Membership decline. - Are we turning the corner?

[Mr. Boyce]

There are major efforts underway to start connecting kids to the outdoors, courtesy of Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods book.

 

Interestingly and oddly, the book does not acknowledge the existence of scouting, except in passim. This is a glaring omission, since now there are organizations trying to get kids outside who have never done this before. . . when instead, scouting could be more easily promoted.

 

To some extent, I wonder if (admittedly lefty) conservation/environmental groups may eventually craft an organization that gets kids outside. . . ignoring scouting due to political disagreement with scouting policies.

 

But does national show any scout population cumulatives over the past 10-20 years?

[AvidSM]

I've heard a statistic used about Cub Scouting retention - that 75% that started as Tigers are lost by the time they get to Webelos. I don't know what can be done about this.

 

Another statistic, which is my own observation from ten years in a troop is that 40% to 50% of the crossed over Webelos are lost after one year in the program. Some join without knowing what Boy Scouting is all about and find out they don't like the program for a host of reasons - one of which could be they don't like to camp. In some cases the parents are too overprotective and don't trust the leaders to keep their sons safe. A lot of boys are not used to spending an extended period outdoors. Look at the number that don't wear coats or jackets - even in the winter. They are used to being driven in SUVs everywhere they go - school, the movies, the mall and aren't outside long enough to need one.

 

The other reason I see for scouts dropping in the first year is they get overloaded with too much homework and other activities. When this happends, parents will set a limit on the number of activities and make them choose the ones to keep - and they don't choose scouting. What's worse is the one's who stay on the troop roster, but miss meeting after meeting because every week there is something else that is more of a priority to them. I've new scouts that have signed up and paid for weekend camping and then not show up.

 

I also don't know what can be done about this. Our troop schedules really cool campouts - we launched model rockets at a navy base at our last one. And, our meeting are focused on perparing for the next campout with skills instructions, patrol meetings, etc. All the campouts have a theme which the boys select.

 

I guess we live in different times now. Boys are spoon-fed everything they need to know and are not taught to take on responsibility. I see this more and more with the new scouts coming in. I read that more adult sons are still living at home well past the age of 21. Not getting married - not getting an apartment. I couldn't wait to get out on my own!

[Lisabob]

Avid makes an interesting point about Tigers and retention. I've been district membership chair for almost a year now, and been involved with our district membership staff on and off for a few years before that. In that time I have seen push after push to recruit new Tigers, and it *works*! The boys can hardly wait to become cub scouts and many parents are just as eager (including lots who were scouts themselves). And I also see the rosters of the packs in our district every year, and I know for a fact that we lose huge numbers of Tigers - and their parents, and their little brothers in the future - due to poorly run den programs. People do not sign up their child for a roller coaster ride, poor organization, poor communication, endless hassles, etc.. They sign them up for a fun, family-oriented youth program with all the bells and whistles that the BSA promotes. When the den falls apart after a couple months, or never even truly launches to begin with, the first thing that happens is the more experienced folks (including UCs and other of us "district types" turns to these new parents and blames THEM for not stepping up! The second thing htat happens is a lot of those new parents say "hey, this isn't what I thought we were getting into here, and it isn't our fault you can't deliver what you promised us at Round Up." And then they leave.

 

I don't really blame parents for this. I know that I felt that way more than once in my son's first year of scouting. Now we stuck with it and ended up becoming volunteers and all that. But we had the luxury of time to do so, which many other folks do not have.

 

I really think if we want to see our membership grow then we need to do something, as an organization, about those Tiger retention numbers. National needs to change the approach to shared leadership among Tiger parents. Having brand new parents serve as Tiger Leaders all too often simply does not work. It sounds great on paper and all, and sometimes someone comes along who really "gets" the program right away, has time to go to a high quality district training session, and who runs a really good den. But in watching for several years, I've concluded that this is not the norm. Most strong packs in my area get around this by finding someone to be their Tiger leader who has prior experience as a Cub Leader. But this is tough to do, and not all packs are fortunate enough to have someone who can do this, let alone have someone who will do it every year. So the program is incredibly uneven and soone3r or later, somebody (usually the CM) looks at the literature from national and says "hey, the new Tiger parents are supposed to be leading themselves!" And then it falls apart all over again.

[AvidSM]

I can see National's point of view about Tiger Cub leaders in that if you force them to lead themselves, you are creating a new batch of adult leaders, who if they stick with it, will eventually replace the current leaders with the experience.

 

Retaining Tiger Cubs and their leaders should have the highest priority in the district. If they can't get to the training, the training should come to them. Also, what about a "Pack Guide" position - someone with experience who can coach and advise these new Tiger Cub leaders? This position would be like the Troop Guide, who's job is to help the new scout patrol leader(s).

 

UC's and other District types should be focused on doing everything they can to help out these new leaders instead of blaming them.

[Lisabob]

Avid, there used to be a Tiger Coach position akin to what you are proposing. It was phased out. In reality, I know very few packs who used it - and those who did, tended not to really need it because they also provided all sorts of other support to new parents/leaders. The packs where the Tiger families are all left staring at each other wondering "what do we do NOW?" and who can never seem to retain more than a third of their Tigers from one year to the next, those packs didn't use the Tiger Coach position anyway because they were chronically short-staffed to start with and had no one to spare.

 

The truth is, from a district perspective, it is very easy to think short-term about recruiting new Tigers. It is far, far harder to work with units on retention of these new leaders and scouts. I am by no means saying it is impossible or not worth the effort because I think it is worth it- but it is undeniably tougher. And part of it is that the BSA literature pushes what I think is an unrealistic solution in "shared leadership" of Tiger dens.

 

 

[meschen]

Actually, the position that Avid is really looking for is a "Pack Trainer." Given the requirements of that function, that position should ideally be held by an experienced Scouter. Unfortunately, after filling the Committee Chair, Cubmaster, Unit Commissioner and various Den Leader positions, who has highly experienced Scouters left over to serve in that role?

[DenZero]

Lisabob sure hit the nail on the head. We lost all of our new tigers this year when it sunk in that if they wanted a good program, one of them would need to step up and be den leader, and that one was not going to be provided out of thin air. Out they slunk, one by one. Most of them ended up in other, larger packs.

 

The big pack in our area did it right. The mom of one of the kindergartners was the type of person who would make a good den leader. They worked really hard to recruit her during the kindergarten year. I tried pretty hard to recruit her and her son as well, starting in January, but the big pack succeeded. So they were able to do fall recruiting with a den leader already in place. They had no problem building up a den of 17 tigers.

 

I suppose it could be made a cubmaster's duty to serve as tiger den leader until a permanent leader could be found, but that's awkward if he's already wolf and webelos den leader too :-).

 

 

[shortridge]

Lisa,

 

Could you give some examples of the types of hands-on marketing that the X Games folks do? I'm only familiar with the video games, Mountain Dew, flashy logos, etc. What are some specific techniques that we can adapt from them?

 

I agree with Mr. Boyce that local PR is a critical part of this whole shindig. There's one troop in my county that sends out regular writeups about their programs and treks - one troop of about 10. Reading the local papers for the other towns, you might not know that Scouting even exists. Community newspapers are desperate for stuff to fill their pages, and they're usually the papers that the target parent audience reads.

[Lisabob]

OK the pack trainer business is another of my pet peeves. We have 6 of them in our district. None of them are trained for the position (because our district doesn't offer training for that position). None of them DO anything as trainers, and 4 of the packs told me point blank that they were counseled to register a fairly random parent as PT when they turned in their recharter paperwork, just so that they'd have enough registered leaders to be rechartered. What good is that?!

 

Now once upon a time I set myself up as pack trainer for my son's pack, because (in addition to doing the advancement work) it gave me a platform from which to push, cajole, beg, plead, exhort, and otherwise encourage the rest of our leaders to go to training. But I did this all very intentionally, as part of my WB ticket, and my use of the position was clearly not the norm for our district. Maybe people in other areas have better experiences with the PT position than what I have seen.

 

 

[fgoodwin]

Mr. Boyce writes of Richard Louv's "Last Child in the Woods"Interestingly and oddly, the book does not acknowledge the existence of scouting, except in passim. This is a glaring omission, since now there are organizations trying to get kids outside who have never done this before. . . when instead, scouting could be more easily promoted.Louv does mention Scouting, and not in a flattering way. I don't have the book handy, but I recall he said something very similar to the quote from a 2005 interview:An Interview with Richard Louv: About Nature-Deficit Disorderhttp://www.ednews.org/articles/419/1/An-Interview-with-Richard-Louv-About-Nature-Deficit-Disorder/Page1.htmlhttp://tinyurl.com/4f348aBy Michael F. Shaughnessy Senior Columnist EducationNews.orgPublished 09/28/2005Q: The Boy Scouts seem to be the last bastion of refuge- taking children out to show them the stars, the sky, the moon, the clouds, and the beauty of a sunset. How can we encourage parents to share these experiences with their children? A: Good parents are doing their best, but information about the value of nature experience to child development has not been widely available. Indeed, there are many parents out there who have deliberately or intuitively exposed their kids to nature, but without the proof of how important that is. I hope Last Child in the Woods will make them feel very good about what they did or what they're doing. But the wider societal message often unwittingly teaches children to avoid nature. This powerful, negative message is even codified into the regulatory structures of many of our neighborhoods. In a sense, this criminalizes natural play. That may seem an extreme statement, until you add up all the neighborhood covenants and government regulations -- many of them well-intentioned -- that put nature off-limits. This is only one example of how the everyday message is delivered. And, by the way, the Boy Scouts, I believe, have drifted too far from an emphasis on nature itself. I would like to see them, and other similar organizations, reclaim more of that territoryThat last statement about sums up how Mr. Louv feels about Scouting. Although Louv does not embrace Scouting, Scouting certainly has embraced Louv and his ideas; see the article in the May, 2006 issue of Scouting Magazine:The Wonder of the Woods: What Are Our Children Missing?By Mary Jacobshttp://www.scoutingmagazine.org/issues/0605/a-wndr.html

[Gold Winger]

"the Boy Scouts, I believe, have drifted too far from an emphasis on nature itself."

 

I might just agree with him.

[evmori]

I've heard a statistic used about Cub Scouting retention - that 75% that started as Tigers are lost by the time they get to Webelos. I don't know what can be done about this.

 

Could be these kids are burned out with arts & crafts by then! Maybe it's time to get the WEBELOS program more into the outdoors & away from the little kid stuff.

 

Ed Mori

1 Peter 4:10

 

[Lisabob]

There's something to that as well, Ed. I loved the webelos program - we had a really good time with our guys. But we did a much wider variety of activities than are really included in the activity pins. And if I had it to do over, we'd spend more time outside instead of inside, less time working on those pins. I don't think Webelos needs to be the equivalent to first year boy scouts but it isn't wolves and bears either.

 

But a funny thing - the training (at least around here, and I note we aren't always good about providing super high quality cub leader training, to my great dismay) for webelos leaders does not focus on what to actually DO with the boys. It gives no practical advice on how to connect with local troops or what sort of joint activities with troops would be useful, except to suggest that connections should happen. It focuses on how the awards differ. It focuses a very little bit on the idea of webelos as a bridge to boy scouting. It focuses on how to earn a bunch of the pins in an 18 month plan, which is also in the leader guide. Consequently, for a typical Cub DL with no prior Boy Scouting experience and for whom position-specific training is all they're going to get/do, they do not come away with the sense that webelos is fundamentally different than cubs, just that it has different awards that are a little more in-depth. And many webelos dens, therefore, run just like the wolf/bear dens did. So, you want to really emphasize that webelos is different? Start by changing the way we train WDLs.

 

(And incidentally, about half the packs in our district don't have a registered WDL at all. Of the half who do, less than half of them are listed as "trained." So if our district is at all typical, it appears that most dens are being led by someone who doesn't even have the above-mentioned training!)

 

When i think about all of this membership stuff I come away with three thoughts:

 

1) We, BSA, need to do a better and more consistent job of marketing our programs to our target audiences. When we do it, it works well, but it is so uneven that it is hard to build or maintain any momentum.

 

2) We, BSA, need to think more carefully about how we provide training and support to our leaders, especially in the cub program. Much of the training I have seen is woefully inadequate, frequently poorly delivered, and often doesn't even reach those who need it most.

 

3) We, BSA, need to pay better attention to details. I know many folks aren't happy about being detail-oriented when what they want to do is go outside with the kids. I don't want to stop that from happening! But looking at our leadership in my district alone has convinced me that when we don't pay attention to details, what we end up with is units who aren't able to run the program and "deliver the promise" because they haven't even filled the proper slots on their volunteer roster! No Tiger DL, no Webelos DL, yet they have a "pack trainer?" C'mon. Why isn't someone - UC, DE, membership, training, anybody! - communicating with units about this sort of thing? Maybe all it takes is that friendly conversation (hey, I see your Tiger den doesn't have a registered leader. Can we talk about how to remedy this?) to take a struggling pack and set it back on the path again.

 

Instead of addressing these deficiencies we all say "well they're just volunteers" and throw up our hands. Yeah, and that leads to poor programs, a tarnished "brand," and declining membership.

[DenZero]

Lisabob,

 

This is probably getting off-topic, but registration records aren't a useful guide to the actual positions being served, especially for small packs. Rechartering requires 1 Cubmaster, 1 Den leader and 3 committee members. So a small pack with 4 dens will typically have 3 of the actual den leaders registered as committee members. (and no real pack committee).

 

My experience with Cub Scout leader training is that it really doesn't provide enough information to know how to have a good program. It's also _really_ tough to get people to take the time out to go to it. It's easier to find a few minutes now and then to read this forum, where I've learned 10 times as much as in Cub Scout leader training.

 

[Eamonn]

For a good many years I owned and operated a couple of fairly successful restaurants.

As with a lot of restaurants I did depend on the sales of alcohol to make a living.

Over the years many of the smaller home town food companies seemed to get pushed out by the bigger food companies. -Sysco, US Food Service and the like.

These companies weren't just happy supplying the dry goods and canned goods, over time they grew and tried to replace all the suppliers. Meat, fresh vegetables -you name it.

These companies never ever seemed to want to help with ant sort of sales promotions.

That is no one from Sysco ever came and said "Hey Eamonn if you sell our coffee we are going to help you out by paying for promoting our coffee".

On the other hand the big breweries seemed really worried about Market Share, they bent over to help come up with promotions for their products.

As a small business owner I really didn't have vast amounts of money to spend on advertising. Most of the time I was forced to rely on word and mouth.

To this end I did my best to buy the best possible product and hire the best staff. Of course this wasn't the cheapest way of doing things.

Here in SW PA.There are still a lot of people who seem to be happy to go out and eat not so great food as long as it's cheap and the plate is over-flowing.

I was happy not to even try to cater to these people.

Translating this into a Scouting setting.

National is in some ways like Sysco.

They have a good product -The Scouting programs.

Maybe we need the CO to be a little more like the breweries and take a more active role in promoting their youth groups.

Still at the end of the day it becomes up to us to provide the best possible product (The program) to the end user, (The youth) We will do this best by ensuring we have the best staff (Fully trained volunteer leaders and committee members).

There is always going to be people or groups of people who for whatever reason are not going to be happy with what we offer. We should all be so very busy doing what we do and doing it well that we ought not have time to worry about these people. -Leave the worrying to others.

I know we seem to use the word Program a lot and at times we lose sight of what it means. To my way of thinking it's all about doing what we can to make every event and every meeting as good as it can be.

Kids join Scouts for fun, adventure and new challenges. If after a meeting or event you know in your heart of hearts that these have not been delivered. - Something needs to be looked at and changed.

I think we could double our membership within five years if we went out of our way to ensure that the program offered by every unit was full of fun, adventure and offered the youth new and exciting challenges.

Eamonn.