How to use your website to keep your Scouts or Guides involved over Summer

The summer holidays have already arrived. Some of you may be having your final meetings, along with your AGMs for the adults, or heading off to your final camp of the academic year.

Parents and leaders alike might be wondering how to keep the young ones entertained through six weeks of doing absolutely nothing, with unpredictable weather.

Why not encourage your Scouts or Guides to stay involved with the Group throughout the Summer break which can be productive whilst also keeping them engaged?

Write guest blogs

Allocate each youngster a week in which they can pick a topic to write about or can log their week with what they get up to. You can then use your Latest News page to publish their blogs with images and text.

This would be interesting for other members of the Group to read, and keep up to date with what each other is doing, and perhaps get some inspiration for their own activities throughout the summer.

Publish photo galleries

Similarly to guest blogs, why not encourage your young members to keep a photo diary of their week or a particular activity they take part in? This can be used in collaboration with the guest blogs or news articles.

They could also be used as visual evidence for working towards badges over the Summer.

You could agree that your members could upload their images as a draft before approval by an appropriate adult, or you could upload them yourself via email.

Keep an eye on events

Some Groups might still have the odd meeting, activity or get-together over the Summer. Make sure that your members know what’s going on by getting them to check the events page for any upcoming events they’d like to take part in over the Summer.

If they have any ideas for get-togethers or meet ups over the holidays, you could get them to submit an event for approval!

Research for the website

Why not get your Scouts or Guides to carry out a research task over the Summer to help their Section, Unit, Group or even their District or County?

You could assign a team of members a page each for which they have to carry out research to populate the website pages such as About, Our History, or What Scouts Do etc.

This encourages teamwork, as well as getting them involved in a project that they’ll be able to watch come together and will benefit them too.

Use your members area for activity sheets, ideas and task lists

You can upload plenty of documents such as activity sheets, task lists and boredom buster ideas to the website with the use of our bespoke buttons, buckets and tables to organise them in a way that’s neat and easily accessible.

You can also make this page password protected so that only members from your Group who have this password can access it, which makes it even easier for you to comply with privacy concerns.

Find out more about Scout Group websites here