Why should my troop have a web page?

Why should my troop have a web page?That is a good question. There are lots of answers; some apply to your troop some may not. You need at least one reason, otherwise its not worth doing. It is an important question because many decisions further down the road may depend on WHY you did it in first place.
Think about who reads the web page; see the policy for more on this.

As an activity for the youth.

This is one of the best reasons to do it. However it only works if the youth want to do it and the adults are knowledgeable enough to give the right level of help. Maybe have a page for boys done by boys and a page for grownups done by grownups.

As a recruiting tool.

Sorry that will not work. There are thousands of troops and hundreds of councils which have web pages. Why would anybody join your troop from looking at your web page? Some boy in Florida may find your webpage nice, but your troop meets in San Mateo, California...

Actually there are circumstances where the web could help recruiting: The clue is that the right kind of people find and visit your web page. For example if your school puts your troop into a good position on their "community links" page.

Or, if have just the right keywords for the major search tools. Guess what happens if somebody wants to find a troop on the web:
First) That person will search for boy troop scout camping... The search tool will show a million of pages, the first 3 which have nothing to do with scouting, the next two hundred will be out of the country or otherwise in-appropriate.
Second) That person will narrow the search. Here is where you can do something: Predict how that person will narrow the search. Typically the name of the school or the city will be included to the keywords. These are the keywords which can make your troop being found.

By the way: If you forget mentioning your city or a contact address nobody will tell you, and nobody will sign up.

Being proud of.

That means it needs to be done well. You don't need lots of pages, but one or two nice page can do it. There is nothing wrong with this reason; its good for the boys to be proud of their troop.

Information for parents.

This might work. What kind of information is not as easy available on paper? If people should come back and look again they need to believe that they find what they are looking for. If the information is out of date, or more clumsy then paper they wont look at the web a second time.
For the council web, the calendar is central: People get a paper calendar at the beginning of the year. Nobody tells them when something changes, but the web calendar will be updated. (If somebody tells the webmaster :-))

Scouting Web Pages