Girls practice placing orders using Digital Cookie, a new addition to the Girl Scout Cookie Program. Girl Scouts of the USA
Those station wagons loaded with Thin Mints and Samoas parked outside your local grocery store, surrounded by pint-sized, badge-bedecked businesswomen, may soon be a thing of the past. The Girl Scouts are going digital.
On Monday, the non-profit organization, which sells $800 million worth of cookies every year, announced the launch of its Digital Cookie program, which lets scouts sell the sugary treats online for the first time in the organization’s 102-year history. The Digital Cookie program is a long (long) time coming, but one that Girl Scouts executives hope will help give girls a more contemporary sense of what it takes to run a business in a world that’s growing ever more obsessed with e-commerce and mobile commerce.
“Online is where entrepreneurship is going, and it’s hard to think of brick and mortar without having that online component,” says Kelly Parisi, vice president of communications for Girl Scouts of the USA. “Girls are digital natives, and they’ve been telling us they want to go into this space.”
Parisi knows that many people might see this change as a long time coming. “A lot of people have asked: ‘What took you so long?'” she says. But she explains that the non-profit needed to take extra precautions to ensure the safety of its scouts. That and the fact that the organization is comprised of 112 individual chapters, who get their cookies from two different bakeries, made the Digital Cookie program a massive logistical undertaking. Plus, Parisi says, the leadership team wanted to make sure that they could build an online portal for the girls that would still educate them in the kind of marketing and communications skills they get in person.
“This isn’t just a fundraiser,” she says. “This is really an educational experience for girls.”
Knowing a Girl Scout
On the Digital Cookie platform, girls can set up their own webpages, with a unique URL. They can customize it with a photo and write an introductory letter to customers about what they’ll do with the earnings and what they hope to learn from the experience. The girls also have access to a sales dashboard, where they can track year over year sales, manage their sales goals, and track orders that customers have placed through their website. Before any of this goes live to the public, however, it must be approved by the girl’s parent, to ensure no risky identifying information, like her last name, phone number, or address, is on the page.
“We don’t want a customer being able to contact the girls from the general public,” says Sarah Angel-Johnson, chief digital cookie executive. That means to place an order online, you still have to know a Girl Scout, or at least someone willing to share a Girl Scout’s webpage with you.
Still, Parisi notes that in-person sales are still a major part of the cookie selling experience. “Booth sales on a busy Saturday afternoon on a college campus or in front of your local grocery store are big business for girls,” she says. “That’s still a corner stone of the Girl Scout Cookie program.”
Mobile Payments Too
That’s why the organization is also rolling out a mobile payment product the girls can use. It allows them to take credit card orders in-person using a phone or tablet. Customers can either swipe their card through a credit card reader, if the Girl Scout has one, or enter their credit card information manually. This is exactly the kind of thing that tech savvy Scouts have been wanting for years. “We always have people asking, ‘Do you only take cash?’ And then they have to run out to get money, and then maybe we sell the cookies,” says one Girl Scout named Marie Teresa.
But perhaps the most important part of the program is that it will allow girls to sell cookies to faraway friends and family, which will, in turn, raise more money for the organization, whose membership has dwindled in recent years. I spoke with one tiny New York City-based Scout, who told me she’d never been able to send cookies to her grandmother. Now she can. “She lives in a different country,” she told me. “She’s in California.”
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