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.
As we near re-charter, I have several parents who’s Scouts have aged out and will not be renewing their memberships. The parents however, would like to remain informed about Troop events, specifically fundraisers and service projects. Additionally, there are community leaders who are not registered with BSA that we would like to include on some communications.
Is there a way in Scoutbook to maintain an email distribution list for non-Scoutbook users? This would be much more efficient than having a separate “off-book” list. We did that with parents before Scoutbook, but the list was always dependent on whoever was using it - therefore we ended up with several somewhat official lists that did not agree with each other.
I don’t know of any way of doing that in Scoutbook, and while I can’t speak officially, I suspect it is not likely to happen any time soon, if ever.
Our troop has been using a Google Group for the past 12 years, and still uses it in preference to emailing through Scoutbook. As you noted, it lets us keep many past scouts, past scouters, and non-scouters all updated whenever we post something. They have the ability to change their linked email, update their settings, or remove themselves from the group at any time, so we rarely have to do that manually. The key is to have at least three or four active managers at any given time, so you never risk losing the ability to manage the group - as one leaves, another is added.
We also set up a troop Google email account and associated Google Drive, which is shared with the Group. By doing so, everyone in the Group can access the Drive, with access updated automatically as they join or leave. That lets us easily handle file storage and sharing that isn’t available through Scoutbook (and most likely never will be).
Scoutbook can only send e-mails to individuals associated with the unit. If you want to use Scoutbook to continue communicating with these individuals, several options come to mind.
Add them as Unit Scouter Reserve to your roster in Scoutbook
Create 1 generic account that is a Unit Scouter Reserve and give it the e-mail address of a google group then subscribe these non-unit individuals to the group. When you send e-mail to the generic account via Scoutbook, it will be forwarded by Google.
