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 am a crew advisor. I would like to be able to e-mail my crew, parents and leaders but this does not work. I have 8 crew members and 4 show up when I click to send an e-mail, two of the missing participants are my own offspring and I have full control on their accounts and know for a fact the e-mails are correct.
One just turned 18 but was missing at age 17.
When I “send reminders” to RSVP to an event, I am not sure if all the crew members are getting those e-mails.
Is this just my crew or are there settings I don’t know about to allow emails and text messages via scoutbook?
Also will my VP comm be allowed to “send messages” or will she have to send email to a leader to do this for her?
Normally, if the youths don’t show up in the messaging screen, that means that they don’t have an activated Scoutbook account. There are two steps that need to be taken to activate a youth account:
The parent needs to invite the youth the activate their account. After entering their email account, you need to click the “invite” button at the bottom of their youth profile (sounds like you already did this step).
The youth needs to accept the invitation. This step is skipped frequently… The youth will get a system email from Scoutbook with an activation link. They need to click on this, which will allow them to complete setting up their account.
After those two steps are done, they should show up in the Messaging screen.
Sending reminders in the event dialog will normally generate email notifications for each person invited to the event (for youths the reminders also go to their parent). But… each user has the option to opt out of receiving event reminders. I have several parents in our Troop that have opted out of the notifications for various reasons.
Once your VP Comms has set up their account properly, she will be able to message any adult or youth in the unit, assuming the other youths have also set up their accounts.
The big restriction we’ve run into with youth accounts is modifying the unit calendars… Creating and editing calendar events is restricted to adults with one of these roles:
Unit Admin
Committee Secretary
Outdoor Activities Chair
We work around this restriction by having a shared dummy account for our PLC set up as the committee secretary.
It is important for Scouts and parents to understand that the parent is inviting the Scout to connect to the Scout’s already existing account in Scoutbook.
Scouts / parents should not create a new account for their Scout, because all registered Scouts already have one. Creating a new account for Scouts is a cause of duplicate account issues.
My daughter just turned 18 so we physically set this up on her computer for her, to make sure she could log in and do YPT, she is in scoutbook, and does not appear when I try to send e-mail.
How does that affect e-mails? I have only added one scout myself and I was careful to use his BSA ID and import him from his troop, and he still does not appear when I try to send e-mails to the crew.
