Pack 232, Josh McWilliam
With the collapse of our old website provider (SOAR) we have launched a number of new and improved solutions for managing our website and communications.
This guide will help show you how to take full advantage of some of the great new capabilities this provides to more easily and effectively manage communication within your den.
Roster Management via ScoutBook
Twin Rivers Council requires that we use ScoutBook to maintain our roster. Therefore it already has all of our scouts information complete with den assignments, leadership positions, advancements, parents, etc. New scout applications automatically go into this. It therefore makes sense to leverage this to whatever degree we can rather than having the burden to maintain a second roster via another system.
Therefore ScoutBook will be the main source of truth for our scout and family information. This is where all parents should be directed to keep their information up to date and to see other scout information.
There are however a number of things ScoutBook is not good at and so the remainder of this article will outline some of the additional tools we will use for other needs.
New Pack232.com Website
The new website is now live at www.pack232.com. With scout/roster management happening in ScoutBook, there is no need for the main website to have individual logins. This creates an opportunity for a solution (WordPress) that can allow us to create a much richer site providing a better source of information for our current families and better marketing material to prospective families.
The site is still evolving, but it now serves as a much better resource that you can direct families to for more information (without requiring they have a login). Some of the resources include.
Much of the information is public, however, to protect the privacy and safety of our scouts and their families, some information is password protected. This includes:
Calendar Den Information Photo Gallery Files & Downloads
The password is the same for all of these pages and is easy to remember. It is the cub scout motto, all lowercase with no spaces (doyourbest).
Den Email
We are using Google Groups to provide each den with their own email group list. The email list is simply den#@pack232.com, where # is your den number (ie. den6@pack232.com).
A full list of dens, their emails, and their calendar links can be found on the Den Information page on the new website. There is also a Leadership page with email addresses to contact many of the non den leaders.
Each of the den email addresses is private. Only those who have been added to it will receive communications sent to it and only those on it may send to it.
Managing Your Den Email Group
You, as the den leader, have the power to manage members of the group as you often know best who needs to be added or removed. To make changes to the group, follow these steps:
Open a web browser and go to https://groups.pack232.com Login using using your email address that was added to the group (you may need a Google email account to do this properly). Click on your den’s group, which should be listed. Click on People > Members in the left navigation bar. Add or remove members as needed. For adding new people you will generally want to add them as “Group members”, not managers or owners. However if there is someone else you want to be able to help manage the group with you you can certainly add them as one of those other roles if you like. You may also change someone’s posting permissions to prevent them from sending messages to the group or require their messages be approved by you before distributing to the rest of the group.
Each member of the group has the ability to remove themselves from the group and to change their email frequency if they wish by following the first few instructions above as well.
Den Calendar
While ScoutBook has a calendar, we have opted to use Google Calendar to manage our overall Pack and Den calendars for now. We have an overall Pack Calendar that people can view and subscribe to but each den also has its own calendar. This allows families to easily subscribe to just the calendars relevant to their family.