The Program Problem

The work of getting families to feel included and engaged is an art. A rare one. Yet it is implicitly expected of every adult volunteer, whether they have the skill or not.

The entire Scouting program lives or dies on the first 90 days a new family spends inside a Cub Scout pack¹. Most kids who end up in Scouts BSA, Venturing, or Sea Scouts came up through Cubs. Everything downstream depends on what happens here. Scouting America's own membership leadership has called it “pivotal.”

The volunteer role most directly responsible for the family experience is the New Member Coordinator. It barely exists. Only 15% of packs even have one². The marketing-grade skill the role needs is also rare: only about 2.5% of US adults have any professional marketing experience at all³.

And the volunteers who are holding the role can't easily get trained up for it. The chart above is what an unfunded advertising agency looks like. The job descriptions⁴ hand the volunteer real comms work (“promote through social media,” “have open communications with families”) and assume it's easy. Doing it well takes the same craft a marketing professional spends a career on.

Scouting America runs a National Marketing Bootcamp because some volunteers self-identify that the elementary training isn't enough and go looking for more. But the bootcamp is the upper rung of a thin ladder, found only by the people who already know what they're missing. The bootcamp's own promotional copy opens with a question that doubles as an institutional confession.

“Are you excited about Scouting but have little marketing experience to share your enthusiasm?”

I took the bootcamp. The trainers are real marketers; the material is what you can teach a beginner in two hours. But the art has to be practiced year-round, with every family in the pack, at a level two hours can't cover.

Teaching Scouting America's 628,000 adult volunteers⁵ the art of customer retention marketing is not feasible. Software has to do the work the volunteer can't.

See what that looks like →

1. 1.Sean Magennis, EVP of Membership Engagement, Scouting America: “The first 90 days in the Cub Scout journey is pivotal for us. If your child gets a wonderful experience, they stay longer.” Quoted in: How Scouting America plans to engage and equip volunteers for membership growth. On Scouting. March 10, 2026. On Scouting / Scouting America official blog ↩
2. 2.Scouting America's New Member Coordinator recognition program set 15% of registered units (with at least one NMC who completed the Welcome module) as the district achievement benchmark. Applied to an estimated ~22,000 Cub Scout packs nationally (roughly half of BSA's ~40,000 total units), that yields ~3,300 NMCs. Scouting Wire NMC resources page, accessed 2026. Scouting America / Scouting Wire ↩
3. 3.US workforce baseline. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics + Census American Community Survey lifetime-experience data place adults with professional marketing, advertising, or PR work history at roughly 2.5% of the adult population. Applied to volunteer rosters as a baseline assumption; NMC self-selection likely lifts it modestly but not into a different order of magnitude. BLS OEWS + Census ACS ↩
4. 4.The Unit's New Member Coordinators official position description, BSA / ScoutingWire, 2017. Lists comms duties including “promote Scouting benefits through social media and other avenues of communication,” “appeal to potential youth members and their families through well-designed and widely-distributed invitations shared through electronic media, handouts, and personal contacts,” and “develop a unit welcome packet, electronically and/or in print.” The Den Leader and Cubmaster descriptions add “have open communications with den families” and “maintain good relationships with parents.” In every case, comms appears as a duty to perform, not a craft to develop. Scouting America (New Member Coordinator Position Description, 2017) ↩
5. 5.Scouting America About page. scouting.org/about/. Accessed May 2026. Note: the April 2025 Scouting Newsroom Report to the Nation press release cites 477,000; the About page figure of 628,000 is cited most widely in external coverage and is used here. Scouting America ↩