Exporting Badge Records from OSM

What you are exporting#

Your members have earned their badges — and that history should come with them. OSM lets you download badge data so completed badges and requirement progress can be brought into Scoutworks.

Badge data in OSM is organised by section and by badge category, so you will download a few files. The badge categories are:

• Activity badges
• Challenge badges
• Staged badges
• Core badges

You download from each badge-category screen, per section. Treat the steps below as a guide and check them against your own OSM screen, as the exact wording can vary.

OSM exports the section a member is in today#

This is the part that catches people out. When you download badges for your Scouts, you get what those young people have earned as Scouts. Their Cubs, Beavers and Squirrels records sit in those sections in OSM, and they are separate downloads.

So a Scout who joined as a Squirrel has four sections' worth of history, and only one of them is in the export you have just taken.

You do not have to stop at the current section. If you want a complete record, switch OSM to each earlier section the young person was in and export from there too. Scoutworks records every badge against the section it was earned in, so nothing collides and nothing overwrites: a Scout keeps the Chief Scout's Silver they earned as a Cub, sitting alongside the badges they are working on now.

Staged Activity badges are the exception. Swimmer, Nights Away, Hikes Away and the rest already span every age group, so a single export carries a young person's whole history for them. You only need to take those once.

How to export (per section, per category)#

For each section, and within each badge category:

1. Open the badge-category screen in OSM (for example, the Challenge badges screen for your Cubs).
2. Choose the option to download the badge data.
3. OSM produces an Excel (.xlsx) workbook with multiple sheets — roughly one sheet per badge.

Repeat for each category you use, and for each section — including any earlier sections your members have moved up from.

A note on "occurrences"#

Some badges are count-based rather than tick-box — for example, nights away, where what matters is how many you have done. OSM records these as occurrences. Those counts come across in the export, so your members keep credit for what they have achieved.

Scoutworks reads the Total column for these badges. That is OSM's own running total and it already includes anything recorded before the group started using OSM, so you don't need to add the two figures together yourself.

Activity badges need Silver or above#

Exporting Activity badges relies on OSM's paid data export, which is available on Silver and Gold plans but not on the free Bronze plan. If you only have Bronze and you need Activity badges, you can upgrade a section to Silver for the month you migrate, use OSM's GDPR data download, or ask OSM support for help. Challenge, Staged and Core badges may behave differently depending on your plan, so check what you can see in your own account.

Bringing badges into Scoutworks#

Scoutworks imports badges separately from members. Upload every export you have — all four badge categories, and every section you took them from — review a single preview of what will change, then import. Each file carries its own section, and you can correct it before anything is written. Names in your export are matched to your Scoutworks members, and any match you resolve by hand is remembered for later imports.

• Importing all your OSM badges at once — the full walkthrough, step by step.
• How badge tracking works — how badges and requirements fit together in Scoutworks.

What's next#

• Exporting your waiting list from OSM
• Moving from OSM to Scoutworks — the full checklist.