06/27/2016
From the Coweta DE
Sign Up process happing this Fall. If you missed the Council Kickoff in May, don’t worry because we are having a District Fall Sign Up Night Kickoff on Tuesday, July 12th at 7:00 p.m. at Cornerstone United Methodist Church (2956 Sharpsburg McCollum Rd. Newnan, GA 30265). This will take the place of our Cub Scout breakout at the July Roundtable. I’ve attached the District Kickoff Booklet, which lays out all the details of the plan. I recommend reviewing it with your committee. I think you’ll be enthused to see a fresh, new approach, and we want to be able to support you with the heavy lifting in preparation. If your unit was not at the Council Kickoff, it is mandatory that you have a representation at this meeting. The Sign Up process now involves multiple members of your Pack to hold speaking parts (versus the one presenter before), so it’s important that you have someone there. We recommend you get as many of your leaders there as possible. We will be distributing the School Night Sign Up dates during this meeting.
The main purpose of this new process is to better prepare ourselves to receive new Scouting families this fall. Here is the game plan:
•The Commissioner Staff will be reaching out to each unit to have a Conversation with unit leaders of each pack about the need to gather this information and how it will help them with Sign-Up Night and retention.
•After having a conversation with pack leadership, we will need to get from you the all the info requested on the attached Pack Info Workbook document. This info will be used to ensure your Pack is ready to receive new families and will allow us to make the necessary copies for your sign up night. It is okay for you to fill out your tab on the attached document electronically if that works best for you, but you may have your own files already prepared. That is a good thing. We aren’t asking you to do recreate them or do more work. You can just send us what you already use. The important thing right now is just making sure you have everything on the list confirmed. If you do, that tells us you are prepared to accept new families into an organized unit.
•We are on standby to provide support to those packs that are unable to provide any of this information: ◦Some packs may need help creating a budget so that they know what pack fees they will want to communicate to parents
â—¦Some packs may have leadership challenges and you will want to engage your charter partner and unit commissioner to assist in finding new leadership
â—¦Some packs may need a commissioner to work with them on developing a program calendar for the year
•As you have information compiled: ◦Get it to your Commissioner or me
â—¦You do not need to transfer information from Pack files to our spreadsheet if you have your own
The goal is to have this information compiled for all the packs by July 14th. This is also when we will host our own District Sign Up Night Kickoff, imitating what we did at the Council Kickoff by giving a live demonstration you can experience, along with some key points to discuss afterwards.
Here is some additional background explaining the changes in our sign up process:
We have heard from parents of elementary age children, those involved in Scouting, those who have tried Scouting and left, and those who have never tried Scouting. Our research tells us that we need to take a different approach to bringing in new families, and to our preparation to Fall Recruitment. First, we have dropped the term “Round-Up” and use “Sign-Up Night” so that we are calling something any new parent would understand. Second, we are going to work to provide a more organized and prepared environment for our new families. To create this environment, we want to help by gathering information and then preparing documents, to be given out Sign-Up Night that are specific to your pack. We have learned that this is expected by today’s parents, and we want to meet that expectation.
