Looking for Better Scout Den App

We live in the worst of times with constant lack of time; And we live in the best of times with active kids. Sometimes people say we are living without attention. That said, from my experience as a Den leader for Cub Scouts in 2016-2017 (see the reflection piece), I felt it is important to spend more time with kids and less time in managing the schedule or information flow.

In the scouts world, we get an amazing book with lots of details for how to handle the scouts for the year. We get lots of information on the web. And there is a nice CubTrax – a spreadsheet tool, to help us manage the schedules and achievements for kids. Still I had to do a few more tools last year to manage the rhythm of Cub Scouting that included:

1. Get contact information for parents of scouts.
2. Enter and manage the parent information in CubTrax.
3. Extract and create contact records for parents with their cell phones (as associated with the cub scout).
4. Create a mailing group (that only I could use, not a joint mailing group) for reaching out to the parents.
5. Create and maintain a google group for posting information … that barely was used by others. It was hard to set up permissions and sharing to manage it all.
6. Keep a shared calendar (on google) to track the events. These events were also duplicated a bit on the Trax spreadsheet.
7. Maintain SMS conversations as appropriate.
8. Track who attended each session on the Trax spreadsheet.
9. Track which parent will help with what month and what activity stream.
10. Update the Trax sheet with achievements.
11. Remember to pull out specific names and appropriately identify the set of badges the scouts were eligible for (from the seemingly infinite pool of badges and belt loops possible).
12. Take pictures and be respectful of privacy of kids. Share pictures with privacy in mind. It is still hard to track which picture may end up where.
13. Share updates from the pack meetings with the cub scouts.
14. Learn and remember what types of materials are appropriate for each activity.
15. Learn and reach out to local venues and partners to seek places to take the scouts too (we got a meeting at the Police station, at Boys & Girls club, etc.)
16. Handle last minute cancellation and delays from any participant.
17. Appropriately encourage and even nudge scouts or parents to complete the achievements. More achievements the merrier!
18. Never shy from sending some reminders (even if there were duplicates).
19. Fix errors in the scouting spreadsheet.
20. Show videos and other relevant content to the scout. Some video sites like netsmartz.org did not render well on all machines and the games were somewhat out dated too)
21. And many more items ….

What is desirable? Of course a handy app on smart phones that allows us to smartly discover, share, and update information. And perhaps the app can nudge us to take actions based on the collective wisdom of the past scout den leaders too! I would imagine the components that make the application ought to include some pre-built components to help us.

• User Management for Scouts, Parents, and Den/Pack leaders. (Contacts, Age of child, Payment information, Permissions, etc.).
• Schedule / Events Management (import, create, view, update, delete, export).
• Activity Sponsorship (by parents) and suggestions of venue, type, methods, etc.
• Attendance tracking at events.
• Activity tracking after events, which feeds into the achievement tracking.
• Shared storage for pictures / videos / messages.
• Messaging (create, view, add to, group).
• (virtual) Badge markers for Scouts.
• Automatic calculations of achievements based on updated rules set (at least 2 changes per year)
• Secure and Private for the specific Den
• Even better … automatically export and allow for import into new graduating Den next year.

In due course and time, I anticipate such an app existing. If you know of any please let us know! Till then we will continue to juggle multiple things at the same time 🙂