How does the Boy Scouts of America market itself and it's programs?

[VentureScoutNY 10]

This thread was spun from another thread.Ok..I don't know much about this area so I'm throwing it out for all of you to play with. This is now my new Research Paper topic for "Research in Communications 200" I'm staying away from the former post in the Issues forum about Discrimination, Marketing has much more relation to Communications than Discrimination for this paper:

 

How does the Boy Scouts of America market itself and it's programs?

 

Thoughts..links..etc..

 

Yours in Scouting

VentureScoutNY

[eisely 13]

Not very well.

[Bob White 20]

This is a direct responsibility of the Council/District and the BSA national Council in Irving Texas. I recommend you interview the DE of your District, the SE of your council,and contact the national headquarters and speak to folks there who handle marketing. Your SE can get you the appropriate names and numbers.

[NWScouter 9]

Many Councils and districts have volunteer personnel and committees to market Scouting to the local area, everything from submitting press releases for Eagle Scouts and various newsworthy activities of council, district, and units to coordinated recruitments campaigns for new members. They also provide training in roundtable and University of Scouting in methods and ideas for local units to market them selves. This is where I believe the more effective marketing happens.

[Balding Eagle 10]

I think some of the best marketing comes from word of mouth of those currently involved in scouting.

[Laurie 10]

Our units receive detailed information on how to promote the units. It is specific to our area as it contains local media contacts. Our DE is willing to provide us, free of charge, personalized BSA brochures to distribute. We need 600, and at no cost to us, that's a very helpful thing for the DE to provide. The unit is responsible for promoting itself, but we are given plenty of how-tos on how to accomplish this. One thing I tried this year was a cable TV ad on the school district channel; it was free and ran every half hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for one month. We learned that not many people watch this though. We have a website which is a useful tool for keeping current families informed as well as promoting the pack. The key is getting word out that the site is available. I visit our council offices on a regular basis and have found a variety of brochures that, in my opinion, are excellent for recruiting purposes. All I had to do was ask for some more, and council was willing to get me all I needed. The resources are available, but Bob is right: check with your own council to see what they have to offer and how they handle promotions. I agree with Balding Eagle: the best promotions come by word of mouth. That is how my family was recruited, and that is how we have recruited several others.

[Eamonn 61]

I don't spend too much time at the National site. I know at one time they did have some of the newspaper ads that they were using. However I'm not sure if they are still there.

As a Council we do use newspaper ads around School Sign Up time more to remind people of the day then the event. The event is marketed to the youth in school presentations. We also use billboards a lot. In fact one member of the Council who owns a advertising agency won some big advertising competition for an ad which showed all the knots that are required for first class tied in rope with the caption "Scouting We Teach Kids The Ropes."

At the Council level we do have two people in charge of marketing they more or less advise the District Marketing people how to get stuff in the media.

We on our District Committee do have a person in charge of marketing. She gets the papers involved in stuff that the district is doing and has put together a booklet on who to contact in all the local media.

It of course goes without saying that Scouting happens in the unit, many church newsletters and newsletters that the chartered organizations put out do have information about the units that they charter in them.

We have used some of the TV ads that National has when the local cable company has donated the time.

The sad thing about advertising in the media is that it is so expensive. I don't think that unless a big company sponsors the ad that we will ever see Scouting ads during the Super Bowl. I'm not sure if we want to compete with a horse that has gas?

Eamonn

[hops_scout 9]

They now have ads on one of their websites. I want to say that it is the Good Turn for America.org one. Not sure. They have posters, radio ads, and tv ads on the page for you to view.

[Twocubdad 665]

In a prior life I was a marketing communications executive and consultant. I don't know what kind of course this paper is for, but you really need to have a basic understanding of marketing communications before you can do much of an analysis of the BSA's program.

 

Without trying to cover in one post what could be most of a graduate degree, the major thing you need to consider is what audiences/markets is the BSA trying to reach. Take membership as one example. I don't have any kind of data, but I would suspect that the profile of boys joining BSA for the first time is strongly weighted toward 7- and 8-year-old boys with the curve of new members dropping to near nothing after age 12 -- maybe a spike at 14 for the Venturers. Consequently, our target market for new members is elementary school-aged boys and their parents (actually, research shows that the moms are the primary decision makers). When you understand that, the School Night Roundup program most councils conduct in the fall makes sense. We are very specifically targeting boys and parents in areas where Packs already exist with mailings, flyers, live presentations and one-on-one follow ups. That is a textbook way of approaching a narrow market segment like that.

 

On the other hand, if you compare BSA's marketing to a national mass-media campaign suitable for consumer products (think Hot Wheels or Flinstones breakfast cereal), the BSA approach seem rather wimpy. But they are different markets, different products and different forms of communications -- not to mention different media budgets.

 

At the next level, to get a real picture of BSA's overall marketing efforts, you need to expand your analysis to look at all the different audiences/market segments in this same light: donors, United Way executives, grants and foundations, chartered organizations, parents, not to mention all the different groups of youth BSA serves.

 

My ultimate point is that if you are just looking at the national media BSA produces (which is extremely limited and a very small part of their overall communications program) you're going to get a very skewed idea of what they do.