Ask the Expert: How to Connect with Your Scout

Connections have evolved. Over 25 years ago, the first mobile text message was sent from a British engineer to a co-worker on the Short Messaging Service Center Project at the Vodaphone telecommunication company. ¹ Texting was first popular in Europe and eventually was introduced to American customers in 1995. By the start of the Millennium, texting became universally accepted and used by all carriers. Today, over 10 trillion messages are sent daily, but use is declining. Conventional Short Message Service (SMS) or texting is troublesome because SMS is limited to 160 characters. Group texting sometimes results in unwanted messages and sending pictures is unreliable.

How Scouts Are Communicating Today

A revolution is happening today with Messaging Applications. A wide range of apps are available to chat with friends and family, book train tickets, order food for delivery, buy clothes or play the lottery. Some services offer elegant user interfaces to enable group messages, share documents, videos or post pictures. The most popular app worldwide, What’s App, boasts over 700 million active users. In America, the most popular app is Facebook Messenger, used by nearly 60% of smartphone owners. ²

We expect this pattern to accelerate. An astounding 88% of boys aged 13-17 have access to a mobile device at least occasionally during the day, ³ 55% of teens aged 13-17 text with friends daily ⁴ and we know they send an average of 60 text messages per day. ⁵ Among the youngest in this age group, 12-13 year olds, over 80% of boys use social networking sites to post messages. ⁶ With this momentum in the use of sophisticated messaging applications in America, it’s time for parents to consider Scoutbook as the go-to social network platform for your Scouting family.

Using Scoutbook to Get Connected

Scoutbook is much more than a messaging tool. It now has over 673,000 connected users. During the month of December 2015, 1.8 million messages were sent connecting 9,000 units and 255,000 youth. Scoutbook is a property of the Boy Scouts of America and access is by user name and password for security. Parent(s) or a designated unit leader receive a copy of all messages sent to youth with whom they are connected – protection for your son.

Among the benefits Scoutbook offers to the parent and Scout: ⁷

• Ease of scheduling events, day camps and all types of meetings
• Reminders from unit leaders (items to buy, bring to a campout, etc)
• Very low cost, approximately $1 per Scout per year
• Access to hundreds of news stories, videos and pictures from other councils and scouts worldwide
• Advancement tracking
• References such as Scout Oath, Scout Law and Cub Scout Motto, as well as all the basics of Scouting, Faith and Duty to God sections
• Messaging

We started this blog discussing the explosion in messaging. We acknowledge that our kids are using sophisticated messaging services. Let’s end it with a testimonial from Tim T. about Scoutbook.

Join Scoutbook today! Learn more at www.scoutbook.com.

References:

1. http://gizmodo.com/5965121/the-first-text-message-was-sent-20-years-ago-today

2. Comscore Mobile Metrix. Top 15 Smartphone Apps Total US Smartphone Mobile Media Users, age 18+” July 2015 “

3. Forrester Research Consumer Technographics North American Youth Survey, 2014. N=4,517 aged 12-17 years old

4. Pew Internet Research: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/08/06/teens-technology-and-friendships/2015-08-06_teens-and-friendships_0-02/

5. http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-number-of-texts-sent-2013-3

6. Forrester Research Consumer Technographics North American Youth Survey, 2014. N=4,517 aged 12-17 years old

7. BSA internal Scoutbook market facts