Girl Scout Cookie Marketing: Kid-Led and Kid-Made Cookie Sale Signage and Campaigns

Local Girl Scout cookie prices rose from $5 a box to $6 a box this year. I'm not sad about the price increase, because it means that troops are receiving an additional 27 cents profit from each box, up from 75 cents per box in the last few years to $1.02 per box this year. That's going to lead to at least an extra $490 for my troop after every kid meets their selling goal, all with the same output of time and labor!

What I AM sad about is going through all the kid-created Girl Scout cookie sale signage that the troop has made over the past few years, tossing everything that reads $5. 

That 4 BOXES FOR $20 sign that one kid dreamed up and we're pretty sure has resulted in countless upsells? Gone, sigh! I guess we could replace it with 5 BOXES FOR $30, but it doesn't really have the same ring to it. The same with SOLD BY THE CASE FOR $60. Maybe I'll just cut the price part off...

When my troop led our Service Unit's Cookie Rally for years, we always set up a station to teach attendees how to craft a marketing message and walked them through creating a good cookie sale sign to use at cookie booths. Marketing is such an accessible way for even the youngest Daisies to participate, because, come on, even kindergartners know all about ads and commercials.

And if a kid continues in Girl Scouts, cookie sales are a great way for them to practice long-term problem-solving. Every year kids can evaluate the previous year's sale and replace or revise what didn't work, improve on what they created when they were younger now that they're older and have more sophisticated understanding and skills, and, yes, scrap a well-loved material and reimagine it when prices go up. 

Here we've got individual Girl Scout thank-you notes to include with Girl Delivery cookies; door hangers with links to a kid's Digital Cookie site, small "business cards" that the kids hand out at cookie booths with every purchase, and nicer thank-you cards that the troop gives to businesses that host our cookie booths--accompanying a box of Girl Scout cookies, of course!

COOKIE BOOTH MARKETING

DO: 

• high-quality, kid-designed, kid-made table cover
• removable, laminated payment and price signs
• temporary displays and hand-outs for special reasons

DON'T:

• big tabletop displays
• gimmicks with big kids
• prizes or thank-you gifts or fancy shopping bags--anything that you spend troop money on

My busy high school Girl Scouts don't have to call a yearly meeting just to create their cookie booth displays, because when they were young we took the time to make eye-catching, child-led displays that were made with quality materials and have lasted for years. 

In the early years, we did a LOT of trial-and error, and most of what we tried didn't stick for more than a year or two. Here's a booth from 2015:

The kids cobbled together the table cover during an afternoon meeting--it wasn't beautiful, but it was entirely kid-designed and kid-made and their best effort at the time! I firmly believe that there is nothing wrong with displays that look VERY kid-made--in fact, kids ought to be designing and building the booth displays almost completely by themselves, and the more that it looks like they have, as unpolished and age-appropriate as it is, the better customers like it. I know we troop leaders always say that "the cookies sell themselves," but that's because most customers aren't buying cookies just to buy cookies--they're buying cookies to support the kids! The more that customers can tell that kids are leading the project, the more customers will support them.

The kids spent a few years crafting highly-detailed and embellished tabletop displays featuring a cookie menu and information about our donation recipients, and I do think that those were good in their younger years, when the kids often needed that visual prompt to remember the cookie names and descriptions, etc. But it was always just one more thing to load and unload and carry and set up and take down, and if the booth was windy it would be unstable, and kids couldn't see over it if they were behind the table, and definitely couldn't conduct a transaction over it, so I am NOT sad that they eventually stopped wanting to create those massive displays. They occasionally do make and display posters with targeted marketing messages, but they just do that on posterboard now, sometimes reinforced with corrugated cardboard, and it works fine!

The kids also had a lot of fun thinking up and making that sandwich board and wearing it the first year or two we sold cookies. It was good to have one more job for a kid during those early years when they couldn't always conduct transactions independently or were sometimes too shy to talk to customers. I stored it behind a dresser in between cookie seasons, and I thought it was adorable WAY longer than the kids did. Honestly, I think a kid might have trashed it behind my back, because I feel like it just disappeared one day!

The best displays that the kids made are the two felt table covers that they all worked together to make, just one year after that first cobbled-together one. A canvas drop cloth would also work for this, but I used felt for each table cover, long enough to fit our six-foot folding table, and wide enough to cover the top of the table and all the way to the ground in front--that's to hide all the crap we store under the table, mwa-ha-ha!

I had loads of stash felt at the time, so I plugged in all my hot glue guns, brought out all that felt and all the scissors, and basically just let the kids have at it. What they created is, I think, the cutest table cover that I have ever seen. It's clearly kid-designed and kid-made, but also it's clear, visually distinctive, and, I think, very well designed. You can definitely tell that the kids made it when they were practically babies, but it's sweet and lovely enough that they've never, great big teenagers that they are, requested that we make something to replace it with. 

Of course, they could just be remembering how much effort they put into the first one and how much work it would be to make a new one, but that's one of the reasons why we do our work well the first time!

Over the years, the kids have tried various other cookie booth marketing campaigns, from offering "prizes" to people who bought a certain number of boxes (this was the year that Rainbow Loom bracelets were on trend, so guess what the prizes were...), to handing out free samples, to including free cookie-themed valentines in our pre-Valentine's Day booths, to putting everyone's purchases into lovely brown paper gift bags. All those tactics did keep squirrely little kids busy, and encouraged young Girl Scouts to have positive customer interactions when some of them were very shy, but I wouldn't say that they ever increased sales. If a troop parent wanted to organize a cute cookie booth gimmick that the kids seemed into, then we'd go with it, but it wasn't worth spending troop money on.

DOOR-TO-DOOR SIGNAGE

DO:

• door hanger with QR code/link to Digital Cookie

DON'T:

• anything that has a cell number, email address, or contact info other than that Digital Cookie link

Door-to-door Girl Scout cookie sales have come a long way since the olden days of walking around and ringing doorbells and writing pre-orders on a clipboard! Here are the old-school door hangers and order clipboards that my kids used way back in the day:

I'd even keep their spelling mistakes. Kid-made, amiright?

The kids still use these clipboards for out-and-about activities that require a portable writing surface.

Now, thanks to Digital Cookie and its Girl-Delivered feature, the kids only have to walk around neighborhoods and leave door hangers. People can pick them up at their leisure, click on a kid's Digital Cookie site at their leisure, order cookies, and the Girl Scout can just swing by and pop their order on their porch. It's a whole new wonderful world that we live in!

With all the technology, the kids' door hangers do look more polished and less kid-designed. It's age-appropriate for my teenagers, but if I still had a troop of little ones, I'd still be encouraging them to hand-draw their own marketing images and slogans to add to the door hanger graphics.

INDIVIDUAL GIRL SCOUT SIGNAGE

DO:

• digital graphic for social media marketing
• Girl Scout photo for Digital Cookie
• yard sign
• flyers to pass out in person
• thank-you notes to special customers (and grandparents!)

DON'T:

• elaborate thank-you notes to everyone (good etiquette, but doesn't bring additional sales)
• off-season marketing (unless it's to earn a badge, ahem)

There is so much room for personality here! Kids can make all kinds of signage for their personal cookie sales, depending on what they think will be useful. Several years ago, my younger kid made this webcomic for me to use when promoting her brand-new Digital Cookie site on my social media, and it's still my favorite thing:

She also experimented with making a cute Girl Scout avatar for her Digital Cookie site--

--but ultimate decided (correctly, I think), that it was more effective to use a real photo of her doing something Girl Scouty and awesome.

Digital Cookie has also made it a LOT easier to promote Girl Scout cookies to the neighborhood. Matt took my kid's basic door hanger design, rearranged and tiled it, and printed it. I laminated the pages--

--assembled them--

--and just like that, we've got a yard sign!

The kids have always written thank-you notes to family members and family friends who've bought cookies from them, but instead of something similar for Girl Delivery customers, they use just a simple printed handout that thanks the customer for supporting Girl Scouts, and gives the QR code for their Digital Cookie site so they can order more. Again, if I had younger kids, I'd have them handwrite or draw a thank-graphic to put onto that flyer, but a completely digitally designed product is teenager-appropriate. Everyone knows that teens know how to use Photoshop!

Speaking of Photoshop... one year, Matt helped my older kid create this cookie-themed Christmas postcards as part of earning the Girl Scout Senior Customer Loyalty badge:

I thought those badge activities were really hit-or-miss--some of the activities were marvelous and tangibly amped up her communication and business skills, and some were completely worthless. This one was... well, it only cost us a few postcard stamps, ahem.

TROOP SIGNAGE

Girl Scouts can collaborate on troop-level signage that they can use at cookie booths or during their own marketing and publicity. I handle this with my troop by seeing if there's a kid who needs to make something to earn a cookie business badge that we're not earning as a troop, or who just wants to volunteer to make something. The display in the above photo was a marketing tool for the troop's push to collect a donated box of Girl Scout cookies for every single participant in our community's weekend meals program for children experiencing food insecurity. A kid wrote up a marketing message, I added a photo I took of the troop volunteering with this program, and Matt made it into a poster that also had a counter to our goal. I don't think the poster alone would have necessarily increased donations, but it was a great reminder to the kids that they really needed to promote their campaign to customers, and seeing how many boxes they still needed to solicit was good incentive to actually do it!

Donation cans are kind of my collective cookie booth nemesis. They get SO banged up every year, and I get SO tired of sourcing good cans and getting kids to volunteer to decorate them every single year. Eventually, I had the brilliant idea of asking a kid if they could design just one model can wrap for each of our causes, and now I just have to print a new can wrap whenever the old can gets destroyed:

That reminds me that I should ask a kid to design a troop donation can wrap this week, because all of our troop donation cans are TRASHED!!!

Kids can also use the cookie booth space to bring awareness to any individual or troop Girl Scout project that is utilizing cookie profits for its funding. One year, my kid made these brochures to bring awareness to her Silver Award Take Action Project:

Again, I don't know if the brochures alone increased cookie sales, but they were a good way to encourage the kids to initiate better conversations with customers, which in turn reminded customers of tangible ways that their purchase supports kids, and in turn I do think that it got more donations put in our troop donation can.

I'm just now realizing, as I write this, that the troop's most successful marketing tools have been the ones that encouraged the kids' engagement, and didn't necessarily focus on sales or even the customers themselves. Displays that the kids clearly put a ton of interest and effort into attract customers, displays that show how kids have used cookie profits to engage in enriching activities inspire customers, kid-made displays charm customers, and kid-created marketing campaigns are used by the kids to help them talk to and otherwise interact with customers.

Okay, off to see which troop kids have time to design a new troop donation can wrap!

P.S. Want to read more about Girl Scout cookie booth math and marketing? Here's my complete series (so far!):

• Girl Scout Cookie Booth Analytics, or, Math Helps Girl Scouts Sell More Cookies!
• My Very Own Girl Scout Cookie Booth Calculator: How Many Cookies to Order for Booth Sales
• Girl Scout Cookie Booth Math: Equal It Out and Assign It Fairly
• Girl Scout Cookie Marketing: Kid-Led and Kid-Made Signage and Campaigns

P.P.S. Want to know more about all the weird math I have my kids do, as well as our other wanderings and wonderings? Check out my Facebook page!