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My office staff tells me that effective January 1, 2010, labels for bulk mail need to have all information in all capitalized format, no commas anywhere, and some other changes. Will we have a soft-ware update to accomodate these changes? Can anyone verify this information as I cannot find this on the USPS website.
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our council gets several requests a week (up to several a day at times) for a "complete list of all training in our unit." and currently this is only able to be accomplished by going in to each adult in the unit individually.
We don't want we NEED a report that acts like the Unit Advancement Detail report that will list the adult and then all trainings and awards given.
When we ask region or national reps or the help desk we are told to use the training completed / not completed report which has known flaws and isn't being fixed. also it only lists the basic level training and nothing advanced.
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We frequently print out unit rosters for all of our units for rechartering and other activities from Scoutnet. The only format that they will print in is alphabetical by unit type and then by unit number.
In our council, most of our sponsors have a full compliment of Scouting (Pack, Troop, Team, Crew). When printing all the rosters in the district, we end up spending an hour or more sorting the 200 or so units to their respective charter partners. It would be VERY helpful to have the option to print rosters by charter partner instead of by unit type and unit number. Getting them to also print in order of program from youngest to oldest (i.e., Pack, Troop, Team, Crew instead of alphabetically - Crew, Pack, Team, Troop) would be an added bonus.
Also, there is an option to print the adults only, but no option to print only the youth members.
Moderator Comments
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If when we look up a person in the PSA Find in ScoutNet, we could click a button to create a v.card, a file which is read by outlook and other softwares which would automatically populate the name, address, phone numbers etc. and can be saved. For those of us who use the Blackberry Enterprise or other linked smartphones, it would then automatically be entered into our telephone for future use.
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I recommend creation of better retention tracking tools in Scoutnet or MyBSA. For example, widgets or reports that showed our 2, 3, and 4-year retention of our programs (Cubs, Boy Scouts, etc.) and individual units within our service area would be very helpful.
Further, I recommend there be a creation, or better promotion if it already exists, of a local council award for long-term membership retention. This could be like the marketing awards, High Five Club, etc. - given out annually to those councils and districts with significant 2, 3, and 4-year retention rates. If we better emphasized keeping youth involved and engaged for three to four years we might have less burden on recruiting 15-25% of our annual membership to "+1" by December 31st.
Better retention tools in Scoutnet or MyBSA would more easily allow the professional staff to see which units have a high turnover rate. Further, this would allow us to see where more training and program support may be needed. In addition, creating recognition for those groups that did have strong retention might disincentivize councils and districts from relying on programs that created units with high turnover rates.
Moderator Comments
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In the print repository, it would be nice to have a button that lets you "delete all". When reports stack up, it's a pain to delete them individually.
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The Scoutnet-populated Unit Roster should be changed to include the Unit Commissioner. If there is not a Unit Commissioner, a field saying "No Commissioner" or something similar should be in place.
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Every year local councils are required to prepare a unit roster that includes members and adult leaders after rechartering or establishing units. Because the Unit Commissioner is so important to the health of the unit, they should be included on the list. (How many times have we heard a unit leader say "What's a Commissioner?")
This would be great to synthesize with the new Unit Visit Tracking System.
Moderator Comments
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I would like to see us be able to pull up a ward roster out of scoutnet in the same way we can pull up individual units.
Moderator Comments
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Please allow us to access Unit Meeting Info by a URL Feed. XML would be nice.
For example:
http://scouting.org/xml/unitmeetings/[council#] will give information like:
*Note: please replace scare brackets below with angle brackets.
[council number='047' name='Golden Empire Council'][district number='011' name='Iron Horse']
[unit type='troop' number='1']
[meeting place='LDS Church' street='100 Main St' city='Sacramento' state='CA' zip='95821' time='7pm' /]
[/unit]
[/district][/council]
Please make the URL extensible to add a district # and even a unit # to drill down to the information.
We already have ScoutNET designed to store this information. What's the point if nobody can access this information? It's meeting info that Councils are forced to then duplicate on their own webpages. Then when the unit's meeting info changes the DE has to change it in ScoutNET (no point currently in doing this) and then ask the webmaster to update it. This new idea would allow the DE to simply update the info in ScoutNET and then the change would be made across all systems that get meeting info from ScoutNET.
Councils could then make some really sweet (and up-to-date) unit maps using Google Maps.
Your zip code thingy at thescoutzone.org has major flaws for my district. Half the suburban city has zip 956** and the other half 957** so when a person puts in 95661 they get all of the Sacramento metropolitan area, but they don't get across the street in their own city. Plus the results offer little in the way of useful information (no address or time, but just unit numbers for a good portion of California?) and it's all textual. Why all text and no map? Please give us the requested feature and we can make our own maps with even more valuable features that National just doesn't have the time/resources/innovation to make. Example, make a "get directions to unit" link for each unit on the map.
See http://ironhorsebsa.org/councilmap to see some of these ideas in action, just it's not hooked up to the info in ScoutNET so only the Iron Horse district has much of anything. There's even a YouTube video in the bubble of one of the packs. And the DE's email address is in every bubble. And a Council logo that is clickable to the website. And a date when last updated.
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Some pros are asking for foreign language training. This is a waste of time and money in my opinion, I lived in Russia two years and now speak Russian.
Our volunteers are a huge untapped resource to help us get into other language populations. The adult app should allow a person to specify other languages they speak and ScoutNET should hold that information for us. Then we could contact a volunteer (perhaps in a neighboring district) to help us.
Of course we could always get out and meet our volunteers and get to know them. Half my council in California is LDS. Most of the men have served two-year missions all over the world. When you meet a volunteer ask if they speak another language. I asked a white guy this and it turned out he spoke Chinese.
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I recently had 600 people needing various trainings in my district and training in two weeks. In order to email them their individual list of trainings needed I would have had to look up each of them in ScoutNET and write an email one at a time.
Luckily, I'm a little smarter than that. I found software on the Internet for $30 that merges the Training spreadsheet with columns from the membership roster spreadsheet (I needed email address) by matching the BSA ID# from both. This gave me a training spreadsheet with email address. By splitting the courses column into 3 columns and doing lots of search and replace I was able make a human-readable spreadsheet which I then did mail merge and sent each individual the list of trainings they needed by email with the click of a button.
I've created a web application that merges the two spreadsheets for free and does all the search and replacing at http://ironhorsebsa.org/tools/training . Can't National improve ScoutNET to make it more usable with email by at least including the email address?
See my Facebook post in the BSA Professionals group at http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=7506061819&topic=7102 for more details
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Why can't I change my password? Seems like a no-brainer that I should be able to.
Moderator Comments
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LFL rosters need to be one page. There's very little info printed on them and it is a huge waste of resources and money to make it two pages.
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When printing a roster out of scoutnet, it only says "Unit Roster" in the printing field. It would be better if it identified the unit (e.g., pack 493, team 511). As it stands right now, when you're pulling multiple units from scoutnet, if you don't print them all right away you have to open them up to ID them.
Moderator Comments
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It would be great if these lists were sorted in ScoutNet. Sort them by year, by unit number, something to make the information easy to use. Having them in no order, or some order that is not easily determind by any normal person hinders the accuracy of information that we can give out. Would it really be that hard to code in a sort function? Thanks!
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Many of the suggested technology improvements (social networking, mass email, Google map of units, etc) could actually be built by volunteers if we had a ScoutNET application programming interface (API).
Make it so programmers can make their own web pages that query the ScoutNET database using the end user's credentials.
For example, I as a DE should be able to make a Google map showing where all the Scouts in my district live color coded by unit or whatever. Google maps will take information from any database on the fly. But if a Scoutmaster logs into the same page he can see a Google map of only the boys in his troop.
This is only one example. The possibilities are endless and the process is simple. All that would be required would be to attach a password field to each membership record, require a unique email address for logging in, and build the interface for programmers to interface with ScoutNET. Google has already done this with all of its applications as well as many other companies as the proliferation of "mashups" shows.
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