I’m a Scouter raising Scouts. Our family has been active in Scouts for many years – in Cub Scouts and Scouts BSA.
I’ve created a lot of content for our Pack and Troops over the years, particularly during the pandemic years. I am finding that I share much of the same content with folks. This page provides a central, public place to point folks.
There are four sections to this page:
Meeting & Merit Badge Content
Below is a curated collection of content that I share most often with other Scouters:
- Cub Scout Pack Flag Ceremony (PDF; PowerPoint)
This is a compact, one-page Flag Ceremony that I built for my Cub Scout Den. The ceremony is simplified and Cub-friendly, it’s easy to skim, and it’s compact. Everything is on one sheet and caller instructions are highlighted in yellow. - Building a Lego scout neckerchief slide (Video)
This video is a step-by-step introduction to build a neckerchief slide for your Scouts BSA uniform. I originally created this video for my Cub Scout pack’s Scouting at Home event.
Additionally, I have started as a merit badge counsellor – my content is below. The approach mixes in-person content and offline reference material into one place:
- Environmental Science Merit Badge (2024 requirements)
Presentation (PDF; PowerPoint) | Agenda (Word)
This was my first merit badge session. It was run as part of our Troops ‘Merit Badge Mondays’ series in the Fall of 2024 – running October through January.
Promotional Flyers
Following the Pandemic, our Cub Scout pack changed up our marketing tactics to boost membership.
One effective tactic was one-page marketing sheets (‘flyers’) that we ran in for local Elementary School that used the Peachjar service. These advertisements have a few elements that are worth calling out:
- They focus on ‘selling the Scouting program.’ In particular, you will notice that we center on how the program helps to grow Youth into citizens.
- Imagery has a strong presence – it’s active and it’s outside. This helps separate the flyer from the usual inside/STEM-focused content that they likely see in school advertisements.
- These sheets use a Call-To-Action (‘CTA’) to attend a virtual Q+A session for interested parents. The CTA can/will vary depending on where we are in the year – they can also point towards a Pack Meeting of interest to new families.
- We limited variance across the flyers. The language and format remained very constant. We only changed two things regularly – the CTA (of course!) and we updated the image each run.
- Fall 2021 (PDF)
We ran this just after the Pandemic, with a focus on the outdoors and inclusion of masks - Fall 2023 (PDF)
This one used imagery from BSA’s #AdventureOn campaign and pulled a focus on putting the Outing in Scouting.
Each of the flyers makes use of the imagery, colors, and fonts from the Scouting America Brand Center. I also sent these to my local Council for review before submitting them. The goal of these PDFs is to align with – and reinforce – messaging coming from your local Council and from National.
Scouts BSA PowerPoint Template
I also created a PowerPoint slide template to help me prepare content for use with our PLC and Merit Badge sessions, which is used in the slide decks above. I’ve been asked for the template a couple of times since presenting with it, and so I am sharing it here for folks. I hope you find it useful!
I wanted something simple for presentation and/or handouts – the slide deck has four types of slides based on two groupings
- Light + Dark themes – The template includes two themes within it, both using a green background and a Scouting America logo and landscape along the bottom:
- The light green theme is ideal for when you will be presenting in a bright room, or you want to optimize on using the slides as handouts
- The dark green theme is ideal for a room that is going to be dark or dim
- Titling for merit badge presentations or general Scouting content – Each layout has a header option using either the Scouting America logo or a merit badge image.
The template includes most of the common layouts that you could expect to need – title slides, closing/thank you slides, one column, two column, and two column with headers.
If you have feedback on the slides, let me know.