Diya Mehta has been a Girl Scout for five years reaching the cadet level. This year, during her seventh-grade year at Flagstaff Academy, she plans to expand her cookie business.
From the start of the pandemic, Girl Scouts everywhere had to take a moment to rethink how to sell cookies. Typically, girls would travel from door to door or set up shop outside businesses, hoping to convince shoppers to take home a delicious treat.
As the largest girl-led business in the world, simply canceling cookie sales for a year was not in the cards. Girl Scouts depend on the revenue from these sales to fund learning experiences and community projects for their troops.
Instead of giving up and chalking up another defeat by the coronavirus, Girl Scouts, including Mehta, decided to branch out in how they sold cookies.
“This is more than just a fundraiser, the girls are learning business skills. They learn goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills and business ethics. Each of these girls is running their own small business,” said Helen Henrichs, marketing and communications manager for Girl Scouts of Colorado.
Instead of giving up on past methods, Mehta and members of her troop, adapted in order to not spread the coronavirus. In the past, they would knock on doors in their neighborhoods asking if anyone wanted to buy cookies.
In 2020, Mehta made door tags that she hung on doorknobs inviting neighbors to purchase cookies at their leisure. On the tags, Mehta included contact information so partons could make their purchases via text or email. Once the order was placed, Mehta would place the order on the porch and text the recipient to let them know their cookies had been delivered.
After building some skills in coding through the Girl Scouts, Mehta also decided to build a website to further her reach. This link was shared through her family’s social media accounts, alerting close friends and family that it was again time to buy, Mehta said.
Each cookie season, prior to COVID, it was commonplace to see a group of Girl Scouts standing at booths in front of stores everywhere. Mehta said her troop decided not to do this last year, but didn’t stop her from setting up her own booth in her neighborhood, she said.
“It was a little hard at first,” Mehta said, “... we still didn’t know how to sell to other people that didn’t live in my neighborhood.”
“I feel like our girls were very innovative this year,” Henrichs said.
Girl Scouts of America encourages young girls to develop their own small businesses as they gear up for another cookie season. Of the many supports offered by the organization, girls are able to use a Digital Cookie® OR Smart Cookies platform to boost local sales.
The Digital Cookie® platform allows scouts the opportunity to invite cookie buyers to their personal cookie-selling websites. Buyers can purchase cookies right from the site and choose how they wish their cookies to be delivered.
In addition to being a purchasing platform, Digital Cookie® contains tools to support the girls in their small business by teaching marketing, budgeting and resource allocation skills. Girls also are able to set goals for themselves.
Each year Mehta sets a goal to sell more cookies than she did the prior year. Although the pandemic brought on challenges to reaching customers, she sold 427 boxes of cookies. In previous years the maximum number of boxes she sold was around 350, she said.
“I sold way more than I usually do, so I think I am going to use these methods next season, also,” Mehta said as she spends approximately the next 130 days preparing for the next cookie sales season.
After an innovative season of selling cookies, Girl Scouts created 28 new badges this year. Of these 28, several are designed to encourage young girls to explore entrepreneurship by learning important skills such as collaborative work, goal setting and using digital marketing, Hendrichs said.
“We know they’re our future leaders and all of these skills are applicable for more than just business … it’s giving the girls confidence to be the leaders we need for tomorrow. Our girls are truly changing the world,” Hendrichs said.
Correction: Diya's name was misspelled and corrected.
