District communications and data report projects

My Scouting Tools
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  1. What data reports does the district need from my.Scouting Tools, and BSA ScoutNET (via MyBSA)?

  2. Here is my first draft. Inclusion of non-BSA commercial tools does not indicate an endorsement by me or the Boy Scouts of America.

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As district Vice-Chair for program, I’d love to see the data behind the district JTE numbers broken down by multiple factors and accessible as data so I can understand it better. I “own” JTE measurements in advancement, camping, training, and service, but helping my functional committees to set SMART goals is hard.
For advancement, as an example, I get a canned printout of a report that shows how many scouts in each unit advanced to each rank, and the number of merit badges awarded by each troop. I’d love to be able to have a discussion about the data with my advancement committee and commissioners: things like - “How are the units doing on closing out Scout through First Class? Is the average scout in unit A taking six times as long as the average scout in unit B? If so, what can we do to help (that the unit will accept)?” Scoutbook adoption and usage could also be helpful as a leading indicator for advancement. Right now council admins can generate a report showing how many units have logged in within the last 30/60/90 days, and there’s a CSV download of individual users that I could use to see more detail about what’s happening (maybe too much!).
Service is another opaque area. We get one number for the district every month. It would be nice to be able to encourage units that are going gangbusters and to help units that aren’t finding service opportunities.
The situation in training isn’t half bad, because the individual training data is sort of available, but it could be more accessible. I had to write a bunch of Excel macros to automate our training needs analysis.

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  1. Youth activity participation report geared toward what youth are not showing so membership can reach out to find out issues. Yes, this can been seen as a unit problem but it is not only “Unit level” responsibility to deliver the aims and means of scouting. Not just the “recharter dropped youth” as that is too late in most cases.
  2. Scoutnet district member “tenure report” If it can be done at unit level why not at the district membership level?
  3. Status of applications to show where they are in the approval process. examples: Awaiting CBC background check, Awaiting registrar action. Yes there is awaiting payment and awaiting signature…
  4. Camping reports for OA membership readiness tables. Unit #### has # scouts available to nominated at next election.
  5. Membership roster expand to include visual Commissioner table.

Bring back the BSA-IT where are we going in the future, what’s coming up, what’s the focus of IT development monthly or bi-monthly roadmap so we know what to expect.