New Scouts - Parent Contact

We are using Scoutbook this year for the first time, and are generally there… How do you deal with new scouts? When the profiles sync over from Council, a parent contact/e-mail address isn’t associated with the scout.

Q1: Are we supposed to rely on the parents to register on Scoutbook, or do you take the time to manually enter everyone’s information in and associate that with the Scout’s profile? The latter seems like a time consuming endeavor.

Q2: We also provided all new parents with a step-by-step guide for creating their logins on My.Scouting & Scoutbook & SSO setup. But without them knowing their BSA ID they can’t do anything… Do you give them their numbers, or just create profiles and send out e-mail invites?

Thanks in advance from this Scoutbook Newbie…

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Q1 - Generally speaking, we create/look-up accounts for new parents in the unit. It typically takes a few hours over a week or so of calendar time for me to go through as a unit admin and do it when we have a large bolus of new scouts (e.g. Webelos bridging), but is pretty fast otherwise. Typically faster than the turn-around for the scouts to be entered into the system by the registrar, especially during transfer season. :wink:

Q2 - We don’t generally have our new parents create a my.scouting account, since it has not been (historically at least) needed unless they’re taking training (e.g. YPT or prepping to join as leaders). Usually, we do what I described in the response to Q1 which creates a Scoutbook account for the parent (or locates an existing one). We associate that account with the new scout’s account, assuming that the parent isn’t already associated (e.g. transferring from a pack or troop already using Scoutbook). Then, we send out an invite to the parent to connect to their Scoutbook account (again, assuming they aren’t already connected).

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the last part of your question. What do you mean by:

The creation of the my.scouting account creates a BSA ID (I believe) for anyone who doesn’t already have one. That BSA ID will appear on their YPT certificates, or in the upper right hand corner of the login screen at my.scouting.

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How would you provide the parent with a BSA ID number, assuming they’re not a registered leader? I assume you’re not creating my.scouting accounts for the parents.

Charley, Thank you for the wealth of information! Correct. We are not creating Adult Leader profiles for all of the parents. Boy wouldn’t that be a dream to have every parent an engaged leader/committee member…

We provided a tutorial for parents based on published info from Scoutbook and other Packs which suggested having parents create a login on My.Scouting, then login to Scoutbook & SSO. Though, it sounds like I just need to bite the bullet and set up all of the parent connections on my end & send out invite e-mails.

Thanks again!

Hi, @JeremyJardell,

I don’t know that there’s anything wrong, per se, with having all of the parents with a my.scouting account. I’m just not sure it’s necessary.

The Central Florida Council uses the My.Scouting login for signup and payment for Council and District events, so in our case, a My.Scouting account is necessary.

@JeremyJardell - I checked some events in your council and it appears that they use BlackPug for event registration. I am not certain though if it is hooked to my.scouting.org so I thought I would ask.

No kidding! I’m surprised that there’s that much integration.

It seems like that could put a huge extra burden into the person database storing all of the various parents. On the other hand, creating the my.scouting account is often the biggest impediment to getting parents to take YPT… “Say, since you’re already logged in anyway, could you click on that big red-and-black icon on the right side of your screen and take the training that starts up?”

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