Why have Scouts?

[InquisitiveScouter]

8 minutes ago, DuctTape said:

Yes., if the youth want to be a scout, then that is all that is necessary. There are other benefits for adults... parents, society etc, but in the end the only target audience that matters is the youth.

I love the idea, but how do we reach that as reality?

Parents are a target audience.  Without them, how would we have Scouting?

Adult volunteers are a target audience.  Without them, how would we have Scouting?

BSA National has made itself the target audience for the dollars.  Without them, we could still have Scouting 😜

 

 

[DuctTape]

2 hours ago, InquisitiveScouter said:

I love the idea, but how do we reach that as reality?

Parents are a target audience.  Without them, how would we have Scouting?

Adult volunteers are a target audience.  Without them, how would we have Scouting?

BSA National has made itself the target audience for the dollars.  Without them, we could still have Scouting 😜

 

 

 

Little League is not marketed to adults. Kids wanna play baseball so the adults (and community) provide a league.

If youth want to do it, their parents would sign them up. Parents are often the volunteers, the youth become volunteers. There is no need to market Scouts to the adults; if the youth wanna do it, the adults will provide. The scouts are the only target audience. IMO part of the problem is BSA (national) was/is trying to market itself to the adults and as a result forgot the only target audience that matters.

[InquisitiveScouter]

So, Little League websites, social posts, email blasts, electronic newsletters, "Annual Key Touchpoints", imagery, sponsoring searches, etc. etc. etc. are all aimed at the youth??

Who knew those kids were so savvy??

https://www.littleleague.org/downloads/annual-guide-marketing-assets/

If kids just wanted to play baseball, they'd go to the park, backyard, open field, sandlot, (like we did as kids) and hit the ball around.

Edited March 14, 2023 by InquisitiveScouter

[DuctTape]

10 minutes ago, InquisitiveScouter said:

So, Little League websites, social posts, email blasts, electronic newsletters, "Annual Key Touchpoints", imagery, sponsoring searches, etc. etc. etc. are all aimed at the youth??

Who knew those kids were so savvy??

https://www.littleleague.org/downloads/annual-guide-marketing-assets/

If kids just wanted to play baseball, they'd go to the park, backyard, open field, sandlot, (like we did as kids) and hit the ball around.

Communication tools provided to adults to help them get their kid involved is not the same as marketing to the target audience.

One can only aim at a single target.

[InquisitiveScouter]

8 minutes ago, DuctTape said:

Communication tools provided to adults to help them get their kid involved is not the same as marketing to the target audience.

One can only aim at a single target.

So, if the adults are the decision-maker to sign up the kid to Little League (or Scouts), then they are certainly A target audience

[InquisitiveScouter]

9 minutes ago, DuctTape said:

One can only aim at a single target.

Um... no.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUWJ4lZ0NgQ&ab_channel=Matt"Wags"Wagner

 

[InquisitiveScouter]

https://mattixdesign.com/marketing/how-to-target-multiple-audiences-and-ideal-customers

[DuctTape]

Absent the youths' desire, everything else is meaningless.

Back to the OP. Two words. I submitted mine.

[InquisitiveScouter]

4 minutes ago, DuctTape said:

Absent the youths' desire, everything else is meaningless.

Back to the OP. Two words. I submitted mine.

I wish life were that easy. I have seen many Scouts over the years who didn't want to be there.  Their parents made them.  (We have a few at the moment.)  Some have changed their minds over time, and some left. 

Parents ultimately make the decision about joining Scouting, not the youth.

[DuctTape]

15 minutes ago, InquisitiveScouter said:

I wish life were that easy. I have seen many Scouts over the years who didn't want to be there.  Their parents made them.  (We have a few at the moment.)  Some have changed their minds over time, and some left. 

Parents ultimately make the decision about joining Scouting, not the youth.

I did not say it was easy; anything but.

I have had similar experiences. Mostly the scouts want to do scouts.

We disagree about who makes the ultimate decision. Certainly parents have the authority, but IMO the ultimate decision needs to be the scouts. 

[AwakeEnergyScouter]

6 hours ago, InquisitiveScouter said:

If kids just wanted to play baseball, they'd go to the park, backyard, open field, sandlot, (like we did as kids) and hit the ball around.

I hate to say this, but it's not a given that enough kids would be allowed to walk to a park unsupervised to play unsupervised, let alone this happening without neighbors getting involved.

I tried to teach my child independence by letting the walk to friend's houses to ask if they wanted to play. In the 200 m from our house to a friends', they were stopped by a neighbor who asked if they were lost and only started walking again when the friend's dad came out to wave the neighbor off. No friends ever ring our doorbell without a parent. My husband shoots daggers at me every time I tell our child that they can go see if so and so is home.

I don't know if I'm correct, but I think someone might call the cops and/or CPS if there were a bunch of kids playing without a gaggle of adults in the park. Not to mention all the kids are signed up for a million things that most of the time, the kids aren't home. Little League, just like cub scouts, assures you other kids who are into the same thing will be there. 

Childhood has definitely lost a lot of freedom. Not sure why everyone is so scared of kidnappers, but they definitely are. Although in the case of why my child's school now has security and checks ID against tickets only available through the school for elementary school soccer games, I do know - bomb threats against elementary students. Statistically, crime rates are way down, but emotionally everyone is very scared. The result is a lot of things, but includes that kids in the neighborhood playing outside spontaneously seems almost taboo.

[qwazse]

@AwakeEnergyScouter, it depends on the social class of your neighborhood. Being able to monitor your child at all times has become a symbol of wealth. Even if you’re not rich enough for someone to kidnap your pre-teen, you’re supposed to act like you are.

That said, there are forces that prey on children. Distributors of marijuana, for example, benefit from users starting in adolescence. Therefore, they recruit teen dealers. Nowadays they don’t have to entice youth on street corners because the information super highway takes them right to their potential candidates’ bedrooms. The child with the slightest tear in social fabric may be vulnerable to this and a plethora of other ills. Kids know this, and many of my scouts are youth whose path to fun and adventure is freedom from that cycle.

So another two-word reason:

Substance independence.

[AwakeEnergyScouter]

26 minutes ago, qwazse said:

Nowadays they don’t have to entice youth on street corners because the information super highway takes them right to their potential candidates’ bedrooms.

Yeah, open internet is a no-no in our house, and will be for a long time. I agree completely that dangers of all kinds lurk on the internet. I had a long talk with another xennial mom who's a lot more worried about internet dangers than kidnapper dangers. We came of age right when the internet became ubiquitous, and we remember from our own adolescence the constant sexual harassment and/or prodding to send nude pictures and sex chat requests. I don't want to derail the thread with how dangerous the internet can be, but I do think that scouts might have a role to play as a place that attracts other parents that want to let their kid have some physical freedom to be unsupervised, or at least only lightly supervised. (Unfortunately, parents still need to fit scouts into the time puzzle that is daily life.) Some of the previous two words right at the start include that aspect though, IMO.

[qwazse]

21 minutes ago, AwakeEnergyScouter said:

… xennial mom who's a lot more worried about internet dangers than kidnapper dangers. We came of age right when the internet became ubiquitous, and we remember from our own adolescence the constant sexual harassment …

Sounds like you are about my Son #1’s age. I prefer the term “post-modern nomads” for your generation. Many people criticized it, but as I meet parents from this generation (and their children), I am very positively impressed.

I’m sorry to hear about the internet grooming that you endured. I wish that scouting was a better solution for it, but I fear that we are a generation away from best practices in a world of high speed communications. I think BSA’s youth protection has it backwards. Youth need the presence of multiple adults online. Before leaders were restricted from being social media friends with youth, I called out several abusive behaviors (by informing either to the youth themselves or their parents). Now that’s on the parents themselves.

[AwakeEnergyScouter]

7 hours ago, qwazse said:

I'm sorry to hear about the internet grooming that you endured. I wish that scouting was a better solution for it, but I fear that we are a generation away from best practices in a world of high speed communications. I think BSA’s youth protection has it backwards. Youth need the presence of multiple adults online. Before leaders were restricted from being social media friends with youth, I called out several abusive behaviors (by informing either to the youth themselves or their parents). Now that’s on the parents themselves.

Unfortunately, it wasn't even grooming, because random guys threw all these requests at you seemingly without any consideration of why we would agree. I have no idea what they were thinking. It just formed a constant stream of chatter to shut down. Real grooming would have been much worse - I've heard of some pretty horrendous sextortion cases that started with catfishing. I don't bother with sites that aren't heavily moderated for this reason myself, and don't want to let my child onto the open internet until they're confident enough and tech savvy enough to reject men regularly. But even then, more trusted adults would be good. I understand wanting to shut down potential avenues for actual grooming, but you're also shutting down avenues for helping like you say. We obviously need to keep looking for pedophiles, but tacitly making the assumption that all men who want to work with and advise children and youth are displaying suspicious behavior isn't helpful. We need better discrimination than that. Especially on the internet, where pedophilia is far from the only problem! The vast majority of scouts in Scouts BSA fared no harm. Everyone who's been on the internet has met harmful people. The cost/benefit calculus is completely different online.