The website is designed to provide information for three different audiences:
- The public – non-members who may be interested in helping us or joining us;
- Parents and members – additional content relevant to parents and members, e.g. access to our events system, etc;
- Leaders – additional content to help our leaders, e.g. details of who is signed up for events, etc.
By default, the website shows Public content. To see more information you need to be logged in.
Logging in
Please note that the website relies on cookies to tell if a user is logged in. These are “Strictly Necessary” cookies (not cross-site tracking cookies) and are exempt from the GDPR cookie consent requirements. If cookies are not enabled on the device you are trying to log in from an error will be reported during login and you will only be able to access “public” content.
Parents, Explorers, Scouts and Helpers
Parents, Explorers, Scouts and Group Occasional Helpers can log in using either:
- Their Online Scout Manager (OSM) Parent Portal account;
- Email/password – where email is a contact email stored in OSM and password is one set using the website.
The former is provided to avoid a proliferation of username/passwords that a person needs to remember. The latter as a fallback for use when OSM authentication is unavailable or where a user prefers to have a separate password for website access.
In either case, the email used must be set up beforehand as a contact email in OSM. Specifically,
- Parents: One of the Primary Contacts1 or 2 emails;
- Explorers, Scouts and Group Occasional Helpers: One of the Member emails.
We encourage older youth members (e.g. Scouts and Explorers) to take responsibility for signing up for events (particularly the Explorer Weekly Meetings). However, we don’t allow youth members to sign up for chargeable events costing more than £20 – parents (Primary Contacts) still need to do that. To allow Scouts/Explorers access to the website, parents (Primary Contacts) need to provide a member email for their child in OSM. Conversely, if you do not wish your children to access the website, then please make sure the member email fields are left blank.
Logging in to the website using OSM Parent Portal authentication
Click on the “Login (members using OSM)” item on the Login menu. You will be taken to OSM and prompted to enter your OSM Parent Portal credentials. Once this is successfully done you will taken back to the website and will have access to member’s content.
If you don’t yet have an OSM Parent Portal account, please check any recent group emails you have received for a link to create an OSM Parent Portal account. The email you use when setting up the OSM Parent Portal account must be one that is listed as a contact email in OSM (e.g. the one the link was sent to).
If you have forgotten your OSM Parent Portal password, use the OSM “Forgot password” feature to reset it. If you don’t get a response from that, it may be that you haven’t ever set up a Parent Portal account. In this case, try the links in the group email (as described in the previous paragraph).
And, if all else fails, contact us and we will try to sort things out.
Example
The website is designed to work on both desktop and mobile devices. The following shows the sequence of screens when logging in on a mobile phone.
Logging in to the website using contact email and website password
Click on the “Login (members using password)” item on the Login menu. You will be taken to the website login form. If this is the first time you have used this, then:
- Click “Lost your password”.
- This will prompt you for the “Username or Email Address” you want to reset the password for. Please enter one of the contact email addresses for you that have been recorded in OSM.
- You will receive an email with a link you can use to set a new password. Click on the link and select a new password.
- Once a password has been set up, you can proceed to the login screen to enter your email and password.
On subsequent logins using this method, you can just enter the email and the password you had previously saved.
Note that your website password and OSM Parent Portal passwords are not the same. Setting one does NOT set the other. If you haven’t used the website “Lost your password” facility to set a website password you won’t be able to use this method to login.
Leaders
Appointed Leaders, i.e. Section Leaders, Section Assistants, Trustees, Group Administrators and Group Skills Instructors, can log in using their group Google account. Just click on the “Login (leaders)” item on the Login menu. You will be prompted to pick your account and enter your password. Once this is successfully done you will have access to Leaders’ content. In future, if you are already logged on to your Group Google account when you try to login to the website you won’t even need to enter the password – you will just be taken straight to the content.
If you have forgotten your password:
- If you have set up a password recovery please use that,
- Otherwise please ask the Website Administrators to reset your password (using the “Contact Us” form).
Protected content
If you attempt to access a page that requires you to be logged in whilst not logged in you may see the following.
The top two buttons are the equivalent of the “Login (members using OSM)” and “Login (leaders)” menu items described above. The Username/Password dialogue is equivalent to “Login (members using password)”.
