Help
Guides for troop admins, leaders, and parents. Use the search below or browse by topic.
Calendar
Calendar views and filters
How the four view modes differ, and how den/patrol/category filters interact.
Importing an outside calendar feed (ICS)
Pull events from an external .ics calendar feed — like a council or district calendar — into your troop's MyTroop calendar.
Subscribe to your troop's calendar
How to add the troop calendar to Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, or Outlook so events show up alongside your personal schedule.
Using the calendar
What the calendar shows, who sees what, and the four ways to view it.
Communication
Backup emails
Add extra email addresses that receive your troop mail and can post to mailing lists — without being a second login.
Communication tools overview
How digests, mailing lists, and per-event notifications fit together.
Connect your troop to Claude or ChatGPT (MCP)
Point an AI assistant like Claude or ChatGPT at your troop via MCP (Model Context Protocol) so it can answer questions about your roster, events, and RSVPs — and (if you're a leader) take actions on your behalf.
Email digest — schedule and look-ahead
How to configure the recurring "what's coming up" email to your families.
Emailing everyone going to an event
Send an email to the families going to an event from its page, and use the event's own group address.
Mailing lists — auto and custom
How auto-managed and custom mailing lists work, and who can post to which.
Sending and receiving texts
Who an event text reaches, how to text the whole troop, and what happens when somebody replies.
Sending attachments to a mailing list
Photos and files go out with list email, up to 25 MB per message.
Targeting recipients on a custom list
How to pick exactly who receives a custom mailing list.
What your AI assistant can do
Everything a connected assistant like Claude or ChatGPT can do with your troop over MCP, who can use each action, and the kinds of things to ask it.
Events
Attach files to an event
Put the permission slip, gear list or map on the event itself, so families find it where they look for everything else.
Creating an event — end to end
A walkthrough of every section in the event form so you know what's optional, what triggers what, and what happens when you save.
Per-event payments — adult and scout pricing
How to charge a per-attendee fee for an event, with separate amounts for adults, scouts and guests, plus an optional per-family maximum.
Recurring events — schedules, exceptions, edits
How the recurrence presets work, how to change a single occurrence, and how editing affects past vs future instances.
RSVPs — enabling, limits, deadlines
How to turn on RSVPs, limit attendance, and set an RSVP-by date.
Targeting which families see an event
How the Audience picker scopes events to a den, a patrol, or the whole troop.
Transportation and driver signups
How to enable driver signups so parents can volunteer to drive and offer seats.
Waivers and disclaimers
Three options for the legal disclaimer attached to an RSVP, and how each behaves.
General
Finding out what changed
MyTroop publishes a dated list of every update, so you can see what is new and which version your troop is running.
Light and dark mode
How to switch MyTroop between light and dark, and why the choice is remembered on one device rather than on your account.
Starting a troop on MyTroop
How to set up your troop or pack yourself at mytroop.org/start — account, email confirmation, unit details, card — and what happens after.
Pages
Album pages and the Albums directory
How to create a photo album as a page, who can upload, and how albums + event photos appear together in the unified Albums directory.
Contact export
Download troop members as contact cards (.vcf) to import into your phone, with tags and name prefixes to keep them organized.
Pages — what they are and how they show up
How standard pages, album pages, folders, the homepage, and built-in entries fit together on the public /pages index and in the admin manager, including nesting pages under folders.
Resources
Settings
Charging processing fees to families
How the fee passthrough toggle works and the math behind it.
Connecting Stripe for online payments
How to enable online payment collection by adding your troop's Stripe credentials and webhook.
Custom domains — using your own domain name
Point your own custom domain (e.g. troop36.org) at your troop so the web and email work under that name.
Custom event categories and colors
How categories appear on the calendar, how to add or remove them, and what happens to old events.
Default event disclaimer
A reusable disclaimer that RSVP-enabled events can opt into.
Import and Export overview
The Admin > Import/Export page in one place — bulk CSV for scouts, adults, and events, plus importing an outside ICS calendar feed.
The dashboard message banner
A short troop-wide announcement shown at the top of every member's dashboard.
Troop Settings overview
Where each section lives in Admin > Settings, and which sections affect what.
Turning on text messaging
How to enable SMS for your troop, and what it does and does not do.
Usage and cost breakdown
See how many emails and texts your troop has sent and how much storage you're using each month, and what that costs against your MyTroop subscription.
Your troop's MyTroop subscription and billing
Manage your troop's own MyTroop subscription — payment method, status and discounts, upcoming charges, past statements, and cancelling — separate from Stripe for collecting event payments from families.
Users
Adding a user
How to create a new account in your troop and what the new user receives.
Adding and managing scouts
How to add a scout one at a time, edit their birthday/rank/den or patrol, move them to a different family, promote a group of scouts at once, or delete a scout.
Bulk importing and exporting scouts (CSV)
Download a CSV template, bulk-add scouts with a spreadsheet, and export your full scout roster — including required columns, how families and dens/patrols are matched, and how import errors are reported.
Dens and patrols — organizing scouts into groups
How dens (Cub Scouts) and patrols (Scouts BSA) work, how to create a patrol or assign a den leader, and how to move scouts between groups.
Editing and deleting users
How to update a user's info, change their role, or remove them — and the safeguards involved.
Families — the unit MyTroop is built around
How users group into families, why scouts attach to families instead of individuals, and how to manage family membership.
Managing users — overview
How users, roles, families, and welcome emails fit together in MyTroop.
Roles and permission levels
What each of the four roles — Admin, Leader, Committee, Parent — can do.
Seeing who has logged in
How to tell which members are actually using the site, and how to chase the ones who never signed in.
What’s new
See every update to MyTroop, newest first, with the date it reached this site.
Still stuck?
Reach out to your troop admin, or contact us.