Girl Scouts can go digital for annual cookie sale
NEW YORK – Watch out world, the Girl Scouts are going digital to sell you cookies.
For the first time since sales began nearly 100 years, Girl Scouts of the USA will allow its young go-getters to push their wares using a mobile app or personalized websites.
But only if their scout councils and guardians say OK.
“Girls have been telling us that they want to go into this space,” said Sarah Angel-Johnson, chief digital cookie executive for the organization covering about 2 million girls. “Online is where entrepreneurship is going.”
And the best news for these digital natives: They can have cookies shipped directly to their doorstep.
More than 1 million scouts, from kindergarten-age Daisies to teens, were expected to opt in as cookie-selling season cranks up this month and the scouting organization gets digital sales underway. But the tactic is intended to enhance, not replace, the paper spreadsheets used to generate an estimated $800 million in cookie sales a year – at anywhere from $3.50 to $5 a box, depending on scout council.
There are important e-lessons here, scout officials said, such as better articulating and tracking goals, learning to handle customers and money in a new way, and more efficiently processing credit card information.
“A lot of people have asked, ‘What took you so long to get online?’ We spend a lot of time thinking how do we make this safe, scalable and smart,” Kelly Parisi, chief communications executive for Girl Scouts of the USA, said at a recent demonstration for select media.
Councils were offered one of the two platforms, but not both. For Web-based sales, scouts customize their pages, using their first names only, and email prospective customers with links to click on for orders. They also can put up videos explaining who they are and what they plan to do with their proceeds.
The mobile platform offers tabs for tracking sales and allows for the sale of bundles of different kinds of cookies. It can be used on a phone or tablet.
“They can get them quicker than waiting for me to deliver them because sometimes it takes me a long time to deliver,” 11-year-old Priscilla said at the preview. The adults at the event asked that only first names of scouts be used.
The websites will not be accessible without an email invitation, requiring the girls to build client lists. And personal information is as protected as any digits out there, for both the scouts and customers, using encryption in some cases.
Girl Scouts of Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho is not participating initially in the digital cookie sales program.
The local organization said it would evaluate the program after the current cookie season and make a decision about implementing it next year.