Time to scrap recharter

[Protoclete]

It is time to trash the entire Recharter system.

Maybe this is already discussed under the hopes for changes as a result of bankruptcy, but it always seems like this is something everyone at the unit, district, and most everyone at the Council level is well aware, and yet it never seems to change, or even be discussed by the people responsible for this wildly outdated and unappealing system. 

It is no exaggeration to say that we have lost more scouts, volunteers, and units to the cumbersome approach to registration and recharter than to anything else in my tenure. Not bankruptcy, not lawsuits, not admitting girls, not openly accepting homosexual leaders, not losing the LDS - but this. Something so stupidly simple I wonder if we shouldn't just let someone design a better system as an Eagle Scout project. Well, except perhaps cost - but it is related. 

Annual renewal of membership registration and confirmation of charter for a chartering org should take no more than fifteen minutes and able to be completed entirely online. Payment, transfers, new members, position changes, all of it. It isn't as if we don't have the technology - literally every other membership organization from libraries to churches to business prefered shopper plans make it that easy. 

The current process is entirely too time-consuming. We have piecemeal approach to Scout and Scouter data, bits and pieces all over the place in Scoutbook, Scoutnet, My.SCouting, plus having to generate separate lists and even printing forms and uploading scans and waiting weeks to find out if information is not processed - all this should be online, in a single system. 

Payments cannot simply be made online and directly. The cost of participation is already high, and we serve areas where that is prohibitive. Just showing up to events is costly in geographically large areas. Asking volunteers to pay on top of all the costs of their kids, uniforms, program fees, etc. Especially internationally, there is no benefit seen of national fees and often little for council fees. The justification seems to be paying for people to manage an unwieldy process that exists only for its own sake - since it certainly does not help anyone. 

Timing, granted maybe a council decision, but Packs especially find it hard to follow the calendar year when everyone moves in the summers between school years. And we have high turnover. This also means district/council working with lists that are out of date and useless 75% of the time in terms of who is actually still here, trained, paid, whatever - because nothing updates until March, but then people move in June, so 9 months of the year they are still on the books but not actually here. It could be updated in real time. 

Then there are the issues of applications being submitted and never processed, sometimes multiple times. (The record in my district is six attempts without success). Having multiple ID numbers, one in each council you serve, and then those disappearing after a certain period. Your training and advancements not tracking in transfers. 

Position changes should be the click of a button for registered scouters, either the volunteer themselves going online, updating their profile, and that's it, and/or district/council leadership - including appropriate volunteer roles - able to go in and do the same. It should not require a new registration form every time someone adds a new position. It should not wait the better part of a year before those roles are reflected in the system. 

Our district level staff spend so much time dealing with all this, that they are not spending it training, coaching, supporting - it's all about chasing down the paperwork. Which is too often still paper, or digitalized paper, but using computers to do things the same way as a century ago is missing the point entirely. 

Have I missed some of the obvious problems with the current system? Has this ever been addressed by the people in a position to change it? Help me out here.

[dkurtenbach]

Yes -- Get rid of it! Far too many unit, district, and council resources are wasted on this obsolete process.  If council wants to renew the charter agreement with a chartered organization, then do it; there is no need to include the whole roster reconciliation and annual payment process at the same time.  Apply for membership and pay the membership fee and fees for the unit you are joining online.  Once a member is approved, automatic renewal and payment unless the member or unit cancels.  You want to see who is registered in your unit?  Open up the unit roster on My.Scouting -- every unit already has at least three people who can do that.  And there is really no reason why adults have to register in a particular position (except no-fee positions, such as merit badge counselors).  Let adults register as generic Adult Members, then assign them roles in My. Scouting.

[desertrat77]

Proof of the BSA's indifference to unit level scouting--the recharter process is Exhibit A.

[MattR]

All good ideas.  But this is more than rechartering and even more than software. Making robust software that scales to a million users is expensive and there is no money. My guess is there needs to be a simpler goal rather than an easier process. What is all this data used for? Part of it is doing background checks. Part of it is collecting money. Tracking training and advancement and membership. There are also security issues that add a lot of complexity.

Rechartering is a big pain for us mostly because of tracking down parents that don't respond. So if this process were pushed down to the families it would become a pain for a different reason.

[dkurtenbach]

So, in a no-money situation, the question is:  What parts of the recharter process can we drop because we already have a simpler or easier way to do them?

[HashTagScouts]

The biggest headaches to the process, for me at least, are:

1) the "online re-chartering" was/is nothing more than a form generator, that I have to print and obtain signatures on.  In other words, it might save me some ink in my pen, but it still requires a lot of typing and clicking and so doesn't save me any real time.

2) the biggest one- the processes today assume that the COR and/or IH is daily involved (or at least regularly involved) in the scouting units business.  I feel we've established enough through other threads that this is quite often not the case, and it is the challenge of having to obtain their signatures on everything that creates the most frustration and time spent.  If we would just allow the IH/COR to designate Committee Chairs- whom they already have blessed to be in positions of "authority" to be incharge of financials, etc.-  to sign on the COs behalf (if the CO desired), it would make life so much easier, whether through online process or not.

Edited March 20, 2020 by HashTagScouts

[MattR]

2 hours ago, dkurtenbach said:

So, in a no-money situation, the question is:  What parts of the recharter process can we drop because we already have a simpler or easier way to do them?

Not just rechartering but all the data. For some reason the BSA has very important information that must be guarded by humans. That is the reason that this whole thing can't be just a simple web interface that every parent can use. I understand the need to ensure adults have YPT but nothing else needs to get above the unit. What other youth organization cares about all the data we require? Advancement, training, knots. When my son was on a soccer team all they cared about was his address, that a parent signed a consent form and that he paid. Each year they just started over. In software that's called stateless and it's much simpler to write software for. How important is it to keep records of all this? Changing the mindset of the BSA to leave advancement at the unit level would be an enormous challenge.

 

Edited March 20, 2020 by MattR

[Eagledad]

As someone who has been involved at several levels of rechartering and developing membership data, I would be interested in learning how rechartering is the greatest cause of membership losses than anything else. While I agree the current process is inefficient and could be improved, my experience is that rechartering inflates the membership data.

Barry

[T2Eagle]

3 hours ago, Eagledad said:

As someone who has been involved at several levels of rechartering and developing membership data, I would be interested in learning how rechartering is the greatest cause of membership losses than anything else. While I agree the current process is inefficient and could be improved, my experience is that rechartering inflates the membership data.

Barry

yeah, it's a rare year that goes by that I don't recharter a kid --- or two --- that I never see again.

[fred8033]

7 hours ago, Eagledad said:

As someone who has been involved at several levels of rechartering and developing membership data, I would be interested in learning how rechartering is the greatest cause of membership losses than anything else. While I agree the current process is inefficient and could be improved, my experience is that rechartering inflates the membership data.

Barry

I've averaged 1.5 units of rechartering for the last 16 years.  About 24 recharters.  The first several years were paper and very labor intensive.   The first several were also relatively stressful because of learning the ins and outs.  And they have all be time intensive casing a signatures and driving people in.  The only way I've made it through these is I'm either very loyal or very stubborn.  

This process does burn out volunteers.  This can damage scouting's relationship when handed to any adult not deeply vested in scouting and especially burns new parents.  I doubt it hurts "troops", but it does clearly affect packs.    

This rechartering process also does little to renew the relationship between scouting and the chartering organizations.  IMHO, scouting would be better served by a warm friendly conversation between a scouting contact and the charter org.  The paperwork is of little significance.  Maybe at the end of that warm friendly conversation, the scouting contact could sign the chartering agreement with the charter org contact.  Beyond that, the rechartering paperwork is a waste.  

IMHO, this needs to become as simple as when I go into Amazon and repeat a previous order.  Once I pay, it should be good.