Wired for adventure: An interview with Scouting CDO Lara Burns

'We’re about skills for life'

Asked to think about The Scouts and most of us will call to mind images of bivouacs, woggles and campfires. Tech doesn’t really get a look in.

But in a world that is very much digital, Scouting has to move with the times.

"We're about skills for life, so we need to be teaching young people stuff which fits into the world that they will live in - and the world they will live in, we all know, is going to be completely digital," says CDO Lara Burns when we meet in a busy London coffee shop.

"You can't just block your ears and hope that it will go away, because that's not what's going to happen."

It's fair to say that that sentiment wasn't shared at every level of the organisation when Lara joined in 2019.

"I had like five permanent people and quite a few contractors, but they'd not been managed brilliantly: we were paying quite high day rates, and no one was really quite clear what their output was.

"It's been quite an interesting four and a half years. I've now got a team of nearly fifty people."

The growth has been organic. Lara has won more budget for her team as they have proven their success - though she also admits that she has been lucky to have an executive team that "get" digital.

But even with leadership that are on-board with digital transformation, there can still be pushback.

It's like opening your car bonnet and looking at the engine: most people aren't interested

"The challenge is really putting the business case in to say, ‘We're going to invest, but we're going to invest in all this really boring stuff.' To most non-techy people it's like opening your car bonnet and looking at the car engine: most people aren't interested. It's that classic thing: they're only interested when it goes wrong, and then your CEO is on the phone going, ‘What the hell's going on?'"

That was the situation when it came to making the case for new infrastructure, which was "fairly out of date" when Lara joined. She admits to using what amounted to "basically [cybersecurity] scare tactics" to drum up support and investment, and the need to get online in the pandemic did the rest; Scouting is now (mostly) in the cloud.

"Mostly" is doing a lot of work there; there are two major elements Lara's team is still working hard to modernise.

Switching clunk for agile

First, the experience of the volunteer - the adults who give their time to lead local troops. Removing friction for them is essential, because it will make it easier to recruit more volunteers - and, thus, more Scouts.

"The main focus from a digital point of view is to make the tools easier for volunteers to use, so they take less time doing admin and [can spend] more time with young people. Simple!"

That means a lot of work to replace an old, "clunky" membership system that is "not fit for purpose" with a modern, web-based tool linked to a back-end Dynamics solution. Here volunteers will be able to join, manage their learning and permissions, add permits and much more.

The easiest way to do this is "a cutover or big bang approach," although Lara notes, "we all know how well IT projects that take a big bang approach tend to go..."

To get around this tendency, the team will roll the project out in two phases this summer, with time to iterate and fix errors between them.

We don't have real time data

Once that's in place and working, the team can look to the other, larger project, which has so far remained stubbornly siloed: young members' data.

While data on the young people who make up the Scouting network exists today, it isn't centralised; instead, data is mainly managed locally by Scout groups around the country, using digital management tools for personal data.

The plan is to remove those siloes and build a central data repository.

"Once we have all young people's data stored in real time, it will give us lots of advantages, like giving us real-time insights into young people; both about demographics, but also progress in Scouting: how many badges different groups or areas are getting, what kinds of badges are most popular, how many young people move through Scouting in the different age groups etc.

"Currently we have this data based on an annual data collection Census, but we don't have real time data."

Unlike the new tool for volunteers, which replaces an existing system, the one for young people is being built from the ground up, so the scope can be much wider.

The plan is to add features young members have been demanding and can use themselves, like tracking badge progress, uploading videos as part of their badge work, and talking to other Scouts around the country - and it can all be done over time.

"Because we aren't replacing an existing system, like we are doing for adults, we can design and build in a more iterative way. So, we're going to co-design, build early prototypes and roll out much more iteratively."

The design phase for this new project is scheduled to start in April, beginning with an MVP focusing on core data collection and the features volunteers need to run sessions: rotas, badge progress and communication with parents.

Building and balancing

Building new tools and data stores is exciting, but Lara and her team also have to remember the core of what Scouting is all about.

"Scouts is basically about adventure, being outdoors and [building] skills for life. If you then embed digital too much and people are looking at their screens… Parents often say: ‘We want kids to be away from the screen, not pushing them towards it,' so there's a kind of difficult balancing act there."

Despite what their parents want, tech is ubiquitous now; at some point, you have to accept that young people will be using their phones at Scouts no matter what.

"It's about blending it," says Lara. "Do you let young people on a trek have their phones to navigate? I mean, probably they will have their phones in their pockets and will be using them anyway, so how do you embed that rather than seeing it as something that you have to fight?"

Scouting is no stranger to change, as you can imagine in an organisation that traces its roots to the early 1900s. The first badges had names like ‘Carpenter' and ‘Bee Farmer' - sadly now retired - while more recent ones like Geocaching, Digital Maker and Digital Citizen reflect the modern world.

"A lot of [Digital Citizen] is about social media: how do you understand what you're doing on social media? How do you interpret what other people are doing on social media, fake news, et cetera, et cetera? And I think that's core. If we are teaching young people about skills for life, it's also about how they behave as a digital citizen."

Even though that badge was only designed about three years ago, it already needs updating to reflect changes in tech like AI. And that's fine, says Lara.

"Scouts is a movement. It's not a static thing, and we are really good at changing."