How Apple Reminders Helps Onboarding Processes
Running a Cub pack is one of the most rewarding things you can do with your time, and one of the most admin-heavy.
Between managing waiting lists, chasing forms, and making sure every family knows where they need to be and when, it’s easy for the small but important steps to fall through the cracks.
I’ve been through that process enough times to know that a bit of structure makes a huge difference.
That’s why I started using Apple Reminders to manage the whole thing, and honestly, I wish I’d done it sooner!
🐻 Same Process, Every Single Time
Every time a new Cub joins the pack, the same ten steps need to happen. Send the invitation, collect the details, get them onto the system, arrange the investiture, sort the payments. Miss one step and you’re chasing it up weeks later — or worse, a family is left wondering what’s happening.
If you’re running this process from memory, or rebuilding a checklist each time, there’s a much better way.
Apple Reminders has a template feature that lets you set up your entire onboarding workflow once, and then summon it fresh for every new Cub with just a few taps. It’s built into every iPhone, iPad and Mac, and it costs absolutely nothing.
📋 Build the Workflow Once, Use It Forever
Here’s how it works in practice. You create a list in Reminders that covers all steps of your onboarding process — something like this:
- Send invitation to join
- Assign the Cub to a Six
- Send Welcome email
- Add parents to the WhatsApp group
- Send Welcome WhatsApp (on morning of first meeting)
- Send investiture invitation
- Set up the badges for the investiture
- Send investiture reminder
- Collect the investiture fee
- Send a link to set up direct debit (after investiture)
Once that list is built exactly as you want it, you tap the three-dot menu and choose Save as Template. Name it something like “New Cub Onboarding” and it’s done.
Next time a new Cub comes in, you hit Add List, choose Create from Template, rename it with the Cub’s name, and every single step is there, unticked, ready to work through. It takes about ten seconds.
⏰ Add Due Dates So Nothing Slips
The real power comes when you build timing into your template tasks.
As I complete a task, I will update the next ones, with follow-up dates. This isn’t something that is automatic in Reminders, and since it’s not something I do every day, setting up a Shortcut is quite a lot of work for little reward.
However, using dates and times is crucial to ensure the steps don’t get missed.
For a volunteer role where you’re juggling a pack full of kids alongside regular life, that kind of nudge is genuinely valuable.
👥 Share with Your Leadership Team
If you have an assistant leader or a section helper involved in onboarding, Reminders makes it easy to share the list with them.
Once shared, you can both see progress in real time. Tick off the steps you’ve handled, leave the others for your co-leader to pick up.
No more “did you send the payment link?” messages at 10pm. The list tells you exactly where things stand.
🏷️ Tag by Status to See the Full Picture
When you’re onboarding several Cubs at once, common after an open evening or a waiting list review, it can get hard to track who’s at what stage. Tags solve this neatly.
Tag each Cub’s list with something like #onboarding, #investiture etc and create a Smart List that pulls all those tasks together in one view.
You can see at a glance that Alfie is waiting on his investiture date, Jack’s payment link hasn’t been sent yet, and Noah is fully set up.
Everything in one place, across multiple individual lists.
💰 The Part That Really Matters for Volunteer Roles
Running a Cub pack is a labour of love, and budgets, both personal and organisational.
Don’t pay for expensive software subscriptions. Apple Reminders is completely free, syncs across all your Apple devices via iCloud, and works offline too.
There’s no sign-up, no monthly fee, no premium tier hiding the useful features. It’s just there, on the Apple device you already have, ready to be used properly.
✅ Ten Steps, Zero Dropped Balls
Onboarding a new Cub should feel welcoming and organised for the family joining, and for you managing it.
A well-built template means every child gets the same thorough process, nothing gets forgotten in a busy week, and you’re not starting from scratch every time a new face walks through the door.
Set it up once. Use it for every Cub. That’s the whole idea.
Of course, onboarding Cubs is just one example of where a Reminders template earns its keep.
The same approach works brilliantly for anything that follows a regular pattern:
- Planning a camping weekend,
- Running a committee meeting agenda
- Weekly meal prep shop
- Pre-holiday packing list.
Anywhere you find yourself rebuilding the same list from scratch, or relying on memory to get the steps right, a template does the heavy lifting for you.
The tool is the same, whatever the task. Once you start thinking in templates, you’ll wonder what else you’ve been doing the hard way.