It’s Cookie Season! Here is the ultimate Girl Scout cookie selling guide for leaders to make selling easier for leaders, parents and the girls.
Updated January 2023
For tips on selling Girl Scout cookies safey during a pandemic, please read this 2021 guide on how to do this.
It is a delicious time of year for most of the country…it is Girl Scout Cookie Season! Once a year, Thin Mints, Samoas, Shortbreads and other delights are sold by Girl Scout troops. For leaders who go big for this fundraising activity, it can also be one of the most stressful.
The stress is one reason why I declined to do cookie sales. My troop sold once as second year Daisies, and my Cookie Mom flaked out on me. With a co-leader who helped very little other than show up, I made the executive decision not to be the leader who is in charge of cookies and leads the troop. In fact, my Council discouraged that and told me at my leader training eleven years ago that we were not allowed to have both roles. With no one stepping up to be the Cookie Mom, we did not sell until we were 6th grade Cadettes (the year I stepped down as the main leader). A parent whose daughter transferred into my troop in fifth grade, and was the Cookie Mom in the previous troop, stepped up for the next three years.
Photo image by SPC Charles Preston Signal Photographic Branch [Public domain]
Year one was fun for the girls since they had no selling experience.
Year two had my troop drop down to five, and they still had fun with limited booth sales.
Year three-enthusiasm was way down. We did not sell cookies.
We still are using money from our first year of cookie sales. Since we are a small troop, it goes much, much further.
After blogging about Girl Scouts for ten years, I have compiled many posts to help guide your cookie sales. They are updated and can help you be on your way to a less stressful cookie selling season.
The Most Important Girl Scout Cookie Selling Tip to Remember
Leaders, it goes without saying that you invest a lot of time and energy with your girls. One stress to avoid is to avoid stressing about girls who sell very little or do not sell at all. In the Girl Scout Blue Book on page 22, it clearly states under the Owner of Assets section,
“Such assets are not the property of individuals, troops, geographic units, subordinate units, or communities within a Girl Scout council.”
In other words, TROOP MONEY IS TROOP MONEY. If you pay for one girl to go to an event, you pay all girls to attend. It is really that simple. If girls do not reach a troop goal, then they cannot do the activity or the parents need to pay more money (the troop should not pay for everything).
The Ultimate Girl Scout Cookie Selling Guide for Leaders-5 Tips for Selling Girl Scout Cookies to Avoid the Stress and Drama
I originally wrote this article in 2014, and updated it for today. So much drama is avoidable if leaders simply understand that this is a voluntary activity.
You can read the post here.
The Ultimate Girl Scout Cookie Selling Guide for Leaders-Girl Scout Cookie Selling Simplified
After reading many posts from leaders on the many Girl Scout Facebook pages to which I belong, I took the answers to a posted question…How do you simplify cookie sales? The answers became this blog post from last January.
You can read it here.
The Ultimate Girl Scout Cookie Selling Guide for Leaders-Why Leaders Need to Lighten Up About Cookie Sales
Cookie sales are about the girls and troop goals. Not achieving a goal is a life lesson. When I wrote this blog post back in 2016, I was flabbergasted at how cruel some leaders were to little girls who did not sell what the leader thought was appropriate.
You can read about stepping back and looking objectively about cookie selling in this blog post.
This blog post was published 14 months ago, and is a bit of a sequel to my post about leaders lightening up about Cookie Season. As a person who has worked weekends for the past seventeen years, getting my child to a booth sale was not always easy. That is just one of the reasons why girls may not be able to sell thousands of boxes.
In this blog post, it was my goal to enlighten leaders about why some scouts are not selling and why they need to just “let it go”.
The Ultimate Girl Scout Cookie Selling Guide for Leaders Girl Scout Cookie Booths-How Do Girl Scout Leaders Divide the Sales?
Photo by Hannah Gold
Another hot topic year after year is how to divide the amount of cookies sold when your troop does booth sale. I never understood the stress about this one, as it is such a no-brainer. For us, we totaled the number of hours each girl worked a booth. Then we took the number of cookies sold at the total of booths and divided it by the hours worked. So if our troop sold a total of 1,000 cookies at booth sales, and a girl put in 10 hours of work at booth sales, she received credit for 100 boxes. It is not the girl’s fault if inclement weather or a slow day makes sales lower than at a more active booth. The girls work toward a troop goal for booths.
In this blog post, you can read about dividing booth sales.
The Ultimate Girl Scout Cookie Selling Guide for Leaders-10 Tips to Rock Your Booth Sales
Booth sales are big money makers for troops. When you get a premium space, cases of cookies literally sell themselves. This blog post has 10 tried and true booth selling tips from leaders who have used them.
I also have a free Girl Scout cookie booth checklist to help you out.
The Ultimate Girl Scout Cookie Selling Guide for Leaders-Tips for First Time Cookie Sellers
Are you a leader who is doing her very first cookie season? Here is a blog post from my Daisy Activities blog to help newbies navigate their first year of sales.
Do you have any helpful Girl Scout selling tips to share with other leaders?
