Order of the Arrow Election reports

Scoutbook New Scoutbook Feature Requests
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Wearing many hats in BSA I am trying to figure out how to share data across systems without re-entering it manually. I am trying to support an electronic interface of OA election data into OA Lodgemaster

I have looked at the OA eligibility report and it does not contain information required for an election and contains information not required for OA eligibility (date of rank).

Is there a report available that can be provided that includes name, dob, bsa id, unit, email, address in an electronic (xls or csv) format? Troopmaster used to have a nice OA eligibility report that included election results form.

Who do we talk to about this potential development?

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The OA eligibility report in Scoutbook is a good place to start. I don’t think you’ll get your entire wish list, though, since some of the stuff you’re looking for is PII (name + birthday, for example), and the BSA may not be OK with making in genrerally available.

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Ah, but that information is already required on the BSA’s OA election form.

In fact, this may be one of those rare cases where the requested “form” is something that the BSA actually already owns. :wink: The PDF form could be generated with the information already included. If YPT is the issue, parent emails could be supplied, which is what many troops do, anyway. Everything else is already visible in Scoutbook to anyone with Edit Profile privileges, just not assembled in one form.

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What I foresee is a 2 step process:

  1. A good election form that can be printed and manually completed. Election form in OA Guide to Inductions would be a starting place. Election team and Unit Leader would complete and sign. Name, rank are critical info here.
  2. The capability to transfer the candidate information (in secret of course until callout) including the data necessary to create an OA Lodgemaster record in order to count candidates, make a callout list and use OALM to communicate with the candidates once
    callout has happened.
    The critical issue is how to transfer the information from unit to OA. The current election form process is paper based and results are not optimal, even after lots of manual intervention. As Lodge Membership Adviser and as a Unit Commissioner and as
    a former Scoutmaster I know the data is available, just how do we get it transferrable? Lodgemaster has a very easy import function so I simply need to push the candidate data to OALM.
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I’d settle for the ability to generate the election form, even if I have to keep putting things in Lodgemaster “by hand”. If the PDF form comes out as a native PDF, the data is selectable and can be “cut-and-pasted” into an input file.

I’d rather have the electronic report export/import, but making it easier for troop leadership to create the election form from Scoutbook would be a huge improvement in and of itself. At least we could get more timely responses from units when election time rolls around.

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Charley, I love the idea. Have a PDF form generated, similar to how the ESRA is created, allowing the leader to be able to edit the page before printing for the OA Election Team to use.

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