Scout Troop Collaboration Online – MyScoutLink.com

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 Comments 0
  Posted in Featured, Teamr Spotlight

If you run or are closely involved with a Boy or Girl Scout group, you know that collaborating meetings, events, activities, etc. can be a real pain.  You need to involve the scouts, their parents, and probably some relatives as well as the coordinators themselves.

It’s likely that you’re doing so with an email distribution list, but this can fast become clunky and hard to manage with everyone sending everyone else replies that may or may not be relevant.

Now, there’s an online solution that’s meant specifically for the needs of Scout Troops!  MyScoutLink.com allows scout leaders to build an account for their troop (or even multiple troops).  Each person involved can then log in and not only give input where appropriate, but also update whether they’ll be able to attend, perform a task, etc. quickly.

These tools not only help the organizers get everything together quickly, but they can be targeted towards specific members of the group.  So if a specific ceremony for, say, the Life Scout achievement is being held, those Scouts who are to receive the new merit can be isolated into a specific sub-group to be given information only they really need.  This saves miscellaneous information that the rest of the group doesn’t really require from clogging up the info stream.

There are also Scout-specific tools like Advancement Tracking to track where your Boy or Girl Scouts are and track their advancement through the ranks.  These can be customized for troop-specific titles or achievements as well as include the standard ranks within Scouting.

Other great tools allow for alerting the whole group or individuals within the group (or sub-groups) about specific events, changes, or other things they’ll need to know.  Plus it’s automatic!

Individuals within the group can log in and do different tasks according to their assigned management level and everyone can choose how they prefer to be contacted: email, phone, SMS/text, etc.  One, some, or all of those contact methods can be employed so that those involved are always in the loop.

Schedules can be downloaded into most popular calendar software (Outlook, Palm, Google Calendar) for easy integration with existing software.  This also makes for easy printing for meeting handouts and group agendas.

Headcounts and other tasks are easily built-in so that if you send out an automated email alert or reminder about an event, you can have a quick-link in the email for the group member to click on to instantly update their RSVP as to whether they’re going to be there.

• Manage who is in each Troop or Pack and reach them by email or SMS text
• Track advancement, badges and ranks for all of your scouts
• Automatically send out event reminders
• Set or request items for your Scouts (or their parents) to bring to events
• Encourage communication among Scouts with the Forum
• Define events in your calendar once and share them with your Scouts and parents
• Store files, pictures, and video online, and control who has access to them
• Create a public website about your Troop or Den for everyone to see
• Manage payments and billing for your events
• Sell products for fundraising with your own online store

MyScoutLink.com is extremely useful, professional, easy and best of all: it’s free!  Check it out.

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1. Organizing Classroom Events, PTA, Teacher’s Groups, and More – MyClassHelper
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