As cookie season will be upon us soon, I thought I'd take a look at the new cookie badges and compare them to the ones being discontinued.
Requirements
New Badge: Cookie Collaborator
According to Badge Explorer Juniors learn to collaborate with their troop, community, and network to grow their cookie business.
- Get to know the Girl Scout Cookie business
- Decide on your goals
- Collaborate on a troop budget
- Reach more customers
- Learn from your customers
When Juniors earn this badge, they will know how to work with their Girl Scout team to set goals and make decisions to run their cookie business, and how to collaborate with their friends and family to connect with more customers.
New Badge: My Cookie Team
Bring your different skills and ideas together to meet your goals.
- Find out about Girl Scout Cookies
- Decide how you will use your cookie money
- Set a troop budget and package goal
- Build your team
- Create your pitch to customers
When you've earned this badge, you will know how to use teamwork to help your cookie business
Old Badge: Cookie CEO
When you sell Girl Scout Cookies, you're already running your own business—and you can earn this badge for it!
- Set a group goal
- Explore how a small business works
- Create a cookie sale job list
- Learn to make a good impression
- Track your sales
When you’ve earned this badge, you’ll know more about how to run all parts of your cookie business.
Old Badge: Customer Insights
Use what you learn from your customers to make your cookie business even stronger!
- Ask an expert what customers want
- Do some research at the grocery store
- Find out who buys cookies and why
- Learn from people who don't buy
- Listen for clues and ask great questions
When you’ve earned this badge, you’ll have a better understanding of your cookie customers.
My Initial Comments
Generally when I review badges, I review the VTK and/or badge insert plans and focus on them, not on the five basic requirements listed above. I'm going to do that later in the post but as I'm typing this paragraph right now, I have not looked at the VTK plans, which may give me a totally different impression of the badges. However, since I know many people consider the five things listed above to be requirements and everything else to be suggestions, I thought I'd comment at this point of my evaluation.
First, the new badges are much prettier than the ones they are replacing. I wish GSUSA would revise the badge design for all the non-pink and purple Junior badges and make them pink and purple so the vests look neater.
Second, while I see a definite difference in the two old cookie badges, the new ones really seem like the same thing twice. The first three requirements are basically the same for each badge; only the fourth and fifth are different.
VTK Plans
Cookie Collaborator
For the first requirement, Find Out About Girl Scout Cookies, girls either design a cookie display, practice using the online platform or make a game consisting of cards with the names or pictures of the cookies and descriptions of the cookies, which they then match.
For the second requirement, Decide On Your Goals, VTK has the troop discussing what they need money for and dividing it into several categories. Then they make something to illustrate and track those goals (goal wheel or goal ladder) or they divide into teams to create a flyer or video about each goal.
To Collaborate on a Troop Budget, girls explore how much money is needed for each goal and turn it into numbers of boxes needed. They add this to their goal charts. They may also have a business expert come and talk about budgeting and goal setting.
In order to Reach More Customers the girls discuss the concept of networking. Then they either draw circles representing how their networks intersect and label them (friends, family, church, school etc.) The second option is create a sales plan for reaching various groups of people. The third option is to create social media posts about the cookie sale and to urge parents to share them.
The last requirement is Learn from Your Customers. Activities suggested include doing skits about some method of selling cookies (door-to-door, booths, online, telephone). Skits should include a greeting, a sales pitch, a "what not to do" and the opposite "what to do". The second option is to create a survey about why people do or don't buy Girl Scout Cookies and then to use the results to refine their pitch. The final choice to is discuss reasons people give for not buying cookies and practicing counter responses.
My Cookie Team
To Find Out About Girl Scout Cookies, VTK's choices are to play cookie charades with the cookie flavors being acted out, to have the girls work in teams to see who can answer a list of questions about cookies and the cookie sale first and correctly, or, after discussing the cookies, they create a paper chain using paper the color of the cookie boxes.
The activities for Decide How You Will Use the Cookie Money are Create a Goals Box--after discussing what they want to do with the money, girls are given four strips of paper. Each write a goal on a strip of paper and puts it in the box. After they are removed and read the girls use the other three strips to vote for their favorite three, and they use tally marks to count the votes as they are read and decide as a group how many goals to set. The second alternative is to discuss and vote on goals and then to create a vision board illustrating them. Finally the troop can go online to look for ways to spend cookie money and then create some goals.
Using the information gathered in step 2, in step 3, girls Set a Troop Budget and Package Goal. Once the budget is set, girls create cookie sales charts for themselves and the troop to track their progress toward to goal. Other choices are to create jars full of markers such as buttons, beads, rocks etc representing the number of cookies needed to achieve the goal, and moving the markers to another jar as boxes are sold. The last choice is to learn to track goals online via Digital Cookie platform.
To Build Your Team, the given activities are to role-play running a cookie booth, to get older Girl Scouts to come and give tips, or to work on team communication by having two girls sit back to back. One draws a simple drawing and then gives the other instructions on how to do so. They compare drawings. Then the leader talks about communication skills and they do it again, but this time there is a discussion back and forth between the girls during the creation of the second drawing.
For Create Your Pitch to Customers, the leader talks about pitches and then the girls either practice with each other, create a pitch and video it or create a pitch and put it on index cards.
From GGGS
Cookie CEO and Customer Insights are no longer available on VTK. However I took a look at the inserts from GGGS. These inserts do not offer three choices per requirement; rather they say to complete all five steps to earn the badge.
Cookie CEO
Troops are told to set goals for how many boxes they want to sell and to break that goal down further, such as per booth or per week. Next, girls are told to find out what tasks are needed when running a small business, such as via a speaker, and then to discuss how those jobs apply to the cookie sale. Third, they create a list of jobs associated with their cookie sale and the skills needed for each one, and then assign each girl a job based on her talents and interests. Fourth they talk about how sales people act and do some role-playing. Finally the create a way to track their sales.
Customer Insights
The first requirement is to ask an expert--a female business owner--how she finds out what her customers want, and for sales tips. Next girls are asked to go to the grocery store and to look at the displays and how they affect customer choices. Third, girls create a customer survey about Girl Scout Cookies. The fourth requirement talks about people who say "no" --the girls discuss the reasons they have heard and consider changing their pitch The fifth has girls considering responses to common customer statements.
More Comments From Me
Looking at the two sets of badges, I think the new ones are better done (besides looking a WHOLE LOT better. They give the leader ideas for activities whereas the old directions seemed to involve a whole lot of talking and not much more.
I honestly think GSUSA has done a great job of turning the necessary evil of fundraising into an opportunity for business education. I can't say these badges would be my girls' favorite of the year but most of the topics covered are things we go over every year. Yes, the basic requirements of the badges are repetitive, but basically I think they are designed with the idea that you prepare for the sale every year and since you spend a meeting or two on it, you like to give the girls a badge. I'm ok with that.
Thank you for reviewing the old and new cookie badges. I thought the designs for the actual old badges were terrible, so I was happy to see new graphics. However, I find the requirements for the new badges to be repetitive. Most girls by the time they are Juniors have already been selling cookies and earning the cookie badges for quite a few years. They don't need two more years of badges that repeat themselves. What I liked about the requirements of the old ones is that they really did focus on two different aspects of cookie sales: the first on business skills, and the second on customers/marketing. As a multilevel troop, we often have the Juniors and Cadettes lead activity stations for the Daisies and Brownies. They earn their own badges by learning how to present the information at the meeting, so it elevates their own experience.
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