Scouts.Digital Article

We've spoken about automation on Scouts.Digital at length (After all, it makes our scouting lives so much easier). Well, 2020 is the year of automation for Scouts.Digital and we are starting with a big one. Census is now automated on Scouts.Digital

This year, for Scout Groups that actively use Scouts.Digital, at midnight on the 30th September, your Census information will be automatically generated, put into an Excel Spreadsheet, added to your Groups Document Store (So you can find it later) and emailed to your Scout Group Leader, Assistant Scout Group Leaders and Scout Group Managers. You do not need to do anything in order to have this Census generated for you, it will automatically happen.

The great thing about automating the Census is we now roll your Groups Membership Numbers up to your District, your Region and Nationally. Please be aware that no personally identifiable information is contained in either the District Census Spreadsheet, the Regional Census Spreadsheet or the National Census Spreadsheet. The District, Regional and National Census Spreadsheets only contain a count of Members, not who those Members are.

This means that, at a National Level, there is no requirement for Groups to complete any additional information in order to have a Census generated. All you need to do is have your Groups Members up to date on Scouts.Digital.

Now, this relies on your information being reasonably up to date on Scouts.Digital. This process will count all active Adult Leaders in Warranted roles in your Group and all active Invested Youth Members in your Group (Irrespective of advancement or badge levels). These two numbers make up your Invested Members.

We also count Parent Helpers (Meerkats, Cubs & Scouts) as well as Parents Committee members as, technically, these people are Members. However, Capitation fees are not due for these two groups of Members, so their numbers are detailed separately to the Invested Members number.

And just so that we don't go "SURPRISE..... Here's A Census" on the 1st August, we'll let each Adult Leader in your Group know that the Census will be automated by sending them a monthly notification, explaining that this is about to happen and detailing what is expected of them in order to ensure that your Groups Census is calculated correctly. These notifications start in April and will continue until August.

This is a brand new concept on Scouts.Digital, so we've added a specific FAQ area to Scouts.Digital that deals with questions around the Automated Census Process, what is counted and what needs to be done in order for your Census to be automated correctly.

Watch this space for our next big one (and we have more than one big one in this years pipeline)