Girl Scouts In South Jersey Enter Virtual World For Cookie Sales

When the Girl Scouts begin selling their annual cookie sales on Thursday, like everything else, it will look a little different amid the coronavirus pandemic. Girl Scouts will offer virtual, hybrid and socially responsible cookie ways to purchase cookies, including through a deal with GrubHub.

For the first time, the Girl Scouts of Central and Southern New Jersey will offer cookies for pickup and delivery through grubhub.com and the GrubHub app, according to the organization. Customers will be able to find cookies the way they might find a pizza, and order them for contactless delivery, according to Girl Scouts of Central and Southern New Jersey CEO Ginny Hill.

This provides the girls with hands-on experience managing e-commerce as local Girl Scouts will track and fulfill orders, manage inventory, and more using Grubhub's back-end technology.

“All businesses have had to adapt, and these skills are important for our girls to learn,” Hill said. “For our older girls, there’s real lessons here on how to leverage technology.”

The last year has been a series of learning lessons for everyone, including the Girl Scouts. The pandemic began when the organization’s popular cookie-selling season was already underway.

“We had strong infrastructure. We were able to go virtual within 24 hours,” Hill said. “Our first virtual event was the next Friday. It was a virtual singalong where instead of being around a campfire, they sang where they were. We have not slowed down since.”

She compared the Girl Scouts to school districts, in as much as they have been holding a mix of virtual and in-person activities, when it is safe to do so.

“We would send supplies home to the girls, and we would log on and go through the activities while they had the supplies in front of them. We would do some things outdoors, maintaining distance, as long as it was safe.”

She said one reason it was important to get back to what they were doing was because of the negative impacts of social isolation.

“Many activities they enjoy have been shut down or are non-existent,” Hill said. “That made it even more important to give them something fun to do and have peer-to-peer interaction.”

Some ways the Girl Scouts will be selling cookies this year:

• Contactless Sales and Delivery. Girls can create a completely virtual channel to become an online entrepreneur. The Smart Cookie online interface allows girls to set up shop, customers pay online, and cookies can be shipped directly to the customer's location. The interface gives the girls real business tools to run their sales, including sending e-cards, posting their unique cookie sales link on social media, or sending their link by text or email.
• Contactless Sales and Door-step delivery. With the hybrid participation option, girls can take cookie orders via Smart Cookies and deliver the orders with contactless drop-off.
• Socially Responsible In-Person Sales. With the in-person participation option, girls will load up their wagon or a parent's vehicle with cookie inventory, take in-person contactless payment using Smart Cookies' free credit card processing, and give cookies to customers on the spot.

The dawn of the new cookie season also brings a new cookie, the Toast-Yay. It is a French-toast inspired cookie dipped in delicious icing and full of flavor. The Toast-Yay will give customers a new flavor to enjoy along with Thin Mints, Carmel deLites, and Lemonades, to name a few.

More information can be found at gscsnj.org.