In 2024, BSA shrank, recruited fewer youth, risked reputation with weird brand

Boy Scouts of America, Inc.¹ celebrated its 115th birthday by highlighting its latest blunder, a new brand that initializes to “sexual assault” while solving no problems.

In defense of this rebrand, BSA clams it grew by about 16,000 members.² Truth: BSA probably shrank!

BSA’s 2024 shrinkage

When BSA gives its annual member count, it’s using the count as of December 31. That day is probably BSA’s high-water mark.³

Comparing 2024’s member count to 2023, BSA shows 16,000-member growth. However, the 2024 number isn’t clean, affected by novel accounting tricks:

1. Apples-to-oranges comparison: BSA declined to account for changes induced by a new membership model.⁴
2. Keeping dropped-out members on the roll longer: In late fall 2024, BSA extended the lapsed-member⁵ period by 50%⁶.

These tricks skewed accounting for youth who dropped out shortly after joining in fall 2023.

In the prior membership model, these youth would have dropped off the membership roll on March 1, 2024. Thanks to BSA’s accounting tricks, these new, fall-2023 Scouts who quickly dropped out stay on the roll ten months longer, now past December 31, 2024!

I estimate this to be 29,000 Scouts. This means 29,000 Scouts, who are included in the December 31, 2024 count, wouldn’t have been included under the prior membership scheme!

After removing 29,000 youth from the 2024 count, instead of 16,000-member growth, you get a 13,000-member loss (1.3%)!

(I explain the math in BSA’s new member model creates embarrassing membership loss.)

The SA brand doesn’t solve any problems

On May 7, 2024, BSA announced its new Scouting America (SA) brand. National marketers advised that “[SA] should be used immediately”.⁷ The same day, BSA issued revised brand guidelines⁸ to help maximize SA across the movement.

The main thing accomplished is removing “boy” from the corporate brand to “ensure that everyone feels welcome in Scouting”⁹.

This isn’t solving a problem! The main way people know Scouting is through awareness of what local Scout units do. Some may be aware of the program names, especially Cub Scouts. None of this involves gendered words!

The gendered word is only in a distant corporate name. Few seem to know or track this name.

“Boy” is probably not a problem…

I’m not convinced “boy”, in a distant corporate name, is a problem.

I have yet to encounter a single girl, who is a realistic candidate for a BSA program, who declined to engage due to “boy” in a distant corporate name.

I have yet to see any evidence-based analysis asserting how the corporate name is an issue.

I created a Dull Men’s Club group on Facebook. It has almost 1.5 million members. About a third are women. Did “Men’s” drive them away?

I tested my Dull Men’s Club theory with a poll. With about 8,000 responses, women are saying, in an overwhelming, 99:1 ratio, that “men’s” in the group name is not a concern.

The M in YMCA means “men’s”. Is the YMCA perceived as excluding females?¹⁰

…but let’s pretend “boy” is a problem

Let’s suppose “boy” is a problem. The solution is easy: Adopt “BSA” as the corporate brand!

If an initialism works for the YMCA, it can work for us, too.

The SA brand’s effect on recruitment

If “boy” in the corporate name was noxious, then eliminating it would have helped recruitment, right?

Before I continue, I want to be clear: correlation is not causation. While 2024’s peak-recruitment period corresponds to first-time use of the SA brand, we cannot use simple math to say that SA caused any changes in recruitment.

However, if SA fixed a major problem with recruitment or perception, we should see a significant recruitment boost.

Recruitment was down in 2024. Compared to 2023, SA recruited 6.3% fewer Scouts¹¹:

• 2023 new-Scout recruitment: 298,939 Scouts
• 2024 new-Scout recruitment: 279,994 Scouts

Why did we rebrand?

It’s unclear how the SA brand creates value:

• The “boy” in the old corporate brand was not noxious.
• The SA brand is not associated with increased recruitment.
• The SA brand endangers the movement by associating it with a colossal scandal.

As is its habit, our national organization fiddles while Scouting burns. The SA brand appears to be magical thinking, that shiny objects can save us, therefore allowing us to once again avoid addressing difficult challenges that BSA never acknowledges.

Appendix A: Monthly recruitment breakdown

Below are the number of new Scouts recruited each month of 2023 and 2024. All boldfaced months are on or after the SA brand was introduced.

	2023	2024	difference
January	10521	9867	-6.2%
February	14104	12580	-10.8%
March	19130	12550	-34.4%
April	12251	11202	-8.6%
May	11627	8596	-26.1%
June	10966	9564	-12.8%
July	10438	7452	-28.6%
August	31442	30540	-2.9%
September	75104	77170	2.8%
October	53225	44942	-15.6%
November	26632	21322	-19.9%
December	23499	34209	45.6%
Total (June – December)	242933	233795	-3.8%
Total	298939	279994	-6.3%

1. Despite its new brand, described later in this article, the corporate name remains Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
2. Jamie Stengle, “Boy Scouts see a small membership uptick after rebrand to Scouting America“, Associated Press, February 6, 2025. As the first-mover in covering BSA’s 115th anniversary, which was February 8, 2025, this article may have set the tone for further media coverage. ↩︎
3. Under the fixed-membership scheme that existed before August 1, 2023, most individuals’ membership periods coincided with the calendar year. Therefore, December 31’s member count generally included those who were a member at any point in that calendar year. January 1 was when most non-renewed memberships went to “lapsed” status, and March 1 is when most non-renewed, lapsed members were dropped. A minority of members have membership periods that are offset from the calendar year. While those offset memberships might affect the date of the high-water mark, I’ll bet a $2 bill the number would be very close to the December 31 count. ↩︎
4. On August 1, 2023, BSA switched to a rolling-membership scheme, where one’s membership period ends 12 months after joining. Before then, all members were on a fixed-membership scheme, where each person’s membership period was tied to their Scout unit’s annual renewal cycle. For most people, that corresponded to the calendar year. ↩︎
5. When a person’s BSA membership expires, that person’s membership is “lapsed”. This is a grace period between expiration and being formally dropped. In this lapsed period, the member is still treated like a paid member. BSA includes lapsed members in its count of total members. ↩︎
6. In an October 29, 2024 presentation titled National Town Hall (page 21), a BSA national employee asserts that the lapsed period is “extend[ed] … to 3 months”. Before then, it was two months. ↩︎
7. Aaron Derr, “What our organization’s name change means — and doesn’t mean — to Scouts and leaders“, Scouting Magazine, May 7, 2024. ↩︎
8. Scouting America Brand Guidelines, Boy Scouts of America, May 7, 2024. ↩︎
9. “Boy Scouts of America to Become Scouting America“, Boy Scouts of America, May 7, 2024 ↩︎
10. Some allege that YMCA switched to “The Y”. In fact, the “YMCA” brand remains prominent. In my area, “YMCA” is typically how it’s described. ↩︎
11. Numbers on newly recruited Scouts are discerned by filtering an SA report to Scouts with “new, paid” status. Renewing Scouts have a different status. ↩︎