Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
I saw a similar feature request from July that was automatically closed so apologies if folks feel this is redundant but I wasn’t able to add input to the closed thread.
Would it be possible for the National Outdoor Awards (camping, hiking, aquatics, etc) to auto-populate with earned Merit Badges, miles logged, camping nights logged, etc?
I’m the Advancements Chair for my sons’ troop. I tried to run a report on National Outdoor Awards progress by Scout and it came up all 0%.
I then figured out that I would have to manually record/approve each of the requirements for all 22 Scouts one by one which would involve first running a report on rank, MBs earned, camping nights logged, miles logged, etc., etc. and only then being able to transfer that info manually into the 9 different award types (6 segments, 2 devices and 1 medal).
9 items to tabulate X 22 Scouts = 198 steps… Very tedious.
FYI, my hunch is that based on the troop’s yearly activities that many of our Scouts at First Class and higher are 75-90% of the way toward earning one or more NOA awards. Looking at the requirements a few have already earned the Camping NOA but we (leaders and Scouts) didn’t realize it.
Like most troops in our area we go camping 10-12x each year and most campouts involve activities like hiking, canoe/kayak/rafting, bike riding, climbing, etc.
Rob: I made the post you are referring to and it was based on a similar one that was made by another leader in the old forums. The SUAG response was that making this change was somewhere in the backlog and hadn’t been made a priority.
Thanks Charles. Good to know it’s in the backlog. Makes sense it wouldn’t be a priority since the awards are not a requirement and there are manual work-arounds.
Not knowing how the team is coding SB in the background I can’t say if it’s an easy fix or a complicated one.
My plan is to start populating the awards manually begining with our Eagle and Life Scouts first and then going down to Star and then First Class Scouts. That will cover about 75% of our Troop. I figure it’ll take me about a month over the next few weekends.
After that I’ll add Scouts one at a time once they reach First.
Maintenance may also be an issue if I forget to add a badge or log miles, etc.
That’s the way we have handled it in my Troop. It took a while but we now are able to keep the awards current without too much effort.
Whether the IT team will ever actually set up things to auto populate is anyone’s guess. I tend to think it will never happen because helping the field seems to no longer be a priority. Frankly, I would like to see them tackle some other issues first, such as: allowing leaders to approve items in the camping and service logs before they count towards advancement or OA eligibility; allowing designated youth leaders to approve younger Scouts’ completions. A lot of leaders in the field have asked for these but the IT types don’t appear to be inclined to listen like they did in the beginning.
Thanks Charles. I understand the frustration but if SB development team is anything like other IT dev teams I know there may be multiple cascading issues in the background that we users aren’t aware of which will take precedence.
As more and more units (and exponentially more leaders) begin using Scoutbook full time there will likely be many more bugs discovered which will require dev time to fix.
That said, if anyone on the dev team is monitoring the requests thread… a somewhat helpful work around to this issue would be to add Camping Nights, Hiking Miles, Non-motorized Watercraft Miles, etc. (all the various component NOA reqs) as options in the Report Builder function.
I just discovered they are not options under Report Builder.
