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.
When composing emails in Scoutbook, I noticed some scouts are not included in the available contacts. When digging deeper, I found the scout doesn’t have a parent connection… Instead they only have a Grandmother or Aunt connected, since that’s who registered them in scouts.
To test a fix, I temporarily switched the connection to “Parent/Guardian” and suddenly the connection shows up in the available message contacts.
I think this means, only parents/guardians are eligible to receive emails for a given scout? What if their Aunt/Grandmother is the only one bringing them to meetings? I need to be able to include them in den and pack communications.
The system is working as designed. Other Family Members cannot be e-mailed. There will not be any updates to the legacy Scoutbook messaging system. I do not yet know what the messaging system being developed for Scoutbook Plus will look like.
Thanks, but that’s very unfortunate. Scouting is a family program and this is a miss in my opinion. I would hope any new systems under development can provide for this, either through an approval process by a parent or a pack/den admin.
I’m guessing this was a decision based on youth protection. I understand that need. Just want to support these families as best I can.
It might be worth reaching out to your council to see how they recommend handling these types of situations (e.g. if they think that the adult registering the scout should be listed as a parent/guardian connection). You can’t be the first unit to run into that issue, but local regulations might play a role so advice from folks outside of your council might not be applicable.
Yeah, that’s a good point, Donovan. You might even be able to find out from the council registrar who the responsible adult listed in their system for those scouts is, @MatthewRoss1.
