We’d really like to use TroopTrack to manage people who may participate in Troop activities but who are not necessarily an active scout or registered adult. Currently, I’m doing this by putting them into an alumni and friends patrol, and restricting use of most of the standard magic mailing lists. TroopTrack decides that a youth is automatically a scout.
As an example, we have a former scout who occasionally participates in local events as a guest. The “registered” tag on his profile is not checked, but he’s still automagically a scout. I’d love to see that tag be the part that decides that a youth is also a scout.
Another example is scouts who have aged out. They sometime come back in town (vacation from college) and we want to be able to communicate with them. The alumni patrol works for them. But mostly I’d like to not include them with the adults mailing list and I can’t except to restrict that list (which is what I do).
The same is true for “friends” of our troop. Most of these are parents and family members of scouts who have aged out. I don’t want to deactivate them because then they completely disappear and I can’t manage them at all. But a flag or dropdown in the profile page to categorize them would be useful so that they don’t get emails sent to “adult” or “parent”.
I’ve already filed a bug about how parent doesn’t really work right, adult siblings of scouts (typically a former scout who is now an alumni) get put into the parents category. Oops.
I think part of the confusion for me is that “member” means two different things. I think of it as being a member of our troop: parent, adult leader, scout. TroopTrack things of it as anyone with an profile. I really don’t like that definition
I like the idea of an Alumni Patrol. I would want it excluded from the “everyone” magic mailing list too so they don’t get every email on every event / troop blast / etc…
Count me in on this one! I’d love to have the ability to email alumni even though they may or may not be invited to an event. Right now, we are emailing the everyone group, and including our former bulk email address (which I have to clean up).
We have several former members that like receiving emails about the troop just so they can see what we are up to. They do not attend our events. It would be nice to invite them to special events like CoH.
@rbroberts- Great idea creating the alumni patrol! How did you create them in TT? Did you just add them, but not create an account? I thought about doing that, but didn’t want to clutter up the current membership.
Right now our alumni patrol is just recently aged out scouts who were already in TroopTrack. So I didn’t add anyone, I just moved them around after they aged out. A few of them are actually still scout age, but they dropped out for various reasons. That’s why the adult, parent, and scout mailing lists had to be restricted. The alumni under 18 show up in scouts, those over 18 show up in either parents (due to a TT bug) or adults.
Similarly, the friends patrol is mostly the alumni family members. They were already in TT, I just moved them into a patrol as the only way to get them into a mailing list.
I also would love to see this. I would also like to be able to exclude categories from the Turbonet tools so we stop seeing “fix it” for parents we list who are not BSA members
You could create an “Active” tag, then create another magic list for all Active people. Registered might not work because active parents are not necessarily registered. We created an Eagle patrol for those no longer active but reached Eagle - we don’t want to lose touch with them. Another group of people we have is the ‘External’ patrol which has the District Exec and others from outside the troop (primarily to hold contact info and to email). We also have the problem with siblings becoming ‘parents’.
Definitely interested in this ability. We have several members that we do not want to deactivate (like the Alumni concept) but who do not want to get emails with every event, reminder, and communication tagged to Scouts, Parents, etc.
If you are going to add this, you may as well add the ability to create arbitrarily-named groups/tags, and tag people with membership in those groups. Then you could do things like tag a subset of your members with “OA” and send an email only to OA members.
Family Member is another good category… we have non-scout family members (siblings)who may attend family events… we want to have all register, not just the scouts or adults.
Great idea (see also the Alumni Group thread). In particular, a way to manage Alumni for special events and fundraising. I have gotten this question from several units in our district.
