It's mid-August, do you know where your Webelos are?

About this time, it seems that Webelos and their den leaders start thinking about visiting troops and choosing one to join in the spring. If you are hoping to gain a few new members in your troop, don't wait any longer to start working on it. With the start of school, planning will get more difficult.

There are a few things that greatly influence where Webelos go when they cross-over...

• the Younger Brother - if there's already a boy scout in the family, the younger brother almost always joins that troop. This makes life easier for the family chauffeur.
• the First One - in any Webelos den, wherever the first scout decides to go and announces it, many of the rest will probably join him. These are the ones that don't put in their own research (and they're often ones that don't last long in the troop). So, convince a Webelos to join your troop right now and tell all his den mates where he's going.
• the Fun Event - an event put on by a troop specifically for Webelos that is just exhausting fun can pull in a bunch of scouts. Our troop did an overnight lock-in for many years - it had no scouting to it at all - but it was very popular. Now, we have an all-day event with a patch, collecting trinkets, earning prizes, and food - it seems to work great too.
• the Night - if your troop meets on Tuesday and the scout has band, theatre, karate, swimming, ... on Tuesday then he'll go to the troop that meets on Thursday. Not much you can do about this unless it seems 'everyone' has a conflict with your meeting day and then you might consider changing.
• the Den Chief - having a boy scout work with the den can either gain or lose a lot of scouts. It depends on the skills and effectiveness of that scout.

If the Senior Patrol Leader and his team have not started planning at least one event aimed at recruiting Webelos, they really need to do it this month. A good idea is to offer a day hike in October with fun activities to cover the Scout Oath, Law, motto, slogan, ... so attendees can complete Arrow of Light requirements 2, 4, and 5.

Make sure you publicize your offerings to the Webelos den leaders early so they can get their scouts to show up. If you can get the phone contacts for each Webelos scout family, that's even better, but more work.

Our troop now invites 4th and 5th grade Webelos to its day event and gives a different patch to each grade. This gives the 4th graders something to look forward to the next year and more exposure to the troop.

Scout On