What your District and County need to do

There are some tasks that a District and County need to do, to make sure that all their volunteers are ready for change.

It’s important you are familiar with the information you’re sharing with volunteers. You can use your County Transformation Lead and the information on the Volunteer Experience webpages to help with this.

The District / County Lead Volunteer and District / County Chair are responsible for making sure these are completed, but they don’t need to do all of the tasks themselves.

Brief the volunteers in your area 

1. Ensure all volunteers in your District / County understand what's changing and the benefits of the changes.
2. Ensure each volunteer knows what they need to do and when they need to do it by directing them to the relevant page to them: County / District, Group, or all volunteers. 

In Counties, the Transformation Lead, and their team, will coordinate these sessions and should make sure that Districts have all the information they need to support Groups and Sections in this. 

You might choose to brief volunteers in groupings relevant to their role, cascade information or brief all volunteers together. This should be done via a meeting, in-person or virtually rather than by email. 

Complete your move to a District/County Trustee Board

The move to Trustee Boards has three parts:

1. Name - Changing from an Executive Committee to Trustee Board
2. Purpose - Using the updated Trustee Board purpose as per POR 5.4.6
3. Membership - Adopting the changes to the membership of your Trustee Board as per POR 5.4.7

More information is available on the Moving to Trustee Boards and the Trustee Board webpages. 

Name and Purpose changes should already be in place, with the membership changes being adopted at the first AGM after 1st April 2024.

Build your Leadership and Operational Teams

1. Use the Setting up and building your new teams guide to build your teams and agree accreditations. Make sure that each team has a Team Leader(s) and Team Members. 
2. Once you’ve got your team structure planned, share it locally and make sure your District/Group Lead Volunteers have the information and support needed to build their teams.
3. Informally adopt the new structure and role titles so you start adopting the team-based approach to local volunteering. 

Start using the new ways of working 

Once your new team structures are agreed, each team needs to think about the processes they are responsible for and how they will manage these.

Each team will need to:

1. Understand what processes the team is responsible for, and which will be supported by the new digital tools
2. Agree how the team will manage any changes to these processes
3. For any processes that change, agree how you'll transition from current processes to new ones and share this with volunteers

This includes important processes including: permit applications, Nights Away Notifications, good service awards, manging personal details, learning, dashboards & reporting, inducting new volunteers, suspensions and more.

Get your County / District information up to date 

1. Following the Updating Compass Guidance to get the District / Counties information up to date.
2. Support volunteers to complete any other actions they can’t complete on Compass themselves.

Making sure this information is up to date on Compass will mean a smoother migration to the new digital tools on scouts.org.uk.

Volunteers will need support with actions such as validating their current training and making sure they have the right roles recorded on Compass.

Prepare Go-Live Support (County Only)

1. Put in place a temporary ‘go-live support team’ and communicate this to across the County.

The County Go-Live Support Team Description will help you to organise this, the team will operate from Compass freeze up until 4-6 weeks post  go-live. 

There are many ways you can organise this, but overall, it’s about making sure volunteers can get their questions answered easily when changes go-live. It is important that volunteers in your County know to contact the go-live support team, rather than the HQ Support Centre, in the first instance.

Prepare for migration to our new digital tools 

Compass will be frozen and inaccessible for a short period just before go-live of the new digital tools. During the freeze some processes will stop, and others will need interim processes to replace them. We’ll share more detail on this closer to go-live. Once available, the following actions need to be taken.

1. Ensure volunteers are aware of what processes will stop and which will be replaced by an interim process
2. Ensure all District/County teams ready to implement any interim processes during the Compass freeze