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 I use the Roster Builder Designer and select “Show Addresses” and “Show Phone Numbers”, the roster includes only a Scout’s home address and home phone number.
Our Scouts have profile information which includes their email address and mobile phone numbers. How do I get that data onto a roster?
@JonathanBetz - if the scouts have connected with their accounts, then they can message each other and adults in scoutbook. The way to find out if they are indeed connected is for you to go to the unit then messages and see if they are listed in the scout column. The scout also do what I did when I was a scout… call the house number.
@Stephen_Hornak I’d like to believe that Scouts can be convinced to use Scoutbook as a messaging tool, but empirical evidence suggest otherwise… I can barely get Scouters to use it!
It has worked for us to use Scoutbook. If Scouts want to email each other directly, they will have to ask each other for their email addresses. I am not going to stop them.
There is nothing in YPT or any other policy that says Scout’s can’t ask other Scouts for their contact information. What the BSA does not want to do is to provide contact information for Scouts to leaders without the family providing it directly vs. via the Scoutbook database.
The families providing you with the contact information for their children is different than the BSA doing so without the parents knowledge. There is no issue if you get the information from the families, however, I would caution against distributing that information without the permission of each family.
So it sounds like the feature I really want is a way for Scoutbook to enable parents to give permission to share Scout contact information with the troop; in theory, if they gave that permission, I could then include it in a roster, is that correct?
In the meantime, I guess I will ask parents and Scouts to provide contact info in Scoutbook, and then also provide it separately for a Troop Directory, which, if I understand the thesis here, should not violate YPT, is that right?
@JonathanBetz - scoutbook is not built to provide that information in the roster builder. We have a number of scouts that have connected to their accounts and are in the message list but the information is not listed.
I would not expect any change in how Scoutbook handles youth contact information. That’s not defined by the Scoutbook devs, but by the BSA’s youth protection experts, and approved by BSA’s legal counsel.