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22 hours ago, Eagle94-A1 said:

And some councils have tacked on an insurance fee to MBCs, even though they can no longer camp with units.

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 had paid for that exclusive, it would be even more irksome! 

I really don't understand the reasoning behind the current version of the weird 2nd class MBC membership status.  Are they really costing us the same as all leaders, but being somewhat subsidized?  With restricted privileges so we're only subsidizing the ones who are unlikely to pay full price to join? I could accept that reasoning if they admitted that was the goal, but all I've heard is lawyer-blaming. 

A big piece of the MB role in the program is giving youth a reason to call an adult they don't already know and ask them to work together.  That seems like the obvious role for a groomer to step into.  If a person is safe enough to meet with my child in a MBC role, they're safe enough to camp with us, so I don't buy the official arguments about it. 

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 working to manage the youth's behavior is actually more helpful.  I have often wished it was a drop off program because  I don't want to be in a situation of needing to manage someone else's parenting style because it's frankly toxic and has just killed the mood of our entire campout.  But even when that's not the case, just having more parents in the room doesn't make the task easier.  They need a job to do and to know how to do it.
What we do need is for parents to say "Thank you so much for herding these squirrels so I don't have to and for planning our program.  How can I support you?"
Ideas that don't require "being good with kids", many of them very small tasks that don't depend at all on attendance at the meeting/event:
Treasurer
Health Form tracking
New Member Coordinator
Staff 1 recruiting night
Haul returnable bottles and cans from our drop off to the redemption center
Post flyers around town
Post flyers in school enews
Post content on our Facebook page
Take pictures
Make sure that thank you notes are sent to guest speakers
Coordinate used uniform exchange

Trying to do all of those small things in addition to the big things are what causes leaders to burn out, or set an example of what being a leader looks like that causes all the other potential volunteers to run away! 

@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 time they get to Webelos/AOL, parents are so used to staying that they all just stick around even though it would probably be better to start giving the kids a little space before launching them into a troop.
 

15 minutes ago, SiouxRanger said:

My son got a CIT position at the local camp.

Now, to my feeble mind, that means, "Counselor In Training."

He worked in the kitchen for two weeks, all day. No "counselor," no "training." He hated it.

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 that our BSA camp does sometimes offer a CIT the chance to stay on as paid staff for the rest of the summer.  Or, at least, they did last year. 

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 really charge experienced adult scouters for the privilege of working the jamboree? And then complain about being understaffed?

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 be relayed. These restrictions are essential to preventing these addresses from being used by spammers.

Also, please note that any email sent via email relay must contain a subject line. Messages sent with a blank subject line will fail.

There are two types of e-mail relays:

You can send a message to all active members of your troop by sending to an address that looks like this: Troop999YourCity@twh.email, in which Troop999YourCity is replaced by your site name. This capability is configured on the E-Mail Settings page.

You can send a message to the members of a dynamic subgroup using an address that looks like this: AAA.Troop999YourCity@twh.email, in which "AAA" is an Email Relay Address Prefix you've assigned to a dynamic subgroup. This capability is turned off by default, but can be configured on the Dynamic Subgroups page.

Do not distribute these e-mail relay addresses to people who are not members of your troop, as they will not work for anyone whose e-mail address is not associated with a troop member. So, for example, do not give these addresses to your BSA district office or to your charter organization, as they will not work for them.

Messages send via E-Mail Relay Addresses are not logged by TroopWebHost and will not be displayed in your In Box or in your My Sent E-Mail page.

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 how to filter by one attribute, I'm optimistic he'll be able to make that work for others as well. 

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 RSVPs for, adding that would be easy enough.  It's just a matter of getting all the parents set up with a new site.  Don't want to do that until we're sure we'll be sticking with it! 

I haven't played around with TroopMaster yet, but I know TroopTrack has an option to collect RSVPs outside the software then add them manually so anyone can see the list.  I may try that for the upcoming campout. 

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.

30 minutes ago, fred8033 said:

It was a one-stop source for unit setup.   <name>@<city><unit number>.mytroop.us.  

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-negotiable concern of our scoutmaster.

33 minutes ago, fred8033 said:

After scoutbook started and SOAR began to back off, we just used a monitored Facebook group and a Google calendar in addition to ScoutBook.  

I wish we could get people to use a Facebook group.  It was already hard enough to get people to join the group I made 5 years ago before they started finding themselves in Facebook time-out.  Pretty sure that would be a non-starter.  No one wants to be forced to use Facebook. 

I don't know why everyone is so resistant to a google calendar, but judging by the number of parents and leaders who insist on adding things to the calendars manually one by one instead of subscribing to the pack/troop calendar feed, I think that's going to be unpopular.  (I'm not the one who is making the decision on how to replace SOAR - just researching and making recommendations - so popularity does matter here.)

And we do want to have some type of public website.  Since I seem to have fallen into this research task because I'm the most tech savvy person available, I think it's safe to say we don't have anyone capable of building a website without the structure one of these services provides.

59 minutes ago, Cleveland Rocks said:

One of the things we really liked about SOAR was that it allowed us to have our website with our own URL, and we could have any number of emails tied to that domain name. 

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, but I think it was from 2017.

26 minutes ago, Cleveland Rocks said:

We also like the ability to keep lists of our alumni and families, as we regularly communicate with them, something Scoutbook does not allow.

That was the one thing I noticed on the TroopMaster site that seemed appealing.  Their term for that is Point of Contact, but I haven't looked any farther to see how it works.  I haven't been able to find whether TroopWebHost or TroopTrack have something similar.  

Thanks.  Is there any way in Scoutbook to add a person who isn't registered? I understand that this thing I consider an important feature is also a potential security concern, but we use that for things like our recruiting chairs to suggest suitable weekends for events the scouts want to invite cubs to.  And the Cubmaster can peek at what the scouts have going on that they maybe didn't realize the Webelos would really love an invite to and see if they can get one.  

We also often have an absurdly long lag time before a new scout is added to scoutbook.  Making them register online is probably the "right" answer to that, but it seems like once parents realize it can be done online they say they'll do it when they get home and don't.

Can scoutbook rsvp include guests?  

We definitely have a large Push vs Pull problem, but a lot of the emails we need to send out are things like changes of plans or cancelations or events that are in danger of being canceled if we can't get more leaders. People aren't going to "pull" for updates when they think they already know the plan. 

The large number of events that get moved or canceled is a different problem...

1 hour ago, mrjohns2 said:

The email thing will be sorted out. 

What are you using in the meantime to communicate with Scouts and families? 

How do you share calendar info through scoutbook? The last time I looked at the calendar in scoutbook, everyone was recommending NOT using it because it was the least functional part of scoutbook.  It's better now? 

I considered recommending we switch to just Scoutbook, but with group emails through that not reaching everyone for the last few months, that's a deal breaker.  

And between scoutbook emails breaking and our whole website dying, I'm feeling like having redundant systems is a good thing. 

The platform hosting our pack & troops websites has died and we've been instructed to look at either TroopWebHost or TroopMaster.  Has anyone recently looked at these and chosen one over the other?  What were things that helped make that decision?

So far, it looks like TroopWebHost is the only one that has any functionality specific to linked troops. An ability to share some calendar info between units would be a huge plus.

I think both have ways to subscribe to the calendar, but not clear if that can be filtered by den/patrol etc.

We mostly used our website for: 

Calendar (including registration)

Roster

Weekly automated email

File storage

Brief welcome page for interested non-scouts

Contact form to reach us

We don't really use any of the advancement tracking or financial pieces, but might be interested in those if they were easy to integrate

Any recommendations for us?

9 minutes ago, InquisitiveScouter said:

Careful @qwazse!! 

"Two registered adult leaders 21 years of age or over are required at all Scouting activities, including meetings."

I guess it comes down to what "at the activity" means.  Is sitting at the trailhead at the activity? 

I think I found the source of the confusion.  The 20 mile hike used to be a separate requirement all its own.  Now it's grouped with the other lengths.  This problem doesn't seem limited to 15 year-olds, though.  This is what the advancement newsletter has to say about it:

Requirement 4 After reviewing feedback from the field and discussions from both merit badge counselors and professional organization representatives, requirements 4 and 5 were merged and updated. The new requirement has Scouts complete four 10-mile hikes and one 20-mile hike, as opposed to the previous one 5-mile, three 10- mile, and one 15-mile hike. It has also been written for clarity.

4. Take four 10-mile hikes and one 20-mile hike, each on a different day, and each of continuous miles. Prepare a written hike plan before each hike and share it with your merit badge counselor or a designee for approval before starting the hike. Include map routes, a clothing and equipment list, and a list of items for a trail lunch. You may stop for as many short rest periods as needed, as well as one meal, during each hike, but not for an extended period such as overnight.

They fail to mention that old requirement #5 was a 20-mile hike!  
My confusion was compounded by my usual source for changes (usscouts.org) still has the old change log from when the 2017 version replaced the 2013 version, so reading the most recent old version means sorting through the struck out, the green bold, and the plain text to figure out what used to be new but now is old and the bold 5/10/15 was so much more obvious that the plain 20 a few lines down became near invisible.  

Thanks for helping to straighten me out!

1 minute ago, nolesrule said:

I'm not sure I understand. The 20 miler has been part of the requirements for as long as I can remember. The recent requirement change is from

5, 3 x 10, 15, 20 (6 hikes, 70 miles)

to

4x 10, 20 (5 hikes, 60 miles)

They have reduced the total distance by 10 miles and the number of hikes by 1.

Really?  I guess that's what I get for listening to what a scout was telling me without looking it up myself!  

13 minutes ago, skeptic said:

That just goes to show that I was not up on any such change.  I had thought the 20 miles was part of the badge since "always", and it was one reason it was often not attempted.

 

Are the cycling or swimming ones easier?  You need one of the three for Eagle.  Seems like people usually did hiking. I assumed because it was the easiest of the three.

25 minutes ago, fred8033 said:

Have your scouts already started the MB?  They can use the existing requirements.  Not the new ones.  

20 miles, yeah that's a long hike even on a flat level paved trail.   On a natural path with gravel, dirt, mud, ups and downs, that's 10 plus hours.

Started this month, unfortunately.