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.
Is there a supported method for recording additional Religious Emblems in the system? Several of the faith traditions have successive ‘ranks’ of religious emblems which may be earned. Both there are multiple tiers of Catholic and Protestant faith emblems at different ages for example. The system seems to only allow entering one per Scout.
Also, is there a support method for recording Religious Activities which issue patches but are not considered a Religious Emblem? For example, their 30+ different Catholic religious activities patches which can be earned through USCCS.
Scoutbook/IA2 only support the BSA-specific youth awards. So, while you can mark the religious knot award (note the distinction vs religious emblem, which is typically awarded by the faith organization) as having been earned, there isn’t a way to mark the faith-specific awards (or any other custom awards) in the system.
Typically what I’ve seen done is including the additional religious emblem awards in the Comments section of the religious emblem award as they are earned.
Understood. I logged a batch of ‘Religious Emblem’ awards which automatically add the Knot to the Scouts profile. Some of these Scouts are on their higher level emblem and hoping to log both.
I suppose I can just add their first one and add a note/comment onto the record of it if a follow-on emblem is also earned.
Yeah, technically the individual religious emblems are not awarded by the BSA, but rather by the individual faith groups. The “official” BSA recognition is just the universal religious emblem knot. There’s also a knot for the adults, which I think is the inverse of the youth knot (i.e. dark knot on light background for adults vs light knot on dark background for youth). Obviously, there has to be a corresponding adult religious emblem for the faith group. I don’t think all of the faith groups have one for adults, or at least they didn’t all have one in the past.
@adambillmeier - The religious awards are independent of the BSA, so there is no clean way to track the medals and patches presented by the various religious organizations. This has been asked many times but since the BSA does not have ownership of the awards etc there is no way to represent them or enter them.
Understood. I would think they would just have a simple category of ‘Religious Award’ or ‘Religious Activity’ where they could be logged. Would likely apply for other items like service organizations or something.
@adambillmeier - yeah it comes down to licensing of product and images… Prap Publishing owns the religious awards etc. It is also a driving force behind the BSA hosting a marketing hub with images and preferred vendors and why they want unit related content to be from there.
