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.
The two biggest issues we have in my district is communication and the calendar. I would like to suggest Districts being set up as a unit in Scoutbook. This would allow the district to communicate quickly to all people in the district quickly, or sub groups like Unit Commissioners, Scoutmasters, Cubmasters, Key 3, etc., Cub Scout Leaders, Troop Leaders, etc. these sub groups could be “Patrols” in the group if we used the template of a troop as the model. It would be even better if we could have a template for District use. It could be designed specifically for district use and needs.
Additionally, having a calendar with reminders and RSVP’s would be very useful.
To be added to the District “unit”, you would have to ask to join. I do not think automatically adding every registered leader in the district is a good idea.
This is resource we already have that seems to be working at the unit level and could be applied to the district level.
This would probably be a major development investment, and might get better traction if you can get your council and district professional staff on board pushing the case through their contacts with national. The SUAC volunteers can raise ideas like this, but they might not get the same sort of traction as having a couple of scout execs advocating for it in their end.
Scoutbook is designed and intended as a Unit tool - Unit is the base of Scouting that act independently from Councils.
In SB+ there are some other access available, but National does not want Councils confusing messages from Units as they are the base and first contact.
I feel like right now it could be used for a District the exact same it is used by a unit without additional investment. Members of the district could be grouped in patrols so they could get various communications, to the right level of people, and the calendar could be in a central place with reminders, as it functions in SB right now. Obviously we do not need to deal with advancement, but it will show training reports.
I am not suggesting it be used as a council tool, but a district tool. The messages could would list the district name from Scoutbook the same as they show up for messages from a Unit. I am imagining that the basis of people who would be benefit from the district using it are the registered leaders, not the average parent of a scout.
Several years ago, Scouting America IT investigated adding council and district calendars to Scoutbook. Council’s overwhelming said they were happy with their current solutions and were not interested in changing.
That seems like very limited thinking. We have a tool that has some good functionality and it could be applied to do other jobs. Saying that Scoutbook could only be used for “REAL units” is analogous to saying that the only thing a flathead screwdriver could only be used to turn flat head screws. A flathead screw driver has countless uses like prying on something, scraping something, opening a paint can, pushing debris from a hole, etc. Finding more ways to use the tools we have seems both productive and thrifty.
The tool is fundamentally predicated on the unit structure, so only scouters registered in the same unit can appear in that unit. That’s something that would have to be changed to be used the way you’re talking about.
If a council wanted to try to “work around” this structure, they could theoretically charter a unit and have all of the relevant scouters multiple into that unit. Then, that unit could have its own SB+ identity. I can tell you that I would be pretty reluctant to participate in that myself, since my registration already got complicated when I had both a district and a unit position.
Honestly, in principle the district training chair, DE and DC should have access to the relevant training data (for example) via the reports at my.scouting (or I would expect so), so the only “missing” piece is a calendar. There are better solutions than trying to shoehorn something into Scoutbook just for a calendar.
