4 ways to overhaul your Scouts website as lockdown lifts

Now that the readiness levels for face to face Scouting across the UK have moved to amber, yellow and green, Scout Groups, Districts and Counties are planning their next steps forward when they return in September.

Readiness levels:

• England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland – YELLOW
• Isle of Man, Guernsey, Jersey, and Gibraltar – GREEN
• British Scouting Overseas (BSO) – VARIES

Using your website is a great way to show your members and volunteers that Scouting is opening back up. We’ve rounded up a selection of tools which you can implement across your website to communicate the latest news and information to existing or prospective members and volunteers.

Site Notice

The first thing users will come across when visiting your website is a site notice along the top of their browser window. This feature is useful for important notices, messages and updates such as The Scouts’ Coronavirus response. Lots of Groups also use it to draw attention to fundraising efforts, latest news stories or to further publicise an event.

You can add this to your website by going to your WordPress dashboard > Site Options > Site Notice. Here you can add a short message along with a link button to the page of your choice.

Communicate any important messages to your website users via the site notice.

Interactive Group Finder

Districts and Counties who have been with us a while might already be familiar with our Group Finder feature. This enables users to search for the Groups nearest to them by entering their postcode on the homepage.

We’ve recently improved this feature by making each Group clickable so that your website users can view further information about each of their nearest Groups to help them make a decision on which is best for them.

To add further information to your Groups listing, go to your WordPress dashboard, Groups and enter any text in the large text space when you click on each Group where you would normally just enter the postcode. You can then format the text how you normally would any other page.

Meet the Team – Departments

Many Groups, Districts and Counties use the Teams tool to display their leadership team which helps your members and volunteers get to know each other better. You can add their name, role, a short biography and an image.

More recently however, we’ve also developed a Teams tool where you can also categorise your members by department so you can separate them by Section e.g. Beavers, Cubs Scouts and then use your regular Teams tool for an Executive Committee page for example.

This allows you to display even more team members and display them in a more organised manner, making for easy navigation and improved user experience. The Teams and Teams – Departments can be found in Site Options.

Members on your Team page can easily be contacted via email, and you can add a short biography and image to allow your users to get to know your team better.

Nation Branding

All of our websites are available in the Scout branded colours for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. All of the key areas of your website can be adjusted to be on brand with your countries branding, improving your Group, District or County identity.

Simply let our team know which country your organisation is a part of and we will be able to update the website for you.