Merit badge report from my.scouting is incomplete / incorrect and is missing important columns

My Scouting Tools
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So, long story, but I finally have access to both the my.scouting merit badge counselor report and to the scoutbook detailed merit badge counselor download.

Unfortunately, neither report contains sufficient data for me (council advancement committee volunteer in charge of merit badge counselors / merit badge counselor coordinator) to do my job.

I’ll forgo complaints about the SB report here since this is the my.scouting tools area other than to say that the SB folks position statement is “scoutbook is only for units, not district or council folks; use the my.scouting tools”.

Unfortunately the merit badge report from my.scouting only contains some of the necessary information. For example, this report has an “address” field, but it’s only the city and zip, not the actual street address. Some of my district coordinators want to actually MAIL a card to their people because they get much better response rates that way.

It has a troop only flag and a column for the troop numbers, but there are zero troop numbers filled in for anyone. Even for people who are marked as “yes” in the troop only column.

There are no columns for district only and a list of districts. There is no indication of council only or nationwide status either.

The YPT date is not on the report.

How can we get the necessary information added to this report? This information was available in the ScoutNet report that has now been disabled after the switch to my.scouting.

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I will ask if that is possible to add

This is a function of the ScoutNET system. ScoutNET has no way of indicating which troop(s) the counselor wishes to counsel. This is a reqested feature to be added when the MBC registration functionality is moved from ScoutNET to Registration Manager. I am not sure when it will be implemented though.

I will ask if this can be added. Worldwide is only a function currently in Scoutbook, it is not an option in ScoutNET, so you won’t have visibility of anyone outside your council.

I will ask to see if that can be added.

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Limiting the personal information in reports is a security procedure to reduce exposure of this information.

There is also the issue of protecting military and government workers working overseas. Some charter organizations and Scouters overseas do not have zip code addresses or have zip codes that do not have a location associated with them. This has been discussed in other Scouting Forum discussions.

Who do you mean by “their people”. The district key-3 and others have access to the district contact report.

The district membership committee can download a mailing list spreadsheet.

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I have a person (one or more actually) from each district who handles the merit badge counselors in their district (district merit badge counselor coordinator). That’s “their people” - the MBCs in their district that they contact for recharter / reregistration each year. Some of my district MBC coordinators find better results from mailing a physical card to their counselors.

Doesn’t this statement …

… invalidate this statement …

Why go out of their way to make it difficult for the volunteers? My individual district coordinators are not all tech savvy. They don’t have the knowledge to do the “merge” of the mailing list data with the merit badge data. And, honestly, they shouldn’t need to. Since the information is available anyway (via the district report), why not simply make it available where it’s needed - in the MBC report.

Doing it this way actually makes it WORSE, not better, in terms of data privacy protection. Now the MBC coordinator has a list of EVERYONE in the district rather than just the MBCs. If the MBC report had the address, they’d only have access to the addresses of the MBCs.

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The BSA has a responsibility to limit PII or they will fail Federal data audits which are required of non-profits.

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I don’t know about this. You are telling us the US Government audits nonprofits for PII?

I know some states have or are working on this, I know the Fed has some authority for those who receive federal funding, but I don’t believe this is of all nonprofits.

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This has continued for days. Who does @JamesBrown13 need to call to resolve this?

Collectively, someone on these forums knows who can get this squared away.

Sir, if you and your people truly need this info then I feel your pain.

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@Bill_W has already submitted the request. However, all requests go into a priority queue, and as IDG has time, they are worked on, or they are rejected for some of the reasons cited above.

Right now, IDG is focused on moving data and reports from the old ScoutNet/PAS system to the Akela system where My.Scouting lives. They need to concentrate on this since the hardware is long past decommissioning age, and the BSA CIO wants the system shut down by 12/31.

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Except on a need to know basis. It seems like, @JamesBrown13 is saying to do the job, he needs to know.

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Yea, I’d be interested in seeing the law or rule that says the feds have to audit non-profits and what the PII rules are for disclosure.

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Exactly. We (volunteers) need this information to do our jobs.

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Thanks for requesting all the various fields.

BTW, while adding things to the queue, could they also fix the delimiter in the merit_badges field? Using a comma in that field when there are MBs with commas in the name is a problem. Is this 2 merit badges or 4: “Communications, Signs, Signals, and Codes” ? This is clearly only 2 MBs: “Communications|Signs, Signals, and Codes”

Then how/why is the “troop_s_” column in the output? And how is it that SB has this information along with district and council level restriction preferences? If SB is (supposedly) importing directly from ScoutNet where are they getting this info?!?!

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The bad delimiters issue has been brought up and is already on some backlog to address.

The Scoutnet information is a generic-troop-only but it doesn’t know what troop that is. Merit badge counselors are a district position so there’s no way to associate it with a troop.

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In ScoutNET there is a field were a registrar can put Troop Only (Y/N) but there is no field to put which troop(s)

In Scoutbook an individual MBC can identify which troop(s) to be visible to.

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So I’ll repeat my question. Why then is there a “Troop_s_” column in the merit badge counselor report out of scoutnet / my.scouting / akela / whatever you want to call it when it’s impossible for this data to be entered?

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Yes, by me, but specifically for ScoutBook, not for the my.scouting report. I’d like it fixed in BOTH places. Maybe that’s happening but I’d like to be sure.

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I’ve followed up on @RonaldBlaisdell’s comment and I can’t find any reference that supports his statement.

Of course I could be wrong, I could have missed something.

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I’m not aware of any either. There are obviously federal and state statutes protecting PII but I’m not aware of any government audit requirements.

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CouncilMeritBadgeCounselorListing.csv 5/31/2021

The “Council Merit Badge Counselor Listing” is three reports, the web page display, the export to csv file and export to PDF document.

The CouncilMeritBadgeCounselorListing.csv file address column contains the full mailing address with street, city, state code, zip code for postal addresses served by the USPS.

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It has been my experience as a programmer analyst that a field in a database (column in a spreadsheet) needs to first be defined before tools can be developed or changed to use it.

I have read in this forum that some councils have selected to register all their MBCs as council-wide.