sale with a cookie event at the Council or Service Unit level. Girls of all ages learn by doing and these activities celebrate the 5 essential skills for girls through interactive stations and fun!
Choose a Style and Event Venue
Sleepover – Host an overnight or PJ party. Get a DJ for dancing and movies to watch. Popcorn and other snacks round out the night.
Cookie Kick-Off at an attraction or park - Host your event at a local zoo – super special if they have a Polar Bear! Set up stations near animals that have been cookie mascots in the past and use this opportunity to help girls connect with the environment! Other attractions like mini golf or a botanical garden give girls the opportunity to do extra activities with the rally and increases the value and participation.
Cookie Recipe Cook-off – Invite Local Chefs to create desserts with the Cookies. Have girls sample and vote on best desserts. Or set up an Iron Chef competition with cookies as the secret ingredient.
Pep Rally – short and sweet – meet at a central location and host the best pep rally ever. Cheers, songs, ceremonial first cookie order – all for fun. This event could also be held simultaneously in several areas of the council and streamed via the web to connect all girls together.
Preparation:
• Choose an appropriate location for your event. Be sure to find out what costs are involved and any special requirements needed.
• Advertise the event through council newsletters, flyers, or social media. Be sure to set up a method of registration so you know how many will attend.
• Coordinate with your local council
communications department to get the word out about the rally. It can be the start of the media campaign for the cookie sale.
• Model financial literacy by creating a budget for the event and cost to attend.
• Recruit help! Don’t try to do it all alone. Break jobs into small responsibilities that people can easily do. Invite teen Girl Scouts to help with set up and program activities.
• Please Note: If you are going to sample cookies or
provide refreshments, be sure to ask the girls about
any potential allergies they may have.
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Hands-On Stations
America’s Best Cookies
Girls learn all about Girl Scout Cookies and know their product.
Suggestions:
• Play a Girl Scout Cookie Matching Game. Have names of cookies on one side of a piece of paper and descriptions of the cookies on the other. Let girls match up cookie pictures with descriptions. You can download photos of the cookies from the ABC Web site at www.abcsmartcookies.com in the Art Gallery.
• Do Taste Test. Invite girls to taste the Girl Scout Cookies. To save time at the rally, pre-pack the cookies in baggies for the event. Ask girls to write their own descriptions.
• Have them rank their favorites on a large voting board!
• Design cookie bundles. Have girls design bundles of cookies and think of ways to market them. What about a Chocolate Lovers bundle for Valentine’s Day or a Tea Time bundle – what varieties would they include and why?
• “Name that Girl Scout Cookie” – Call out key cookie facts and have girls shout out the name when they recognize it. For instance – uses real citrus flavors – Cranberry Citrus Crisps!
• Cookie Bingo – set up bingo cards with cookie facts, names, etc. and play to increase girls’ knowledge of all the cookie varieties.
What to include:
• Open the event with a welcome. Create fun cheers or songs to get the enthusiasm going!
• Talk about why the Girl Scout Cookie Program is so important to Girl Scouting and the girls.
• Divide the girls into manageable groups. Explain how the event will run. Be creative and have fun!
• If girls are visiting stations and there is a time limit, use a horn or whistle to signal, about every 15 minutes, when it is time to move to the next station.
• Encourage the girls to interact and share ideas during the event. Incorporate the 5 essential skills for girls into booths: Goal Setting, Decision Making, Money Management, People Skills and Business Ethics. See notes in this guide on which skills are supported by these learning activities.
• Consider a station or two where girls can
complete all or part of their age level Cookie
Business badges. Refer to the Girl Guides for
more details.
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Safety First
Girls staying safe while selling.
Suggestions:
• Invite a local police officer to talk to girls about personal safety while selling cookies and at all times.
• Make and decorate a practice front door to a house. Have girls knock on the door and practice their selling and safety skills.
• Stay Safe Game. Divide girls at the station into groups of 4-6 girls. Give each group a picture with a big “Thumbs Up” and a big “Thumbs Down”. Girls are instructed to hold up the right symbol based on situation. Have the game moderator describe things that might happen in a cookie sale. Examples might include: customer invites girl into house (Thumbs Down) or turn money into the troop weekly for safety (Thumbs Up).
COCO for Goals and Planning!
Focuses on the valuable goal setting life skill and a key to Girl Scout Cookie success.
Suggestions:
• Set up a laptop and show girls how to register for COCO (Cookie Command), set goals, track goals and see what they can earn and do all on abcsmartcookies.com.
• Show the COCO video from ABC and some of the other girl videos on ABC’s YouTube Channel
• Ask the girls to list some cookie goals. How many packages do they want to sell?
• What do they want to learn? Make the display visual and fun.
Some ideas might be to create an igloo or iceberg with the girls’
goals or have the girls write their goals on polar bear paw prints
and create a path to success.
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Super Sales
Girls learn more about their sales goals and brainstorm ways to exceed goals.
Suggestions:
• Know Your Product and Pricing Game. Break girls up into teams of 2 to 4 girls and give each team a half-page answer sheet. Create “flash cards” depicting packages of cookies in varying amounts and boxes with money. For instance, a flash card could show 5 boxes of cookies. The question would be, “How much will these cookies cost?”
Your answer might be $17.50 if you are at $3.50 a box, or $20.00 if you are at $4.00 a box. Hold up each card (could also be done as a PowerPoint if indoors) for just a few seconds and give the teams 10 seconds to write an answer.
• Brainstorm all the things girls can do to reach their sales goals. Post the steps on a large flipchart. Ideas might be:
serve samples at a booth sale, sell at a special event, ask your mom and dad to take you to their workplace so you can sell cookies to their co-workers, etc.
• Set up sample booth sales or have items available for girls set up a booth. Role-play proper booth sale etiquette and good selling techniques. Offer prizes for role-playing or super selling techniques.
• Have girls figure out how many boxes they need to sell to support various activities. Personalize it to your council. For instance, if a troop wanted to do a weekend campout at one of your camp facilities, how much would that weekend cost per girl (include costs like rental of the facility, food costs, supplies, etc.) Have each troop pick the activities they want to do and add up the number of boxes they need to sell per girl and total to reach their goal. Include a variety of activities and include community service projects and purchases of end of year supplies like badges and pins. Use the ABC Troop budgeting worksheet as a reference.
Just for Fun
Design a Bandana
Give girls 12 x 12 blank sheets of paper and have them design a bandana that could be printed and sold in your council shop
Photo Booth
Set up a photo booth with cookie images in the background and have a huggable polar bear mascot on hand for photos. Encourage girls to use these photos with their order cards if mom and dad help by posting order cards at work.
Thank You Art
Have girls create Thank You Cards
at the rally to give to store managers
who provide booth locations or for
customers who buy cookies.
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What can a Girl do?
Encourages girls to think about and practice giving back to their community during the cookie sale.
Suggestions:
• Since our Mascots, Snowball and CoCo reside in a cold climate; consider a warm coat/blanket drive as part of your rally. Partner with a local shelter or warming center to receive the donations.
• Popular in Alaska, totem poles tell a story. Create a totem pole out of materials typically discarded after the cookie sale. Collect empty boxes and cases and use the film wraps as decorations. Display your totems at booth sales or in the council office
• Highlight your cookie share project by inviting representatives of the organizations you support. Military personnel can share stories of how meaningful the “taste of home” is or food banks can talk about how cookies add something special to food baskets.
• Talk about how cookie sales can support other community service projects. Have girls and troops post their community service projects on a wall for all to see.
• Have a representative of your local zoo visit to talk about the polar bear and how they are being affected by changes in climate. Consider a service project for your zoo to support their polar bears.
Activity Ideas
Cookie Twister
Put a new twist on an old favorite!
Use a Twister game or make your own using fabric, a tarp or a large bed sheet. Instead of colors, use cookies as the circles on the game board.
Place the names of the cookies on the spinners. So, put your left hand on Lemonades and your right foot on
Game ShowBonanza
Make learning even more fun by borrowing from a favorite game show format. You can play 1 versus 100, Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader or
