PENDING: Differentiating Scouts and Siblings

Ideas
1

Since we now need to have medical forms and all for all people attending events, which is a good idea anyway…

Currently, when we add a child family member into a household, there is only an option to select whether the member is only a Youth or not.

There should be an option, a check box would be just fine…

When selecting Youth, the system ASSUMES that the member is a Scout.
There needs to be a second option to allow you to specify if the member is a Scout or
sibling.

This would be also very handy/helpful for invitations, as some events could be (and have been for us in the past) Scout only, Scout and (a) parent(s), or a whole Household level thing.

This way RSVPs can be better managed, knowing who is attending, not just Scout and a youth guest, as it is now, but we can see if medicals are in the system or not… etc.

My $0.02…

10 Likes
2

Hi @DonaldFox,

Thanks for using the TroopTrack Community!

This actually sounds like a very helpful feature. Let’s get some more support from the Community and then our developers may consider adding it as a feature.

Thank you for helping to make TroopTrack a better place!

3

I’ll add that this is not the only assumption TT makes. While it’s generally helpful to have TT make a default categorization, it sometimes gets this wrong. See also my request about things like alumni and friends and the bug I posted about how an aged out scout gets assigned the role of “parent” if they have have a sibling still in the troop. All of those really need to be under user control with TT making an initial default assignment.

1 Like
4

Here’s another little tidbit.

Create a household when adding a scout.
Add the parent.
Add another household member with a youth appropriate date of birth. Save it.
Edit the second just added household member, checking the box for youth. Save it.
View the scouts’ record. Click on the little edit symbol for household.
Delete the parent of the household.
Edit the non scout remaining household person. Uncheck youth. Save record.

View den. The ex-youth is now listed as an adult, not a parent, even though there is still an age in the system as a youth.

Interesting, eh?

2 Likes
5

Oh nice idea on the household member idea for siblings.

It would be nice to just add them as a non-Scout member (sister, grandparent, little brother,)

Bonus effects include the following:

Permission slips can be printed.
Can RSVP and have costs breakouts against it.
Can eventually promote them into Scouts (opposite of aging out or deactivating).
Better tracking for service hours. Families often conscript the siblings anyway and our Council wants to know about ALL service hours associated with the Troop, not just Scouts.
Better Tracking for attendance.

6

AND for service hour reporting, etc…

1 Like
7

It’s been a while…
Any followup to this idea?

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8

Good morning. This idea needs to get more support before we can add it to the list.

Thanks!

9

Respectfully, this isn’t exactly a community support issue.

It is in fact a Cub Scouting requirement from National… We have to track all this.

By not being inclusive, we Packs are being forced to use 2 completely separate systems of record keeping. This is hardly efficient, far from it actually…And overly time consuming.

Heck. Adding this support will be a selling point for the TT product… Not a hindrance.

Again, my $0.02… Thanks!

1 Like
10

Thank you for requesting this, but community support tells us whether or not this would be useful to a lot of people.

This wouldn’t be just a simple checkbox, we would have to create a whole new type of user in the system and teach the system how to treat that new “sibling” user (including RSVP, permission slips, promoting, service house, etc). This is a major feature. Before we can commit to this, we need to know that it’s not just going to be 2 or 3 people using it.

Right now you can just treat siblings like scouts. You seem to want to have them as scouts without calling them scouts. Why not just have them as scouts in a siblings den or something?

11

It seems like one of the problems is terminology in TT.

Youth should not automatically be listed as “scouts”. Just like adults should not automatically be listed as “parents” just because they are part of a household that has a youth.

There are some incorrect assumptions in handling a person’s status.

It may be a new feature, but the fact is, at some point you need to find time to bite the bullet and redo you categorization of users. There are youth and adults, which are age-based. But then there is also registration status, which is orthogonal to age.

I would also argue that the TT idea of an “active” user is wrong from a functional standpoint. My idea of active for a youth is that they are registered, i.e., still on the charter. Parent inherit being active from their children. Active for me is a functional status: active members get notifications and invitations. That’s the point of one of my other requests dealing with alumni and “friends” of the troop. I would distinguish active, inactive, archived (what you currently do when deactivated), and deleted (well, we really don’t have to distinguish those…they’re just gone).

There are other things which are also functional. I’d argue that scouts vs siblings is really not the right designation. For Cub Scouts, the siblings is a non-registered but trackable (from a participation standpoint) youth.

My day job is as a software designer, so it’s hard for me to not think in terms of implementation. I see a youth vs adult state that is determined by age. I see a “get’s all notices” vs “must be explicitly included” (what I call active vs inactive). I see a registered vs not-registered. I can add other binary states, too, but they get less “obvious” and more along the lines of things I see I could use (like alumni status and friend status). Most of these should not be brand new types of users, but functional behaviors for users.

Yes, it’s a lot of work and I hate that I’m starting to sound like I’m lecturing (gah!), but it really does seem to me that this one feature (scouts vs siblings) is just a specific instance of a more general problem that has come up in several different discussions (including the mailing lists, alumni, and friends).

3 Likes
12

After reading this topic through the October 3 suggestion to use a “siblings” den, I tried it.

All of my “siblings” are marked Youth in Basic Info and NOT marked Registered Member in Registration Info. Essentially, they are “unregistered youth.” What rbroberts describes as “the sibling[] is a non-registered but trackable (from a participation standpoint) youth.”

The minor improvement in my mind that would make this much more useful is to fix the built-in group definition of “scouts”.

“Scouts” appears to really mean “youth;” it includes unregistered youth. Merely rename “scouts” to “youth” and create a new “scouts” that points to registered youth.

Having implemented a “siblings den,” I do need a “siblings” group since I can select all siblings by selecting the siblings den. The problem is that if I want to assign something to scouts only, there is no group that distinguishes scouts and siblings and I have to invite all of the dens and then un-select the den leaders and lion/tiger adult partners.

If that minor change was made (make the built-in “scouts” group really mean registered youth), I think it would go a long way to making unregistered youth a meaningful category.

13

We’ve tried that solution for last year, what a major headache.

The main issue is… it makes it overly complicated.

By simply being in an unassigned, or even a sibling den, makes them
all still reported by any of the canned advancement reports,
badge books, or even customized reports you may feel like creating.

14

Would those problems not be solved by having those reports recognize the difference between “youth” and “scouts”? Only registered youth (“scouts”) can advance anyway. Customized reports would hopefully be user-selectable for youth vs. scouts.

15

I agree that TT has to do a better job of categorizing the members we add. I should be able to add council members and designate them as such, my district commissioner or council representative, how about an uncle or stepmom.

gio

16

I just had this thought for the same reasons and did a search to find this topic. I see that it has been viewed 654 times but unfortunately people are not necessarily adding their “Like” or posting reply with their “Me to”. I do agree it would make things easier for a Cub Pack using TT to enter Siblings but have them differentiated from Scouts. There are instances where this would be helpful, reports, Internet Advancement screen.

2 Likes
17

We definitely need a sibling option for our troop.

2 Likes
18

Hi Everyone.

Thanks for your feedback on this topic. I agree we need to add the ability to track non-member siblings in TroopTrack. Before I launch into the code, I’d like to explore exactly what this means.

  1. Currently we have only two types of people in TroopTrack: adults and youth. As pointed out above, we assume that everyone who is a youth is an active member, regardless of whether they are registered. This would need to change to at least three possible values: adult, member youth, and non-member youth (NMY).

  2. Non-member youth would not be able to log in.

  3. Non-member youth would have a simple profile with no achievement, leadership, privileges, or vehicles tabs. They would have a participation tab.

  4. Non-member youth would not be able to earn awards

  5. Non-member youth would be excluded from forms throughout TroopTrack that are currently intended for scouts

  6. Leaders will need to be able to de-activate and re-activate NMY.

  7. Leaders will need to be able to convert NMY to member-youth.

  8. Leaders will need to be able to invite NMY to events and track their attendance.

  9. NMY would not have a patrol and would not appear on the Manage Patrols page (aka Manage Units for AHG, Manage Dens for Cub Scouts, and Manage Troops for Girl Scouts).

  10. NMY would not be included in canned reports.

  11. NMY would not appear on the Manage -> User Accounts page

  12. NMY would not have money accounts

  13. A leader would need to be able to track medical forms for NMY

What am I missing?

I know this has been a long time coming. I was reluctant to add this feature to TT3 because it was in need of a major update, but now that the dust is settling I think its time has come.

Thanks!

Dave

2 Likes
19

Dave,

The list is perfect. One restriction may be that a non member youth has to be assigned to one of the current households. The non member youth must be a sibling, not just a friend.

Chuck

1 Like
20

Shouldn’t the reverse of #7 above is also true? That is, member-youth should be able to be converted to NMY. For example, a cub scout aging out but a younger sibling is still active (so the household can’t be deactivated)

1 Like