Tool bake-off - plus features to cement lead

Ideas
1

I just completed a comparison of the major scout tools out there for my pack. Scoutbook, Sxout Manager and WebhostCS. Here’s a quick assessment and a couple features that would cement troop tracks domination in my opinion.

Scoutbook - well intended but a hot mess. Confusing navigating their app, horrible calendar, rsvps fire from Scoutbook rather than app. Parents with multiple children always dup behind the scenes but you can’t tell. Hot mess.

Scout manager - showed promise but not as feature rich. RSVP email call to action fell short and that was a big deal. Prob #2 in rank.

TroopWebhostCS - seems to have good traction among troops. It’s mentally exhausting. Way too much going on and the user experience is super dated. Parent interface is equally bad. Deal breaker - event rsvps work with MS Outlook and not gmail. Super dated. Expense receipts was the only feature i noticed missing in TT if you want to check that box.

TroopTrack - rock star interface and very close to fully featured vs competitors. Household feature is awesome as are its handling of newsletter and money accounts. RSVPs land in the site/app appropriately which is super important.

A couple opportunities to cement its lead

  • minor one. App occasionally opens to a blank screen. Force close and restart fixes it but something that happens enough that I need to share with parents how to handle.
  • Add biometrics and/or make it easy to login. Super important
  • big one. only reason I’m still using Scoutbook in parallel, event rsvps in scoutbook allow you to custom set reminder frequency and as many as you like. (Eg 14 days, 7 days, 3 day, etc). I can load the hopper there and it’s set it and forget it - and can vary based on event. In TT, we get ONE reminder date. Big gap. Please enhance to create reminder flex so i can sunset Scoutbook on my end.
  • creative one. Not only am I trying to get rid of Scoutbook but also our external website. TT is helpful with the site page features. One thing I do on my current custom site is have a blog where I’ll post a couple pictures from recent events and share some upcoming activities. I keep this public as it’s a great recruiting tool for those considering joining the pack. They can scan the blog and see all the fun. For members TT accomplishes this with the announcement feature which works great. My feature ask is to add a “public” announcement feature. If we tag an announcement “public”, it then appears blog style on our public site along with being picked up in the newsletter as usual. (Perhaps with a different expiration date). This would be amazing as it allows us to leverage the same content for member comm and external recruiting.

Overall, great work by the developers here. You’ve got a great product with a ton of potential.

1 Like
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I second more flexibility in reminders on calendar events!

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If i’m force ranking, the Scoutbook reminder like feature is top as I can’t sunset Scoutbook use till we have that within TT.

I would add a new #2. Trying to use the newsletter, and there’s a big gap in how it does event reminders there. In newsletter settings “show events for next 7 (or 30) days” checkbox shows events that the recipient has RSVP’ed for. That’s fine. The ask is “include events that recipient is not invited to” checkbox should be replaced with “include events that the recipient has not RESPONDED to”. This would bring in events (within 30 days) that users are invited to but have not responded to. This is WAY more useful as these are the events we want to provide visibility to - for them to review and take action (not events they’re not invited to - likely for other dens).

@dave and team have done a great job evolving this product. It helps immensely to let us focus more on the scouts and less on the admin/comm side.