Feature requests -- adult participants, VOA, consultants

Some issues I have with scoutbook and I’m hoping they can be addresssed

  1. Job of VP program is to maintain crew calendar but I cannot grant that permission to anyone but a key 3 admin. This is a huge job for the advisor to maintain. I would like [President, VP program, AA program to have that ability, and in addition for the VP program to be able to grant limited permission to an Activity chair to admin their own event.

  2. There is no ability to upload our own permission slips, my council has their own COVID waiver that I wanted to upload under “permission slip needed” as we need those for each and every meeting, all I get is the standard one that is pre-printed with everyone’s name.

  3. We cannot print talent release status for participant and what good is that anyway if all it allows is for the participant to upload a profile picture. Can that be made into a REAL talent release please

  4. If a participant is 18 their parent still has to grant permission to access their own scoutbook account, and parents can sign the talent release and all manner of – this is not how it works when you’re 18 . They are adults, participating in the program, their YPT should be tracked like an adult, and their signature valid as an adult, and their advancement and awards as a participant.

  5. Can’t print advancement reports for venturing advancement, only for scouts, bsa advancement.

  6. Need “notes” for the advancement items and to break down “set a goal” with a note, and “achieved a goal”

  7. Payments – they seem to only attach to participants and only for event attendnance. Advisors and parents pay for events too, and for food, and t-shirts, and stuff like that, can we please apply payments to volunteers and for things like dues, shirts, etc.

  8. If we enter a payment due – is there any way for that to send a message to the participant/parent with a way for them to pay it? I heard we can integrate paypal but I see no way that’s possible.

  9. we would love the ability to track training for participants and for advisors for YPT, safe swim, weather hazards, First aid etc. Participants do the event planning and so we ask that they take the same safety trainings that advisors take, and there is no way for us to track this.

  10. We don’t have merit badge counsellors, we have consultants, and there is no way to register a consultant for the purposes of specialty awards etc There is no way to ask an MBC "would you also like to consult with venturers for the ****elective IE backpacking which is nearly 100% the same as the merit badge.
    11 It would be fabulous to integrate a crew president with the council VOA and have the participant dashboard of say a council VOA officer allow them to contact the crew presidents or for regional VOA officers to have contact with the area VOA officers that way and for the VOA itself to have a “unit” with it’s own calendar etc

1 Like

Committee secretary and activity chairs are supposed to have access to edit and create calendar events. Have you confirmed that they do not?

I Have not seen any way to designate an activity chair let alone confirm they can do anything. How do you designate an activity chair for an event?
we don’t have a committee secretary but why wouldn’t that be a VP program AA program job?

There is an item in the backlog to add the ability for participants to edit the calendar.

I will add this to the backlog.

The BSA’s talent release is incorporated into Part A of the Annual Health and Medical Record. Scoutbook’s talent release slider applies to Scoutbook only and was implemented prior to the BSA’s purchase of Scoutbook.

We are checking but a Venturing Participant may be able to log in to Scoutbook using their my.scouting.org ID and password.

We are checking on this. As far as I know Crews should be able to print advancement reports. We will report it to the developers if necessary.

Every award, rank and individual requirement in Scoutbook has a notes field.

There is an item in the backlog to add payment log capability for adults to Scoutbook.

The Feature Assistant Extension for Chrome and Firefox can send messages to families based on the payment log data. See PayPal Payment Utility – SB Unit Admin Guide for instructions on setting up PayPal.

All training is tracked in my.scouting.org. Per pervious BSA statements, training will not be added back to Scoutbook.

I have never heard of a registered consultant position. Unless this is made an official BSA position, the BSA won’t entertain adding it to Scoutbook.

The BSA has previously stated Scoutbook is a unit management tool. There are no plans at this time to extend Scoutbook beyond the unit. The VOA should have its own tools in place to contact crews.

For the items currently in or being added to the backlog. We do not know when or if the BSA will schedule them for development.

Sorry those are adult committee positions. Doesn’t give access to the members to do what they need to do but it at least takes some of the load off the key 3.

OK thanks, how confusing that they give the same names to committee and participants. This is why we have VP finance instead of a participant being treasurer, it also cuts down on having to replace position patches, I guess I could make the VP program’s dad activity chair and he can let his son log in and do it that way??

As a workaround, you should be able to add a link to the form in the Event Description.

2 Likes

Since this is now superfluous, can I request it be added to the backlog to be removed?

In a properly functioning crew, no committee would edit the calendar … ever.
I recommend Google apps for crew management.

1 Like

Do you mean like google calendar? Just scrap scoutbook completely? scoutbook seems much more geared toward cub scouts. I mean we don’t ask parents permission for a troop-scout to carry their handbook around and get signed off on rank requirements so I don’t understand why a scout can’t just use scoutbook.

So what google apps do you use? If these issues are backlog we all know venturing is last on that list

Scoutbook has a split in permissions – there are functions that are available to Scouts that have been granted access to Scoutbook by their parents, and there are functions that are restricted to adult leaders.

When you’re working with Venturers and older Scouts BSA members, this can cause problems – we expect youth-lead organizations to manage calendars, etc, but that’s not how SB was originally designed. It turns out that changing that is a BIG structural change.

1 Like

The biggest reason is to ensure that there is a valid email address on the parent account that will be copied on all messages to the scout.

2 Likes

I use Groups for E-mail, sheets for budgeting and sign-ups, and sites for web presence.
I also recommend Caltopo for land navigation maps.

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.