Guilty.

[Eamonn]

I'm very unhappy to see the decline in our membership.

I do however feel that maybe some of the pros are getting a bad rap!!

Some of the fixes that have been used have come from volunteers.

While I'm not proud to admit it, I'm guilty of a little fixing myself.

Back when I was a member of our District key 3, reaching Quality District was very important and I put a lot of time and effort into trying to make sure we reached the goal.

Back then a district had to meet a financial goal and a membership goal.

The membership goal was to be plus one unit and either show a percentage growth (I can't remember if it was 5%?) Or be plus one in each section.

We always seemed to have a hard time recruiting Boy Scouts. One year we had met all the goals but were 3 Boy Scouts short. The deadline was sometime in the first week in January. So I met with a friendly Cubmaster, who had a Den of Webelos crossing over in February, he took the Boy Scout apps to the parents and we moved four of them into Boy Scouts. The District was a Quality District.

Another year we needed a unit, so I talked with a friendly Boy Scout Troop, who had mentioned that they had an interest in Venturing, within 3 days all the paper work was done.

Sadly the Crew only lasted a year and was gone.

While at the time I tried to ease my conscience by telling myself that everything was "Legal".

The applications and the paper work were real and all in order.

I know deep down I was allowing my ego to get the better of me.

Sometimes it's not the pros who are up half the night making devious plans. It is the volunteers.

Ea.

[de4bsa]

Membership is a numbers game. To me, there is nothing wrong with what you did. You legitimately moved Webelos into a scout troop and legitimately started a Crew as an offshoot of the troop. As long as all the signatures were valid I see nothing wrong with what you did. Any district, and I mean any district, that has ever made QD has had to do something like that at the 11th hour to make it at some point. Again, as long as everything was above board I see nothing wrong with what you did. You simply played the game. BTW, I'm sure the membership increase was 2%. Increasing by 5% is considered a very good year.

 

Far shadier things than that are done all the time.

[AntelopeDud]

Our council has what's called "Gold Card Units" in which they offer free Rank advancement patches for units that increase in numbers by at least one. The new Centenneal Quality Unit designation looks for the same thing. I absolutely despise this requirement because it causes units to use the many tactics at their disposal to pad rosters. Even the best of units are going to have down years. If not, we'd have unit all over the Country without facilities to properly house them all. Almost all Cub Scout COs are going to experinece up and down periods, and local Boy Scout Troops are going to see the same thing as cross-over numbers go up and down.

 

-AD

[OldGreyEagle]

Eammon, at least you know now what you did was not quite right. Think of those who do it every year and have no problem with their actions, are they under pressure? have an ego trip scheduled? Who was it that said we have met the enemy and he is us?

 

 

(Walt Kelley-Pogo)

[epalmer84]

Perhaps it is time for the BSA to stop focusing on numbers and look at quality in other ways. I know the numbers are important when money is involved, but they should not be the priority.

 

Ed

[prairie]

We complain when the youth "game" the system for advancement or other reward yet this looks like Scouters are gaming the system at the District and Council level. Is this the kind of example we want to set?

Wouldn't it just be better to have the best unit level program we can and let the numbers take care of themselves.

Total membership and how many attended the last successfull District/Council camping event would be a better gage.

I have decided I will not wear any trained or quality unit patchs unless threatened with expulsion. Rightly so the boys should be able to assume I am trained and doing what I can to provide them with a quality scouting program, thats why I wear the uniform.

[packsaddle]

My understanding of things beyond the unit is rudimentary and I like it that way. But as I understand it, the pros at the bottom of the heap are evaluated on the basis of these numbers. The ultimate reason for this is that the numbers result in more or less funding, for a variety of reasons. So the pros at the top of the heap see numbers in a manner that is different from the way I, for example, see them.

The top pros seem to stress numbers while I stress all the program stuff for the unit and for individual boys.

When our unit was in a similar situation to the one Eamonn described, our leadership engaged in the same deception. And I, too, felt guilty for it. But as long as we continue to feel guilty for things like this, there's still a lot of hope.

[Eamonn]

I don't know of a perfect way of measuring success or performance in Scouting?

I don't agree that "Total membership and how many attended the last successfully District/Council camping event would be a better gage."

My feeling is that the program is up to the unit and the role of the District /Council is to support the unit. A unit with a great program might not want to attend District or Council events.

We know that the standards for Advancement vary so much from unit to unit that advancement would not work as measurement.

I know raising money is a pain, but it does show how much support there is for the program and it's hard to abuse the numbers. I'm talking about real income not pledges.

I have to admit to being a little taken back when it seems so many seem willing to suggest the decline in the Venturing membership is due to the numbers being fixed to start with! Kinda like saying that the diet didn't work because the scale was wrong?

While I'll admit that I now see what I did was wrong and I'm in no way trying to share the blame but I know a good many Council Presidents who have egos every bit as big as mine.

I'd really like to see TAY taken into account when we look at membership.

Last year I attended an Area Meeting where a Council President was not very happy the Council had just been informed that they were getting Provisional Charter, due to poor membership. He claimed that the Council was a very rural Council and the Cub Scouts just weren't there. A look at the TAY showed that the Council wasn't reaching 10% of the boys Cub Scout age.

Maybe looking at everything every year is just to often? Maybe having each Council write a long term plan which would be reviewed every three years would work better?

Like it or not the membership is declining and costs are going up. Less membership means less money and the end result will be a cut in services and more sales of Council owned properties.

I don't have the answers. I do feel that we need to stop playing silly games!

I wish our friends in the LFL programs nothing but the best. But I have to admit to caring as much about LFL membership numbers as I do about the number of Lamas there are in the USA.

We need to be willing to do a full audit to find out what the real membership is. If this means taking the hit? So be it.

Once we know where we are we can start working on moving forward.

In my opinion we need to take a long hard look at how we market our programs and who we aim the marketing at.

Commissioner Service needs to be looked at. I know for the most part in our Council it just isn't doing what it is supposed to be doing.

All the volunteers need to understand what the role of the professional staff is. A copy of his or her job description in the rechartering packet each year would solve that.

DE's critical achievements should come from the District Committee, working within the guidelines of the job description and be approved by the Council Executive Board.

All Scout Executives should work on a three year contract. If after year three he or she isn't delivering the goods they need to go.

The goods will be found in the 3 year plan that the Board wrote.

Executive Boards need to have 20% of their members who are from different program areas.

Just as we bring in auditors to go over financial accounts, we need a body of trustworthy people to do periodic membership accounting.

Minimum numbers for starting new units should be increased.

The $20.00 fee a CO pays to recharter should be raised to at least $100.00. This might help ensure that only CO who want Scout Units are CO's! After all what's $2.00 a week?

Ea.

[Oak Tree]

You get what you measure.

 

That's one of my favorite management maxims. I do evaluations of professionals regularly, and I would be extremely wary of judging them on anything as simplistic as what the BSA seems to use.

 

If you measure (and reward) the number of units, you'll get more units. They may be paper units, or ghost units, or overlapping units, but you'll get more units. If you focus solely on youth membership, you'll get more members. They may be boys who don't even know they're in a unit and who didn't pay their own fee, but you'll get more members.

 

In a growing district, you'd see all of those things going up. There would be more unique boys, in more units. There would be more advancement, more FOS, more attendance at summer camp and at camporees. There would be more uniform sales. There are reasons why any one of those might not be a good indicator by itself, but overall you should be able to recognize a good healthy district when you see one.

 

I think the pass/fail nature of the award gives a huge incentive to fudge if you're close to the line. I know that a nice simple result is easy to talk about, but more realistically a district could be rated on a one through five scale, or some such. And it would certainly have to take into account the TAY. There's no reason why a district in a growing region should automatically have an advantage in the rating process.

 

Oak Tree

[Beavah]

My feeling is that the program is up to the unit and the role of the District /Council is to support the unit.

 

Yah, then the evaluation of the district/council should be on the quality of support they provide units, eh?

 

 

 

 

[Eamonn]

Beavah

Yes!

But how do measure support?

Right now it seems the company that employs me has gone over board sending out evaluation questionnaires.

These are expensive and it seems that because we send out so many they have become "Junk Mail"

Of course some Department Heads seem to live and die by these evaluations.

I kinda lucked out.

I took time off when Her Who Must Be Obeyed was really ill and did a lot of work from home.

The company is owned by two brothers. Two really nice guys. They created a position of Corporate Dietitian for me which means I no longer come under "Food Services".

Food Service has come a long way, but never seems to do well on evaluation type questionnaires. Of course the form makes no mention of the services we offer, so we don't pay much attention to them -In fact for resident's diets we lay the blame on food service! Not fair? Maybe, but I'm off the hook!!

Guess I'm guilty again!!

Ea.

[gwd-scouter]

Our Council has a Gold Star Unit award that among other things has a requirement that a unit recharter with at least one more member than the previous year. This led, in our troop at least, for years of recharters with absent Scouts. The troop actually paid the dues each year for these absent fellows just to get free rank patches. Being a small troop, those free rank patches probably didn't equal the registrations paid.

 

Couple of years ago as SM, I deleted all those non-active Scouts and only rechartered with those that paid dues. Wow - Troop Committee at the time was somewhat outraged and DE questionned how our Troop went from 20 registered Scouts to 14.

 

Over the past two years we dropped again to 12 and have kept that same number for two years. This year, we rechartered with only 11. We have had some recruitment, but we have also had a bulk of our Scouts age out. In essence, we've cleaned house over the last couple of years and are now at a place where we have a nice range of Scouts and plan to add a couple of new guys this Spring.

 

The new Centennial Quality Unit award is something else entirely. I do feel that it will encourage padding and inflation of numbers since we have to make a kind of "pledge" about what we will do in advancement, retention and recruiting. At our Roundtable, we were encouraged to put low numbers on the form for the coming year.

 

Our troop has come a long way these past couple of years in improving program and attendance. While recruiting is still slow, I think we're doing things right in our Troop. Boys are having fun and advancing along the way. Others in our area have come to take a look at our Troop and while they may have decided to join others, at least we're being considered.

 

I will do what I can to work toward earning the Centennial Quality Unit award, but I will not inflate numbers nor will I do anything at the expense of my boys, their program, or our Troop.

[Lisabob]

The padding issue is pervasive and it isn't just troops. In our cub pack we were always encouraged to recharter including any boys

who had been registered in the previous year from March-December even though a) we did not charge them the re-charter fee until January and b) they might not have attended an event in months and in some cases parents explicitly told us that they were dropping out. For example, some parents signed up their kids just to go to summer day camp, but that's all they wanted from the program. (Weird, I know, but it has to do with the area schools' practices of starting summer break on a Wednesday. Day camp is usually that Wed-Thurs-Fri. Most summer care programs don't start until the next week, leaving the parents with a short-term need. And our district cub day camp is fun, well-run, nearby, and cheap.)

 

Then too, we were pushed to recharter with all of our Webelos II boys still on the roster, even though our W II program ended in February with most boys crossing over to a troop and being added to the troop's roster. Those who didn't cross over were allowed to stay on through the end of the school year and we would also recharter them, no problem, but few boys/parents chose this option.

 

The reasoning we were given? That way boys would be covered as BSA members for the year in case they decided to rejoin boy scouts later in that year. This left the pack to absorb the cost of rechartering these boys, who then could not be dropped until the following year's recharter process.

 

One year we had something like 20 webelos II boys - between 1/3 and 1/2 of the pack. By the time the recharter paperwork was due, we'd already done our Blue & Gold and all had crossed over to a troop or otherwise left cub scouts. Looking at our limited financial resources, we chose not to "count" them in our recharter. The result, on paper, looked awful for us. But it was far more reflective of reality.

 

As someone doing district membership stuff now (with a focus on webelos-scout transitions) I wish more packs would resist these fluff efforts. Just a quick look at the rosters for a few packs in the area that I know very well showed that most current webelos II dens were being inflated by almost 50%. Boys who haven't shown up for a pack or den meeting in almost a year are still listed as active webelos. Eventually they get counted as "dropped" in the transition process, even though in reality they dropped out long before that.

 

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to contact them too and attempt to draw them back into scouting. But given limited resources, I think it makes more sense to focus first on the boys who are actually active members, who might not have found a troop yet. With these inflated rosters though, it is impossible to tell unless you have personal knowledge of the pack.

[Eamonn]

Our Council recharters Packs in Feb and Troops and Crews in January.

I always viewed the numbers that came in from the rechartering as being the real numbers.

The Scouter's in our area really take A Scout is thrifty to heart! No way they are going to spend $10.00 without a fight.

The numbers used for Quality are supposed to end January 31 of the year, but as a rule there is about a week or ten day extension.

I have never really understood why we need to keep counting our members.

Sure a "Snapshot" View of where we are at is not a bad thing.

But...

I have attended enough Area Committee meetings to know that the Region has a count of every registered member as soon as the registrar hits the send button on the computer and Scoutnet kicks out a report.

DE's and the pros have a rush to try and get membership numbers up by June in time for Winners Circle.

Districts and Councils earn Quality on the year end numbers.

We end up with so many snapshots, we could fill an album!!

Much of the "Creative Out of the Box" thinking has come back to bite us in the tail.

Sadly many of the "Thinkers" have been hailed as White Knights and have thanks to this "Thinking" been promoted and are now holding high office.

My cheating was in part me feeding my ego, but it was also trying to ensure that the DE we had at the time was free from the badgering of her bosses.

The reports she gave me about the Friday Staff Meetings sounded more like a meeting of the Spanish Inquisition than an organization that claims to hold the Scout Oath and Law near and dear.

The pressure DE's are under to ensure that goals are met can be very intense.

This pressure does I think (I don't know!) account for the high turn over of DE's, which doesn't help the volunteers. It seems we have just trained one and the next minute he or she is gone.

I don't think I'm alone in thinking that we seem to put more effort into recruiting than we do retention.

Ea.

[Lisabob]

Recruiting vs. Retention. We are having that conversation these days around here. The consensus appears to be that the district can aid units with recruiting, but it is up to the units to provide the program in order to retain members. Being a social scientist by training I'd like to see some data and run an analysis of the relationship between various district support activities (like leader training, for example, or presence/absence of an active UC) and unit retention rates. Who knows, we might find that the indirect effect of these activities is stronger than currently believed. However, I don't think the kind of data I'd want exists and I'm pretty sure efforts to collect it, even if it were possible, would be frowned upon. (What if we ended up showing that training or UC support or whatever else were irrelevant?!)