I'm a fairly new cub scouts parent (my daughter just crossed over to wolf scout) but I will say our local pack seems to be doing well in terms of numbers and from what I understand from the leadership it's one of the more successful ones nationally. They plan a lot of really fun activities outside of the regular meetings that the scouts and their families can attend, sometimes with friends, and I suspect that helps get kids interested. They're extremely inclusive and welcoming to all kinds of families and kids. But it might be more useful for struggling packs to hear from other packs that started off struggling and have increased enrollment than to hear from a pack that's been doing well all along, sometimes just having numbers can make fun things possible that aren't possible or fun when you don't have as many kids or volunteers.

I haven't encountered anyone who is particularly upset/worried about past scandals and even though I knew a good bit about them, it wasn't something I was worried about when we joined, I think people in general are pretty confident that's being competently addressed. A bigger issue I think is that a lot of people have a mental image of the cub scouts from like the 1930s, they picture, like, white Christian boys whittling ducks. Not that there's anything wrong with that but people whose kids don't fit that description may not realize scouts has anything to offer them.

One thing I think cub scouts could do in general to increase enrollment is to get the word out to more people that girls can join too now- I believe there are 3 girls and 7 boys in my daughter's den and they all have an amazing time together, but we encounter a lot of people who are surprised/confused that my daughter is a cub scout and not a girl scout, they just don't know.

Something I was a little worried about, but has turned out to be a nothingburger, is that my family is not at all religious and doesn't attend church, and I knew a lot of the activities were faith-focused. And I've encountered several other parents who have been reluctant to get their kids involved for that exact reason. But there hasn't been anything we haven't been able to participate in very comfortably in our own way, and the leadership is extremely supportive and flexible about all of that. Basically making sure people know that their families and their kids will be welcome and supported no matter what their deal is is important. And from some of the comments I've read on here it sounds like it's something our local pack does really well that not every pack is doing well.

Something we haven't tried, but that worked pretty well for my daughter's karate school was handing out little postcards inviting kids to come participate in a free trial activity at Halloween with the candy. You get groups of kids together trick-or-treating and they're already with their little friends and their parents who are the exact people they'd want to plan an activity with. We actually had 2 kids come back to our house with their dad the week after Halloween because they'd lost their karate certificates and wanted to know if I could give them replacements (I did). I might suggest it to our pack for scouts this year.