An update to our pilot partnership with OSM

After months of good intentions and hard work from both organisations negotiations have ended between Scouts and Online Youth Manager, who run Online Scout Manager (OSM).

The discussions have been going on since July last year. They’ve involved senior staff and volunteers who’ve decades of experience working with technology suppliers. Both organisations engaged expert legal advisors to try to help us negotiate an agreement, but unfortunately we weren’t able to find mutually acceptable terms that worked for both parties. As you’d expect, the details of the discussions are commercially confidential and so reasonably cannot be shared. 

We think there are a number of benefits, which include:

• having one, national view of our youth membership will give us a real time view of our membership rather than the snapshot through our annual Census;
• the ability to draw insights from the data which helps us understand our collective impact on young people’s lives and communicate this to decision-makers; and
• we’ll be able to better fulfil our obligations to statutory agencies when dealing with safety and safeguarding matters.

We’re not aware of any other youth organisation, or federated organisation similar to our scale and complexity, that doesn’t have this understanding of their members and therefore we see this as critical to our future success.

You should continue using your current arrangements for managing young people’s data. There’s no need for you to make any changes and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t progress with your plans.

Previously we asked new Squirrel Dreys to use OSM since it helps us give the best support for the Squirrels roll out from a national perspective. The new section is a big success. That’s partly because various funding bodies supported the initial pilots and quality research into the benefits and impact of Squirrels on young people’s lives. Understandably, and as part of our agreements with those funders, they want to see the benefits delivered through Squirrels Dreys, and we need ways to draw insights – OSM was one of those.

• If you’re a Squirrel leader already using OSM there’ll be no change to the functionality you use and you can continue using OSM. The main change is TSA are now no longer joint data controllers of the information you've provided, and can no longer access the data provided. This does mean that nationally, we can’t draw insights from the data to support the reporting on benefits to funders directly from OSM and we'll need to rely on individual Dreys providing us with anonymised data to support our statistical analysis. If you need any extra help or have queries using OSM, you should contact the OSM team directly through the usual channels, not the Information Centre please, as they simply can’t assist with specific OSM queries.

• If you’re a Squirrel leader who wants to sign up to OSM you’ll soon be able to register for OSM in the normal way, as other Sections do. If you need any extra help or have queries using OSM, you should contact the OSM team directly through the usual channels, not the Information Centre please, as they simply can’t assist with specific OSM queries.

As part of the Pilot Partnership with OSM there was a data sharing agreement between your Group and Scouts. That agreement has now come to an end. We’re talking to the OSM team about the future of linked services like the automated census data load and will update when there’s news to share.  

We’ll be doing a detailed review of possible options to make sure we make the right choices to enable the local and national management of youth data. This phase will involve intensively listening to volunteers to be clear on how we can make their lives easier, and what a joined up platform for managing youth and adult data could do for us.

We’ll absolutely need your help with that work, involving section leaders specifically, so we can focus on really understanding needs, and how we can best support all our volunteers with moving across to a new system.

We'll come back with more details about how this will work. In the meantime, you should continue using your current arrangements for managing young people’s data.

Our immediate focus is delivering an excellent, easy to use adult membership solution by spring 2023. We would get to working on a national youth membership solution after this time.

We’ll design ways to engage with section leaders and those managing youth data locally to hear directly from the people who’ll use the new system, to make sure we capture the range of needs. We’ll also need to engage users along the way which is key to making sure the new system fully meets section leaders’ needs.

We have a wide range of experts on our Digital Transformation Programme Board to help us drive our digital work. They oversee the project boards for membership systems and our new learning system. Our board members include the former Chief Information Officer of a global business, the Chair of the Charity Digital Code of Practice, the Chief Technology Officer of a major government department and several other prominent digital practitioners, alongside experienced members from across the movement.

Members also include section leaders and local managers, they bring broad digital project experience from across industry, government and charity organisations. We have a staff team full of digital and technology experts, led by a sector award winning Chief Digital Officer, you can meet the staff team. Both our staff and volunteer teams are already working on the transformation of the volunteer experience to provide best in class digital tools. 

Ensuring that volunteers have easy-to-use tools to help with essential tasks is a key part of improving the volunteer experience in our Skills for Life Strategy. The next stage of our discovery work will help us to understand the needs of local volunteers and how a new system might give the tools needed.