Surveying Your Young Members

Sometimes the people best placed to tell you how a term went are the young people themselves. If your Scouts and Explorers have a My Scouting login, you can send a short survey straight to them — they answer it inside their own portal, and you see the results alongside every other survey. This article covers how to choose young members as your audience, what the "have a login" count means, and the promise that no child is ever emailed.

Before you start#

Surveying young members builds on the main Surveys feature. If you haven't sent a survey before, start with Collecting Feedback with Surveys for the full walkthrough — creating a survey, the four-step wizard, and reading results. This article focuses only on what's different when your audience is young people.

You'll also need your Scouts and Explorers to have a My Scouting login, set up by their parents. A young member without a login can't be sent a survey, because there's nowhere safe to deliver it — see the count below for how Scoutworks makes this clear.

Choosing young members as your audience#

On the Audience step of the survey wizard, alongside the usual cohorts — Parents, Volunteers, Trustees and Young Leaders — you'll find a Young Members option. Choose it to send your survey to the Scouts and Explorers in your group rather than to their parents.

As with parents, you can narrow the audience to particular sections, so you can ask just your Scouts, or just one Explorer unit.

The "X of Y have a login" count#

Only young members with a My Scouting login can receive an in-portal survey. So when you pick Young Members, Scoutworks shows you a clear count for each section — for example, "8 of 14 in Scouts have a login."

That tells you exactly how many young people will actually receive the survey, and how many won't because they don't have a login yet. There are no surprises: the recipient preview always reflects who can genuinely be reached.

How young members answer#

Young members answer the survey inside My Scouting — it appears for them the next time they sign in. They never receive an email, a link, or any message outside the portal. They tap their answer, add anything to a follow-up question if you've included one, and submit, all without leaving the safe space of their own portal.

This is the key difference from surveying parents, who answer from a link in an email. For young people there is no email at any point.

The never-emailed guarantee#

Scoutworks never emails a young member — not for surveys, not for reminders, not for anything. This is built in, not a setting you have to remember to switch on:

• Survey invitations to young members are delivered only inside My Scouting.
• Reminders to finish a survey appear only inside My Scouting.
• A young member's account has no working email address that any message could reach.

So when you survey your young people, you can be confident the survey reaches them in their portal and nowhere else. Everything that needs to reach a parent — anything about cost, consent, or running the group — still goes to the parent as it always has.

Reading the results#

Young-member responses appear in the same results panel as every other survey, with the same ratings, comments and section breakdown. Read them exactly as you'd read a parent survey — the rating shows the mood, and any comments tell you what to do next.

What's next#

• Collecting Feedback with Surveys — the full guide to creating and reading surveys.
• Moderating Youth Voice — let young members suggest activities for their section.
• Giving Your Child Their Own Scouting Login — how parents set up a My Scouting login.