In most parts of the country "Christmas Season" is followed very quickly by "Cookie Season" and the leader facebook groups are filled with questions and complaints from leaders old and new. As noted in my profile, I've been a Girl Scout leader for over 15 years and this post is an attempt to share the things I've learned with others. However, the first piece of advice I have is to make friends with your Service Unit Cookie Chair. She is the one who should know the rules in your council, and also what you can expect where you are. Learn Your Council's Rules
No councils, that I know of, allow girls to take the money earned by selling cookies and put it in their own pockets. Most do not allow much if any differentiation between how the troop rewards low sellers vs high sellers at the Daisy and Brownie levels. For older girls, council rules are all over the map as to how they allow cookie proceeds to be used and tracked on a per girl basis. Some allow (or at least turn a blind eye toward) "girl accounts" where each girl's proceeds are tracked and allocated for her use for Girl Scout programming; others strictly enforce "troop money is for all the girls". Knowing your council's rules on this is important when you get ready for the next step: Talking to Parents
Talk and LISTEN to Your Parents
If there is one thing I've seen over and over on Girl Scout leader Facebook pages, it is leaders complaining that they and their daughter(s) have scheduled multiple booths per weekend for multiple weekends and "no one" but them has worked them. I get it--as a leader it is great to have a big bank account on which to draw when it comes time to plan activities and buy badges or patches. GSUSA has done a great job of turning cookies into program materials and girls can learn a lot by selling cookies to fulfill dreams. However, none of that will happen without the cooperation of your parents and the reality is that families are busy these days and many would much rather write you a check to pay for troop activities and badges than to spend hours each weekend for a month sitting at cookie booths or even transporting their daughters to cookie booths.
Go into your parent cookie meeting with knowledge of how your council allows you to track/split proceeds, a basic budget for how you plan to spend money next year, and a question for them: What are they willing to put into cookies? If you are looking at big trip, do they want to just pay for it, or do they want the girls to earn their way? This is where you need to know the extent to which the decisions of one parent will affect the troop. However, if most of the parents are only interested in short shifts and one or two booths, mostly for the experience, unless you are working for individual proceeds or prizes, don't kill yourself setting up and running booths to earn money to carry the troop. If parents are interested in raising major money through cookies, let them know that they will need to step up and help (and let them know your council's rules about who can/must be at cookie booths adult-wise).
Realize that Cookie Proceeds Aren't As Bad As They Sound
Yeah, I know, you are selling cookies for $4.00 (or some other amount) and you only earn $0.50 per box (or some other fraction of the selling price). It really seems that you could do better if only your council would let you (insert name of forbidden fund raiser). However, appearances can be deceiving.
Worlds Finest Chocolate is a favorite fundraiser for schools around here. According to their website, you have to buy a minimum of 8 cases of chocolate and the cost of $60 worth of chocolate is $36. That's a lot better profit margin than GS Cookies offer your troop, but, honestly, how many cases will each girl sell? Of that, what percent are going to be purchased by the girls' family? In my experience, few families sell more than two cases of chocolate, so if you could sell WFC, you could probably figure on earning $48 per girl, much of it from close family. Strangers do not generally buy it from kids going door-to-door and few stores allow groups to set up sales booths. At $.50 per box, a girl who sells 100 boxes of cookies, which in most councils is easy, earns $50. There are not a lot of fundraisers you can do, particularly with young girls, that easily earn $50 per child, with much of it coming from people with little to no relationship to the child.
While bake sales can earn more money per sale than your average cookie booth, you can't do that bake sale again next weekend or later today at another location.
Plan Your Booth Sales to Meet Your Troop (Parents') Goals
Most councils have rules about the minimum and maximum number of girls allowed at a booth. As a general rule, the more girls are at a booth, the more fun the girls will have. However, the fewer girls per booth, the more money you will make per girl. If your goal with cookies is fun, and the money is an extra benefit, then schedule enough booths to give each girl a turn to work and call it good. If you are trying to make big money, the fewer girls per booth the better. As a general rule, having more girls at a booth does not result in higher sales for that booth, only in more girls to split the total with.
Decide Before Booth Sales How You Are Going to Split Sales, and Make Sure Everyone Knows It
Whether you are allocating booth sale cookies for prize purposes or to allocate proceeds to girls, everyone needs to know up front how you are going to do it.
Booth by Booth
The advantage of dividing the sold cookies on a booth by booth basis is that it is easy to relate to parents shortly after the booth is complete. If 100 boxes are sold at the booth and 4 girls worked equal shifts, each gets credit for 25 boxes. This method is probably closer to real-world commission sales, if you are trying to teach business skills to the girls.
Weekend by Weekend
This method takes into account that some booth locations are just better than others, and that troops have to share those locations with other troops. I can't park my troop in front of Wal-Mart long enough to give every girl a turn; we have to take the Walgreens booths too. The weekend (or day) by weekend method adds up the number of shifts worked over all booths that weekend (or day) and divides by the number of cookies sold over the whole weekend.
If you do three booths this weekend, with three girls working each booth, you have 3 booths times three girls per booth equals 9 credits. Each booth a girl worked gets her 1 credit. If 300 boxes were sold, that is 33 boxes per credit, so a girl who worked two booths would be credited with 66 boxes. This method makes it easier to find volunteers to take the less busy booths as they can earn as much as at the busy ones. The disadvantage is that parents can complain that "Suzi" sold 200 boxes at Wal-Mart but only got credit for 100.
Don't Burn the Girls Out Early
Reality is that you will sell more cookies per hour the first weekend of booths than you will the last last weekend of booths. It is tempting to book back-to-back booths that first weekend and to work everyone as hard as possible to make as much money as possible. If you have teenagers working for money for a big trip, this may be necessary, but if you have younger girls, remember that the booth that is fun for an hour becomes "boring" not long thereafter. Limit booth times to an hour for Daisies and two hours for Brownies. If they want to do a booth in the morning and one in the afternoon, that will probably work, if they have a couple of hours break.
Don't Get Too Greedy
In many councils the cookie season starts with pre-orders, during which girls take orders but do not collect money. Using the pre-order information, troops place their first cookie order, planning to fill the pre-orders and to have enough to sell the first weekend of booth sales. In other councils, there are no pre-orders. Rather, girls request cookies from the troop supply, sell them, and then return for more if needed. While different councils have different rules, generally, once cookies have passed from council to the troop, the troop is responsible for paying for those cookies,and once cookies have passed from the troop to the parent, the parent is responsible.
Sometimes people want to order more cookies than they can sell. If you have a first year troop, I highly recommend speaking to any parent who wants to pre-order more than 100 boxes, especially if they order a round number of boxes. Try to find out if they have pre-orders, if they realize they can get more cookies after the sale starts, and confirm that they realize they will be paying for the cookies they ordered if they can't sell them.
On the troop level, watch your inventory. Realize that it could rain the last weekend of booth sales.Know the rules and deadlines for getting more cookies after the sale starts. Bottom line--you don't want to get stuck with cookies. Unless you really are trying to maximize profits, consider your booths the last weekend of the sale to be insurance--there if you need them to get rid of the last of the cookies but hopefully you won't need them.
Use Your GS Network
Talk to leaders in your SU. I don't know how many boxes you can reasonably expect to sell in two hours at your Wal-Mart, but other leaders in your area do. I can't buy your last six boxes of cookies so you don't have to fool with a booth sale tomorrow, but I'll bet there is a leader nearby who could use them. I don't know if the drugstore you are thinking about for a booth sale is a good spot, but...you get the picture.
My service unit and some other nearby service units all participate in a Facebook group during cookie season during which we swap or sell cookies or trade booth sale spots. Most GS leaders are not cut-throat business people who are going to try to help their troop at your expense; rather they want to make cookie season a success for all of us.
Many former Girl Scouts remember Cookies as one of the most fun parts of Girl Scouts. Hopefully your Cookie Season will be a dream, not a nightmare.
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