Recruiting Nightmares

[ProScouter06]

Lots of great ideas from this thread to hopefully get you some traction recruiting. Id also suggest visiting fall sporting fields, soccer games, and set up a table with some flyers/sign up info.

 

Best of luck!

 

In response to stosh, you're probably wasting time trying to get help from the council to recruit 6th graders. The rate of return is too small. Best way to get that age group is word of mouth, peer to peer.

[meyerc13]

Our Pack covers two schools.  Over the past few years, we've had good luck sending fliers home at one school, but weren't allowed to at the other.  One school told us we could put up posters in the school, but since many Kindergartners can't read, and even if they could aren't the best at remembering dates/times/details, that wasn't terribly helpful.  So rather than give up we decided to get creative.

 

We staffed tables at the School Registration days/Back to School Nights.  We also were able to obtain a list of boys and their addresses from the school district and used that to send out a flier directly to their homes.  This wasn't cheap, but it did get the word out.  Our District staff did Boy Talks.  Finally, on the day of our recruitment my wife and I handed out more fliers to kids at they were leaving the playground.  Since we were on the public sidewalk, the school can't say anything about it.

 

This was a lot of work, but we added boys to almost all of our dens, including a dozen new Tiger cubs.  Considering in 2012 when my son joined the Pack they recruited 2 Tigers and nobody at any other age level, I think we did okay.  Despite the challenges, we doubled from around 10 when I took over as Cubmaster in 2013, to around 20 in 2014, and now 40 in 2015 with a few more stragglers I think we'll pick up in October.