Troopmaster or TroopWebHost

[Cleveland Rocks]

9 hours ago, cmd said:

By this, do you mean having email addresses @troopX.org instead of @yourtroop.mytroop.us?  I hadn't thought about that before, but it IS so much easier to send an email to our troop with their vanity email address than to our pack that let that lapse and another unit scooped it up.  I didn't realize that was being done through SOAR, but looks like the troop committee email address uses the vanity domain, so I guess it probably is.  
Please let me know what you find out about whether other options support that.   On the TroopTrack forum there's a post complaining that they don't have that, but I think it was from 2017.

Yes, we registered the domain name troopX.org over a decade ago, pre-dating my time in the troop.  We then use that domain name to have our SOAR website be www.troopX.org instead of www.yourtroop.mytroop.us.  SOAR also handled the email addresses using that domain, so we had info@troopX.org for inquiries to our troop, cmty@troopX.org for emails to our Troop Committee, summercamp@troopX.org for all communication with appropriate leaders regarding summer camp, treasurer@troopX.org for all emails to our troop treasurer, etc. And sending to those groups was very easy--if you wanted to send an email to the entire committee, you just sent an email (provided your email address had permission to do so) to cmty@troopX.org and it went to every adult who had a leadership role of Troop Committee on the roster. You didn't have to maintain separate email lists--SOAR looked at the person's role within the troop to determine what email lists they were on.

The big one we used for everything was announce@troopX.org, which sent emails to everyone who we had an email address on--current Scouts and parents, alumni, friends, committee, etc. Our weekly newsletter was automatically sent out by SOAR to that group. SOAR handled all of that and send them as individual messages so it wouldn't get caught by spam filters.  Can't do that with Scoutbook--you can only send to current Scouts, Scouters and families.

Those two things are big for us, and I'd be curious to know if TroopMaster or TroopWebHost can replicate that.

[fred8033]

11 hours ago, Cleveland Rocks said:

One of the things we really liked about SOAR was that it allowed us to have our website with our own URL, and we could have any number of emails tied to that domain name.  We also like the ability to keep lists of our alumni and families, as we regularly communicate with them, something Scoutbook does not allow.

Does anyone know if TroopWebHost or Troopmaster allows either of those things? I've reached out to them both, but with it being the weekend when all this transpired, obviously no one is going to answer until Monday at the earliest.

I loved SOAR.  Great web site.  Great newsletter.  Great calendar.  I really miss it.  Great roster.  Pictures, etc.

[fred8033]

9 hours ago, cmd said:

By this, do you mean having email addresses @troopX.org instead of @yourtroop.mytroop.us? 

It was a one-stop source for unit setup.   <name>@<city><unit number>.mytroop.us.   Really nice.  It did not do advancement, but that was not the focus.  It was communication and representation.  Great tool.

[fred8033]

On 4/1/2023 at 1:27 PM, cmd said:

Any recommendations for us?

Recognize that the decision is not Troopmaster or Troopwebhost.  The decision is what in addition to scoutbook.  You will be using scoutbook in some form.  It is BSA's official tool.  

We stopped using Troopmaster after decades of use and we did not miss it.  Sometimes, troopmaster promotes tracking data that is really the scout's to track and own.  After scoutbook started and SOAR began to back off, we just used a monitored Facebook group and a Google calendar in addition to ScoutBook.  

[SiouxRanger]

Any recommendations regarding tracking troop finances?  Scout accounts, payments for activities, etc., troop checks written and deposits made? Donations, and fundraisers? Thanks. (Not concerned with any other aspects of the software.

[fred8033]

9 minutes ago, SiouxRanger said:

Any recommendations regarding tracking troop finances?  Scout accounts, payments for activities, etc., troop checks written and deposits made? Donations, and fundraisers? Thanks. (Not concerned with any other aspects of the software.

I used quicken.  Next guy used excel.  Next guy used ....   We let the volunteer decide as long as he kept the numbers.

[cmd]

30 minutes ago, fred8033 said:

It was a one-stop source for unit setup.   <name>@<city><unit number>.mytroop.us.  

That's how our pack is set up, but the troop managed to snag the troop<unit number>.org domain years and years ago and does not want to lose that.  I figured that it would be an easy matter to have that address point to anywhere else we wanted it to, but missed the fact that there were email addresses associated with it.  The troop's mailing lists were things like announce@troop123.org or committee@troop123.org.  I'm not sure, but think there may also be individual email addresses like scoutmaster@troop10.org.  I think that hanging on to those email addresses may be the one non-negotiable concern of our scoutmaster.

33 minutes ago, fred8033 said:

After scoutbook started and SOAR began to back off, we just used a monitored Facebook group and a Google calendar in addition to ScoutBook.  

I wish we could get people to use a Facebook group.  It was already hard enough to get people to join the group I made 5 years ago before they started finding themselves in Facebook time-out.  Pretty sure that would be a non-starter.  No one wants to be forced to use Facebook. 

I don't know why everyone is so resistant to a google calendar, but judging by the number of parents and leaders who insist on adding things to the calendars manually one by one instead of subscribing to the pack/troop calendar feed, I think that's going to be unpopular.  (I'm not the one who is making the decision on how to replace SOAR - just researching and making recommendations - so popularity does matter here.)

And we do want to have some type of public website.  Since I seem to have fallen into this research task because I'm the most tech savvy person available, I think it's safe to say we don't have anyone capable of building a website without the structure one of these services provides.

[InquisitiveScouter]

28 minutes ago, SiouxRanger said:

Any recommendations regarding tracking troop finances?  Scout accounts, payments for activities, etc., troop checks written and deposits made? Donations, and fundraisers? Thanks. (Not concerned with any other aspects of the software.

Scoutbook has decent high level account tracking.  If done correctly, the balance matches what's actually in the bank account.

For fine detail, like tracking fundraiser amounts, we use Excel spreadsheets stored on the Troop Google Drive.  Once all the fine detail accounting is done there by the Fundraiser Chair, the Troop Treasurer makes entries into each Scout account in Scoutbook.

[Cleveland Rocks]

15 minutes ago, cmd said:

I don't know why everyone is so resistant to a google calendar, but judging by the number of parents and leaders who insist on adding things to the calendars manually one by one instead of subscribing to the pack/troop calendar feed, I think that's going to be unpopular.  (I'm not the one who is making the decision on how to replace SOAR - just researching and making recommendations - so popularity does matter here.)

The decision for us is that with SOAR, it wasn't just a calendar (we had subscribed to the SOAR calendar through Google Calendar, so people could see the events on their mobile devices, etc.), it's that with SOAR, the calendar was also for sign-ups, and you could track who was signed up, and whether they had paid, and if they were bringing guests, how many guests were they bringing, etc.

The SOAR calendar also allowed us to allow others to sign-up for events, something Scoutbook doesn't allow for on their calendars.

And, it was all easy-peasy to use. Like someone else said, you didn't need a Masters in Computer Science to use it.

[fred8033]

SOAR was great.

I would have loved to have SOAR and ScoutBook married.  SOAR for unit coordination.  ScoutBook for advancement.  

Edited April 3, 2023 by fred8033

[cmd]

Having BSA take over SOAR and make it free to units would have broken it the same way the ScoutBook lost functionality after BSA took over.  Between trying to adapt it to fit with their other software and the inherent issues of trying to scale up a small private app to serve the entire nation, it does so much less than it did back when we briefly paid for it.

[InquisitiveScouter]

15 minutes ago, cmd said:

Having BSA take over SOAR and make it free to units would have broken it the same way the ScoutBook lost functionality after BSA took over.  Between trying to adapt it to fit with their other software and the inherent issues of trying to scale up a small private app to serve the entire nation, it does so much less than it did back when we briefly paid for it.

Respectfully disagree... Scoutbook has more functionality now than when it was free.  I used it extensively then, and use it extensively now.

It runs even better with the Scoutbook Feature Assistant add-on (which Gary Feutz keeps up) from the Goggle Play Store.

I do agree that Scoutbook support by BSA is sorely lacking.  It is mostly volunteers (Scoutbook User Advisory Council) who assist with day to day problems.  BSA definitely lost a LOT of credibility in my book when they dumped user support, and expected the Registrars to answer peoples questions about Scoutbook (with no training at all, if you can believe it.)

BSA still runs programming changes, and they seem to move slightly faster than glacial speed.  Slightly 😜 

Edited April 3, 2023 by InquisitiveScouter

[MattR]

Hmm. So that's why our email doesn't work. We're in the same boat. SOAR is likely no more.

We use our website for a few things:

1. Calendar with registration
2. Pictures and invites to visit us
3. email aliases (all, parents, plc, etc)
4. Announcements (both push and pull)

I think we could do 1 and 2 fairly easily with a somewhat static website. 3 and 4 need some better tools. Honestly, I don't want to mess with it even though I could.

 

[Cleveland Rocks]

On 4/3/2023 at 11:08 PM, MattR said:

We're in the same boat. SOAR is likely no more.

 

Maybe not . . . if you go to the FAQ that they created, there's this little tidbit posted to it Monday night:

 

Is SOAR out of business?  That will be determined later this week. Some individuals have reached out that may be a path for SOAR to continue.

 

If that's really true, we might be willing to wait it out, depending on how long it might take to get something back up and running. For us, neither Troopmaster or TroopWebHost really provides us what we had with SOAR, and it'll cost us more money to get back to where we were before. Remember, TroopWebHost is saying it will be April 21 before they're able to import and support everything. That's still 2 1/2 weeks away.

[cmd]

It would be useful to know whether there will be incompatibility issues if you set up a new site using scoutbook scout/adult export files then try to bring in other info once the SOAR export format is supported. 

At this point our pack has set up trial sites with TroopWebHostCS and TroopTrack using the scoutbook export files and the troop has done TroopMaster and TroopTrack (TWH only has a trial for the cub version.) It's not fully functioning by any means, but we could go live with any of them right now for emailing purposes.  And if there were a couple of events we wanted to collect RSVPs for, adding that would be easy enough.  It's just a matter of getting all the parents set up with a new site.  Don't want to do that until we're sure we'll be sticking with it! 

I haven't played around with TroopMaster yet, but I know TroopTrack has an option to collect RSVPs outside the software then add them manually so anyone can see the list.  I may try that for the upcoming campout.