What is the Technology Advisory Committee (TAC)?

Technology Strategy and Plans
1

The Technology Advisory Committee (TAC) was formed in October 2024 to help support the Scouting America Chief Information Officer and team.

Per the TAC Charter:

The purpose of the Technology Advisory Committee is to:

(1) provide ideas, feedback, industry perspectives, coaching, and improvement recommendations to the Scouting America Chief Information Officer and others involved in the ideation, development, implementation, and management of information technology strategies and initiatives that support the Scouting America mission, vision, and goals; and,

(2) support, encourage, and promote the use of Scouting America technologies by National, Territorial, and Council professionals, volunteers, and members to better enable membership growth and support, fundraising, program delivery, National and Council operations, and unit service.

The TAC members include Scouting America volunteers, professional staff, university professors, and leading technologists. Current members’ profiles include:

  • Cybersecurity Technology Executive and Council Board Member
  • Scout Executive with experience in digital transformation
  • University Professor specializing in data science
  • University Professor and Scouting America Volunteer specializing in artificial intelligence
  • Technology Attorney and Council Board Member
  • Scouting Professional leading a Council IT team
  • Financial Services technology executive and OA National Committee member
  • Chief Operating Officer at AI-enabled workforce company and CST member
  • Financial Advisor and Council Commissioner
  • Head of Strategy, Non Profits for Cloud Service Provider
  • Commissioner National Service Team Technology Chair
3 Likes
2

I am hoping the TAC can provide some training or enhanced knowledge or a referral to another team or organization within Scouting America that can assist in a deeper understanding of the movement and data flow of registration information that populates the tables and charts found in “Council Membership Tools”. Somewhere there might be a User Requirement Document, URD, that was the design basis for what this tool does.

As CST-3 Council Performance Champion I spend considerable time looking at and sorting through the membership data found in Council Membership Tools. I need a deep backgrounder on the processes employed here. This has become all that more important now that a correction has been made in the 2024 YE membership numbers. I have to believe that others in Scouting America have the same need as I.

As I stated at the start of this message, I am hoping the Technical community can provide the information I seek.

My questions deal with the categories or labels of the various membership groups that are listed in the “Registration Status” section of “Filters” that are found on the right side of “Council Membership Tools”. After selecting Basic Filtering, the labels that are selected that build towards the total council membership are:

Crossover, paid
Lapsed, Member Without Unit
Lapsed, paid
Member Without a Unit
New, paid
ReRegistered, paid
Transfer in, paid

Not included in the Council membership total, but of equal interest are:

Dropped
Dropped, Yearly Membership Process
Transfer, Out, paid

My questions are:

1. What are the definitions of the above terms?

2. What are the sources and data feeds for the reported values shown for these terms?

3. It appears a change was made in the reporting of these values in August of this year, 2025, where “Crossover, paid” replaced “Lapsed, Member Without Unit”. This is indicated by the values for Lapsed, Member Without a Unit going to 0 after this time and Crossover being included in the formula. The question is why, what was the reason for the change?

4. It also appears some change was made in “New, Paid” and this maybe because of the reduced lapsed time now being instituted. What I see is that “New Paid” values all dropped from end of October to first of November. This has not occurred in any previous year. What was the cause of this? If on purpose what was the calculation?

5. What is the difference between Dropped and Dropped, Yearly Membership Process? When did the Dropped, Yearly Membership Process identifier start being used?

6. I want to be able to do a full numerical balance on the membership numbers month to month. If a council has 6789 youth in month X and then 6543 youth in month X+1, I want to be able to explain the numerical delta. Some youth move to Lapse, some move to dropped, some transferred out, some new youth appear as New, Registration, some as Re-registration, some transfer in. I would like to understand the data flows in play here. In a sense, I am trying to re-engineer the system.

I believe providing the assistance I ask is supported by the purpose statement above, clause 2, where it says “support, encourage, and promote the use of Scouting America technologies by National, Territorial, and Council professionals, volunteers, and members to better enable membership growth and support.”.

Though a thorough understanding of all I ask above will not directly bring in a single new scout this understanding will build respect and integrity of the membership reporting systems and help us all focus on retention and recruiting and not spend time on the accuracy of the numbers.

Thanks for what you are doing,

Paul Helman, Council Past President (2011-12), Golden Empire Council # 47 and CST 3 Council Performance Champion

3

@PaulHelman1 Thanks for the detailed request. I can tell you that the data issues that you and others are seeing are primarily due to the complex business process rules that the movement has adopted in the past, as well as the way that we have constructed our systems and technology to embed a lot of those business rules into the core logic of the systems. There is significant work going on to address these issues, with the goal of deploying new systems later in 2026.

In the meantime, we will see if we can provide some additional guidance on using the Council Membership Tools reports.

4

Graeme,

Thank you so much for a quick response and on the weekend no less. It is greatly appreciated. I do look forward to a cleaned up system that utilizes straight forward business rules. Systems with embedded legacy programming are always difficult to modify and having a clean slate, so to speak, is the best.

Additional guidance on Council Membership tools is very welcome and, hopefully, the definitions I ask about and the data flows I seek will be researched and reported on as well.

Thanks again and this will all sort out sooner or later,

Paul