cmd

Our council just increased our insurance fee from $6 to $20, and extended that to include MBCs. So that has jumped from $0 to $45 this year. That's a lot to ask someone to pay for the POSSIBILITY of someone asking to do a merit badge with them. An organization my husband is part of asked him to become a MBC because they had a troop asking them if they could supply one with the program they were signing up for. But the process of vetting him as a MBC took 3-4 months and that program had long since passed by the time they approved him, and no one else has asked to work with him. If he h

Lack of volunteers is a problem, but it's a "sit and wait for someone to tell me exactly what to do while I'm here with my kid" problem, not drop and run. I know that may seem like splitting hairs, but clearly defining a problem is the first step in correcting it. I see people complaining all the time about people thinking we're Baby Sitters of America and the message that sends is that we need parents to show up and be responsible for their kids. Some kids DO need a parent there to manage their behavior, but for others, especially the tween years, having someone OTHER than the parent

@PACAN Have you been involved with Cubs lately? There may not always be a lot of help from parents, but I would never call it "a drop and run game". In fact, that's the biggest difference I see between cub scouts and Daisy/Brownies. The GSUSA programs in our area meet after school with two moms running the whole show and no other parent in sight. Cubs, on the other hand, have a firm national policy that if a parent doesn't attend, the Lion/Tiger can't either. Most packs I know have internal policies that parents are required with all Wolf/Bear cubs unless they absolutely can't, and by the

That's not okay. I hope you complained. Loudly! The issue with CITs wasn't so much that they were a handful, but that they were clueless. Our regular staff showed up for a week of training, then you would get 6 weeks of work out of them and hopefully they'd be back as seasoned counselors for years to come. The CITs spent a chunk of their day in group training, then needed a lot of direction for any tasks you wanted them to take on. By the end of week 2, they were finally starting to be a net benefit to the counselors they were paired with... then they were gone. I know th

It's hard to find a job as a 14 or 15 year old, so they're likely not giving up much in the way of other employment. When I worked at girl scout camp back in the 90s, CITs had to pay something and managing them was nearly as much work as the campers. We did also hire girls the same age as kitchen help and they stayed the entire summer and were paid. I remember thinking it was strange and being told that having unpaid workers was somehow a much greater liability than if they were paying for the experience. Still don't understand that, but labor laws can be weird My question: did we

We've had the opposite issue of den leaders buying beltloops as soon as the adventure is completed, but someone else clicks the "add all to PO" button right before the pack meeting and we end up buying a second set of them all! Our low-tech "I'm going to the council store - text me if your den needs anything" system seems to be less error-prone.

The website is back up and spreadsheets are available again. Since this post appeared in the google search well above the actual link to the sheets, I'm pasting the address here. http://trax.boy-scouts.net/cubtrax.htm

We were hoping to use our domain, too, but as far as I could tell, that's something that none but SOAR offered. Troop Track posted a survey asking whether that was something there was demand for - and whether people would be willing to pay extra for it. It would likely be a strong selling point for us when deciding between things that cost roughly the same, but I don't think we'd be willing to increase our budget for it.

I haven't tried it yet, but the TWH User Guide says you can: E-Mail Relay Addresses You don't have to be logged on to your TroopWebHost site to send a message to members of your troop. E-mail Relay Addresses can be used from any e-mail client to send messages to all active members of the troop, or to the members of any dynamic subgroup. This feature can only be used by members of your troop, and only from e-mail accounts that are currently listed on their membership record. Moreover, the sender's e-mail account must pass DKIM authentication to allow the message to b

Correction - The TroopTrack filtering does allow for multiple colors to be chosen in your calendar feed - it just wasn't obvious.

In case anyone was looking at TroopTrack and turned off by the lack of filtering on the calendar subscription, the developer has reached out to me a couple of times now about that. They're actively working on making that possible. They in-app calendar has an ability to color code your events and if you color code them in the groups that you want to filter for, then you can great a subscription for just that color event. I've pointed out that typically an individual would want their feed to include "everyone" events as well as the subgroups they belong to. But now that he's figured out h

It would be useful to know whether there will be incompatibility issues if you set up a new site using scoutbook scout/adult export files then try to bring in other info once the SOAR export format is supported. At this point our pack has set up trial sites with TroopWebHostCS and TroopTrack using the scoutbook export files and the troop has done TroopMaster and TroopTrack (TWH only has a trial for the cub version.) It's not fully functioning by any means, but we could go live with any of them right now for emailing purposes. And if there were a couple of events we wanted to collect RSV

Having BSA take over SOAR and make it free to units would have broken it the same way the ScoutBook lost functionality after BSA took over. Between trying to adapt it to fit with their other software and the inherent issues of trying to scale up a small private app to serve the entire nation, it does so much less than it did back when we briefly paid for it.

That's how our pack is set up, but the troop managed to snag the troop<unit number>.org domain years and years ago and does not want to lose that. I figured that it would be an easy matter to have that address point to anywhere else we wanted it to, but missed the fact that there were email addresses associated with it. The troop's mailing lists were things like announce@troop123.org or committee@troop123.org. I'm not sure, but think there may also be individual email addresses like scoutmaster@troop10.org. I think that hanging on to those email addresses may be the one non-negotiabl

By this, do you mean having email addresses @troopX.org instead of @yourtroop.mytroop.us? I hadn't thought about that before, but it IS so much easier to send an email to our troop with their vanity email address than to our pack that let that lapse and another unit scooped it up. I didn't realize that was being done through SOAR, but looks like the troop committee email address uses the vanity domain, so I guess it probably is. Please let me know what you find out about whether other options support that. On the TroopTrack forum there's a post complaining that they don't have that, bu