This year GSUSA retired the ugly screen-printed cookie badges and came out with two new embroidered badges. This post will take a look at both the new and old badges.
My Cookie Customers
Requirements:
According to Badge Explorer, for this new badge, Brownies will find out how to get new customers and keep them coming back. The five short steps are:
- Learn about Girl Scout Cookies
- Decide how to use your cookie money
- Find customers
- Handle money and make change
- Connect with customers
When Brownies earn this badge, they will know how to find new customers and talk to them about their cookie business.
Activities
To Learn about Girl Scout Cookies VTK suggests making flashcards of cookie names on one side, descriptions on the other, or making a notebook with cookie information or acting as detective and finding the answers to questions about cookies.
Decide how to use your cookie money is the goal-setting activity. After discussing goals the troop either draws a target illustrating the number of boxes needed for each goal, creates cheers for sales updates and goals reached or make personal goal sticks to track individual progress and a troop stick to track troop progress. These are paint stirrers with numbers on them with progress tracked by moving a rubber band.
After a discussion about where to find customers, girls either make a video to send to potential customers, make lists of potential customers by name or relationship (mom's tennis club) or work on a mural showing places in the community where customers could be.
To learn to handle money and make change, girls either do a pretend cookie booth and practice paying and making change, draw a calculator and then do a pretend cookie booth or they look at the customer side of the digital cookie platform, put cookies in the cart and then practice paying for them or making change.
To Connect with Customers, Brownies talk about cookies and then go over a "Pitch Pointers" worksheet and then write and practice a sales pitch. The second option is to create a video and the final one is to make thank-you notes.
Cookie Decision Maker
Requirements
Badge Explorer says the purpose of this new badge is that Brownies will learn to think like entrepreneurs by making decisions for their cookie business. The five short steps are:
- Get to know your Girl Scout Cookie business
- Decide on your giving goal
- Build your team
- Practice handling money and tracking sales
- Show your cookie spirit!
When Brownies earn this badge, they will know how to make decisions that help their business succeed.
Activities
To get to know Girl Scout Cookies girls either create quiz questions on index cards and quiz each other, or make cookie lanyards with cookie pictures on one said and fact on the other or they practice with their digital platform.
After discussing a giving goal girls can vote by putting tokens in paper bags, or by making a poster about their donation goals or they make a bottle into a goal tracker.
Girls discuss working as a team and jobs that need to be done with a cookie booth to Build a team. Then they either role-play working a cookie booth, get an older girl to talk to them about working a cookie booth or do team building exercises such as working with a group to use your bodies to spell cookie-related words.
To practice handling money and tracking sales, girls make graphs or charts to track sales, do a pretend cookie booth and handle play money or use the online platform to track their sales.
Showing cookie spirit is done by creating cookie costumes, coming up with a song or dance or decorating a cookie booth.
Give Back
The retired Give Back Badge said its purpose was to use the skills learned in the Philanthropist badge to come up with ideas about how to give back with some of the cookie money. The five steps were:
- Find out about businesses that give back
- Set a giving goal
- Involve your customers
- Practice giving back
- Tell your customers how they helped
Activities
Unlike the new badges which offer three activities per requirement, the old badges gave only one per requirement. For Give Back, girls were to find a business that donates money to help others and to see if the business could use their help. Girls then set a goal for the number of boxes they wanted to sell. During the sale girls were to ask customers about how the community could be improved, and were to write down the answers to help them find Take Action projects. Next they were to make a budget for a take action or community service project, or make a plan on how to get customers to donate cookies. Finally they wrote a letter to customers letting them know how they (customers) helped make the world a better place.
Meet My Customers
Requirements
The Retired Meet My Customers badge said that girls use what they learned from the Money Manager badge to make sure their cookie customers enjoyed buying from them. The five steps were:
- Find out about where your customers are
- Talk to some customers
- Practice handling money and making change
- Role-play good customer relations
- Thank your customers
When girls earned this badge, they would know how to find customers and would be comfortable selling to them.
Activities
For this badge, girls discuss where they can find customers and make a list of potential customers. They practice selling to friends and family and practice making change. They role play parts of the sale and write thank-you notes.
VTK Resources
VTK provides these resources:
- Tell your customers: a sheet on which girls can write their personal and troop goals
- Get Creative: A sheet on which girls draw themselves selling cookies and all the places they can sell cookies
- Pitch Pointers: Lists five things to include in a pitch and gives room to write one
- Words to Know: Gives the following words and definitions: brainstorm, cookie entrepreneur, credit card, digital cookie/smart cookie, entrepreneur, feedback, order card, package goal, troop goal and order card.
- Cookie Program Family Meeting Guide: A 17 page guide to running a family meeting about the cookie program
- Cookie Entrepreneur Family Pin Requirements. Two pages long
- Digital Marketing Tips
- Internet Safety Pledge
- Girl Scout Promise and Law
My Comments
There really doesn't seem to much difference between the two current badges, and I'm sure the idea is that you will do one each year. The Family Cookie Pin seems to be yet another repeat of the same concepts. The activities are similar to those offered for the Junior Cookie badges so that should make using them with a multi-level group easier.
No comments:
Post a Comment