Scouting America transforms youth enrollment with generative AI assistant powered by AWS

For 115 years, Scouting America has shaped generations through service, leadership, and outdoor adventure. Their mission is to prepare young people for lives of impact by instilling values, teaching life skills, and fostering character, through adventure and service in a safe, inclusive environment. With over 1 million youth participants and 628,000 volunteers, they’re not just teaching skills, they’re building character.

In May 2025, Scouting America launched Scoutly, a generative AI-powered, multilingual AI assistant built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Scoutly has streamlined their enrollment process by providing conversational support in multiple languages, answering questions, helping families find local units, and guiding them through enrollment with contextual awareness. The platform has delivered remarkable results, reducing registration time from 25 minutes to just 5 minutes through agentic workflows. Scoutly currently averages 2,000 users per day and has answered over 1.9 million questions from visitors.

In this post, we share how Scouting America used this AI assistant to transform youth enrollment.

Removing barriers to youth development

The organization faced significant challenges with their registration process that hindered their ability to serve families effectively. The lengthy and confusing enrollment journey led to high abandonment rates, with families often giving up before even starting their Scouting experience. Between parental authorizations, complex pricing structures, and static forms, the registration process was disjointed and frequently abandoned.

Every abandoned form represented one less future Scout ready to serve their community. With limited staff serving an audience of 1.5 million people (between members, volunteers, and alumni), Scouting America sought to use technology strategically to make registration easier and more accessible.

They also wanted to achieve a strategic goal: ensure relevance to today’s youth as a 115-year-old organization. They needed a tech platform that was straightforward to use and could facilitate digital experiences comparable to modern platforms that young people regularly use.

Building an intelligent solution with AWS

Scoutly is a powerful AI assistant that provides instant, reliable support to leaders, volunteers, parents, and scouts through a comprehensive knowledge base of Scouting America resources. Users can access this interactive assistant around the clock on Scouting.org and BeAScout.org, which provides a safe, child-friendly experience. Scoutly also fits into Scouting America’s broader technology strategy, which prioritizes service design, enterprise architecture, data governance, platform thinking, and simplified user experiences. The organization’s business strategy calls for a unified technology foundation, stronger governance, and a data architecture that can support real-time operations and analytics at scale.

Working with partner Myridius, Scouting America built Scoutly on Amazon Bedrock and a comprehensive suite of scalable services, including AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Kendra.

The solution is designed to be fast, resilient, and built to scale while engaging users with relevant, accurate, real-time information.

Working alongside AWS, Myridius served as the lead architecture and delivery partner for Scoutly, focusing on the technical foundations required to make the experience reliable, scalable, and safe. The team defined the enterprise architecture and integration patterns that enabled real-time orchestration across systems, while confirming the solution could scale seamlessly on AWS.

A key focus area was data governance and content control. Myridius helped design the processes to curate, validate, and manage source content, so responses remained accurate, consistent, and aligned with Scouting America’s policies. Guardrails were implemented to control how information is used by the assistant, with a strong emphasis on privacy, safety, and youth protection. The team also led application quality and release readiness, including rigorous testing and a phased rollout approach to minimize risk at launch. This meant that Scoutly could handle production-scale usage from day one while maintaining a high standard of trust and performance.

Together, these elements established Scoutly not just as an AI assistant, but as a governed, production-grade digital service aligned with Scouting America’s broader strategy around enterprise architecture, data, and service design.

The quality and governance of source content were also critical to the solution’s performance. The content was carefully curated, controlled, and validated before being exposed to users, with safeguards designed to protect privacy and maintain response integrity.

Transforming the Scouting experience

The results exceeded expectations both quantitatively and qualitatively. During the pilot phase, Scouting America experienced a 45% spike in web traffic, demonstrating strong user engagement with the new platform. The agentic workflows successfully reduced the registration process from 25 minutes to just 5 minutes, dramatically improving the user experience.

Scoutly now has an average of 2,000 daily users and has successfully answered over 1.9 million questions from nearly 108,000 unique visitors. The platform has established itself as a widely used resource within the Scouting America community, handling substantial query volume while serving a large and diverse user base.

Scoutly provides live, natural conversational support in English, Spanish, Arabic, French, and additional languages, making Scouting more accessible to communities across America.

Additionally, some interesting and unexpected usage patterns emerged. Although it was originally designed primarily for registration assistance, Scoutly users regularly engage the platform for scouting knowledge, merit badge information, safety guidelines, and operational questions. Users range from youth asking about rank advancement and Eagle Scout requirements to adult volunteers seeking operational guidance for camping events, unit formation, and safety training requirements.

Key insights for nonprofit technology implementation

Mike Bullock, CIO of Scouting America, emphasized the importance of starting with a genuine organizational problem rather than seeking ways to implement AI technology for its own sake. Their approach of arriving at AI as a solution, rather than looking for AI applications, contributed significantly to the project’s success.

This problem-first methodology helped the technology truly serve the organization’s mission.

Supporting strategic transformation

Scoutly supports Scouting America’s strategic shift from systems-focused to service and customer experience-focused operations. The platform helps the 115-year-old organization remain relevant to today’s youth by providing familiar digital experiences comparable to modern platforms.

Most importantly, Scoutly is making it straightforward for purpose-driven youth to find their way into Scouting and stick with it. By removing usual hurdles and offering quick, helpful support, the platform helps prevent future Scouts or leaders from being left behind. This is more than just making registrations; it’s also about building the next generation of leaders ready to serve, grow, and make a difference in their communities.

To learn more about Scouting America and experience Scoutly, visit Scouting.org.

If you are feeling inspired by Scoutly, your nonprofit can harness the power of technology to accelerate your mission too. Learn more about the AWS Imagine Grant, a program designed to empower nonprofits to innovate and scale. Applications are open now through June 5, 2026.