The Scouts Skills for Life: One Year On

This time last year, The Scout Association had just announced the Skills for Life rebrand that would be both its offline strategy and online identity for the next five years, until 2023.

The Skills for Life digital-first branding aims to prepare even more young people with the skills to succeed in life and to have a positive impact on society at the same time.

Since then, hundreds of Scout Groups, Districts, Counties & Regions have approached us or returned to us to develop their new on-brand website in line with the new Scouting guidelines. These new guidelines as set out by The Scout Association include the new modernised logo, colours, font and messaging – view them here.

The effect of Skills for Life

One of the main goals of the Skills for Life initiative was to expel any out-dated and pre-conceived notions that the public may have had about Scouting and it’s impact on the community whilst still maintaining strong links to it’s heritage.

The rebrand that takes The Scout Association through to 2023, aims to promote growth and to have a lasting impact on the young people involved by being more inclusive, focusing on current and relevant topics that affect Scouts in their day-to-day life and allowing them to shape their own experiences.

As The Scouts look back on the previous 12 months, UK Chief Commissioner, Tim Kidd says that overall membership has already grown over the past year, including a rise of 1.2% of leader enrolment, a 2.8% increase in Young Leaders and the amount of girls aged 6-18 rising by 4%.

How it will continue to improve Scouting

When The Scout Association announced the rebrand, they said that 44% of parents were more likely to volunteer after seeing the new materials.

By 2023, The Scout Association predicts that they’ll have 10,000 more adult volunteers and 50,000 more young people involved in Scouts.

They also aim to have introduced Scouting into 500 more areas of deprivation in order to reach young people who could “benefit the most” and have already opened more units in less-advantaged areas over the past year.

How we adopted the Skills for Life branding

At the same time as evolving our design and development of the sites to incorporate the new visual identity, we also took into consideration feedback from all of the Scout Groups, Districts, Counties, Regions and Campsites that we’ve worked with over the past few years to find out how we could benefit you going forward and how to make Scouting more accessible for your local young people.

Brand new functionality such as OSM and Google Calendar integration, to keep track of your events, programme and other important information all in one place, has been developed by our expert team of developers.

Our customisable Joining and Contact forms for young people and adult volunteers, along with Side-Wide Search Tool and Group Finder functionality, have all helped with increasing recruitment of local members and has improved communication with existing members, parents and volunteers.

You can also now take bookings for adult training events at District level and above, directly through your site, minimising the steps needed to process a booking request and in turn, automating the whole process.

If that’s not enough new functionality for you, our eCommerce Shop feature has also been refined to include more accepted payment methods, an improved system and has a whole new look.

Find out more about Scout Group websites here