Thinking back on The Great Indoors

The summer’s end is always a good moment to look back. It’s a moment to reflect on the things we’ve achieved as a family of Scouts, during this, one of the most turbulent times in our history. Back in the spring, it would have been so easy to simply close down, switch off and forget about Scouts until the crisis had passed. But we didn’t. It’s not in our nature as Scouts. We’re naturally go-getters, doers and helper-outers. We prefer to look on the bright side and we always look for ways to help others and make a difference.
Instead of shutting down, we changed. In the best spirit of our movement, we evolved to meet the new challenges and conditions. When we couldn’t meet face to face, we switched to Zoom. When we couldn’t get into the great outdoors, we made #TheGreatIndoors all our own.

How we all played our part

And when I look back on this extraordinary spring and summer, one of the best and brightest things that strikes me is how we all played our part. Every Scout, every volunteer and member of the staff team threw themselves into one amazing team effort. And when we do things together, they’re always so much better than when we go it alone.

Let’s wind the clock back to 17 March, if we can bear it. The mood music was grim. The cases of COVID-19 were rising, the schools were closing and face to face meetings were suspended. Lockdown. How could we carry on offering those skills for life in these new and strange circumstances?

This is where the inspiration for the Great Indoors came from. We wanted to do something positive for young people, suddenly separated from their friends, leaders and teachers. We also wanted to support families in the totally unfamiliar position of being stuck inside together 24/7 with little or no experience of home schooling. We knew we had hundreds of activities we’d developed for our programme planning tools. We heard your feedback and we knew we needed to make these activities work in the context of online or socially distanced delivery quickly. That said, with some simple changes, we made many of them suitable to be used at home. And of course we wanted to support Scouts and volunteers too – making it easy for them to find great activities with a minimum of fuss.

Working together

A volunteer and staff team worked with heroic energy to pull together the Great Indoors website. If we were to boil it down to three key aims, we wanted first to engage families outside Scouts, second, we wanted to share our skills for life message as widely as possible, and finally, of course, we wanted to support Scouts and volunteers. There was something else too – we saw an opportunity to support society in a unique way – to help with learning at home.

Supporting over 500,000 families

You probably know what happened next. It swept the nation. Scout Ambassador, Tim Peake, kicked us off in fine style with a special feature on BBC’s The One Show, making lolly-stick catapults and goodness knows what else from his kitchen with his children. He even awarded a Cub Scout from Sheffield her Astronomy badge through the magic of Zoom. Inspired by what they’d seen, pretty soon we had nearly 500,000 families using our site. And of course it was all made possible through the power of digital, using new tools and new ways of working. We were changing the way we delivered our programmes, but also changing the way we worked as a team too.

Reaching new and different people

So let’s take a look at the numbers – and they are quite simply mindboggling. Our hashtags were seen over 40,000,000 times, we had 4 million impressions on our social channels, and some 4,400 people signed up for more activities and updates. Basically, anything with a four in it…

The media numbers were even bigger still, with over 1,000 pieces of coverage since March, seen by 37.5 million here in the UK, and 396 million people around the world. In fact, it would almost be easier to count the people who hadn’t heard about it. We appeared on all the BBC’s flagship shows from Breakfast to Newsround.

Thinking differently

One of the best things about The Great Indoors was how it inspired us to innovate. A great example of this was the Great Indoors Staged Activity Badge – the first of its kind to be available to young people outside Scouts. With nine activities from practical and creative skills, to community engagement and nights away, it was a perfect introduction to our balanced programme. Over 9,000 of these badges have already been sent out by the Scout Store team, which is truly fantastic.

Then who could forget our Hike to the Moon (and back)? Our brilliant Scouts raised over £360,000 for BBC Children in Need and Comic Relief, which, along with badge sales, was match-funded to over £750,000, making it the largest sum ever raised by Scouts in the UK for good causes. A special thank you to our team at Scout Store for the brilliant badges and other materials to support these initiatives.

It’s not the same without a good badge is it?

Equally brilliant was #CareForCareHomes, with Scouts decorating ‘kindness rocks,’ writing cards and letters for residents in homes, to combat loneliness and improve mental wellbeing, which is what we also did to support young people with #Threefor3, which saw us trending on Twitter.

And just when you thought we couldn’t top that, along came The Great Indoors Weekender. Over 120,000 young people from 44 countries got involved, camping at home, making it the largest online camp ever, and possibly even the largest Scout camp in history. Who would have thought that would happen back on 17 March? A special mention must go to our wonderful Scout Adventures team at Great Tower who led the virtual campfire.

Some brilliant support

Let’s not forget, none of this could have happened without a massive amount of support from our volunteer team too. Graeme Hamilton, Kester Sharpe and so many other members of Team UK, as well as countless other brilliant volunteers found time to advise, shape and steer the projects, making sure we kept up the quality and met the needs of young people. It’s been inspiring to see the huge effort from both our staff and our volunteers in a time of great pressure and uncertainty.

Our ambassadors came into their own too, with radio and TV interviews promoting our Great Indoors events and resources. There was one particularly brilliant day when Bear Grylls and Tim Peake appeared together on BBC Breakfast in the morning, with former Chief Scout, Peter Duncan, appearing on a Facebook Live later that same day. We ran nine amazing Facebook Lives with everyone from Dwayne Fields, Tim Peake and Ellie Simmonds to Helen Glover, Ed Stafford and Bear himself. Tim showed us just how tricky it is to tighten a carabiner when wearing a space suit.

Turning a negative into a positive

My reflection on all of this, is that together, we truly turned a negative into a positive. Whether that was negotiating the free Zoom licences, so that over 80% of our groups could run meetings online (over 9,000 meetings have taken place so far) to organising our huge all-member calls, when over 15,000 volunteers joined us. It’s all helped us keep Scouts running – albeit in a new and different way. And there are many new tricks that we have learned that will surely help our Scouting to be even better and more flexible in the future.

Finally then, I’d like to say a very special thank you to each and every volunteer and young person for your kindness and your commitment in these trying times. Together we’ve already done so much – and I know that there will be more challenges yet to come. But as we head carefully back into the great outdoors, I know we’ll never forget all we did in the Great Indoors.