jc2008

Has anyone used the Michael Beck method for selling popcorn? I cant seem to google any semi-real reviews of it.

(Michael Beck does presentations for Campmasters and he can make you want to drink the koolaid

We did tables at the teacher meet and greets this year. We had parents fill out a form if they were interested in Cub Scouting and a nice little checkbox if they were interested in volunteering for den leader or assistant den leader. Actually got a lot of people marking that checkbox!

We had a posterboard with large pictures of the kids from last year and laptops running slide shows. We also had rocks. At the Dollar Tree you can get a bag of River rocks for $1 and there are like 30 or 40 rocks in that bag. We drew animal prints on the rocks with permanent marker and a printed out guide on the table to which animal made what print and the kids could match them up. We had like 2-3 bags of rocks so we let the kids pick out one of the rocks to take home with them after they did the matching. It got the kids engaged and they got a 'souvenir' rock to take home (all boys love rocks it seems).

Our first roundups are this week. We will probably also have another roundup after the open houses at the beginning of September as well, as our leaders also do a presentation at the open houses.

Thanks a lot Polaris! I was worried we didn't have a good spot. Well its my first time and I don't think we should have too much trouble beating the $3k that the pack made last year with nearly 40-50 boys.

Took me this long to find out all of the information for the popcorn stuff. They finally got everything sorted with Campmasters and started having informational meetings last month.

We do have several council incentives, but they are pretty big ticket incentives, ie $1000 sold gets you free Day Camp, $1600 sold gets you a $250 gift card. These are incentives on top of what Campmasters gives us. I guess I never really saw any of the council incentives last year since our top seller was around $600 in our pack. I plan to try to motivate the kids to do better this year though!

The way the money is split is we get 25% + 5% if we fulfill a few requirements (hand in forms on time, 50% participation, attend kickoff etc), +2-5% based on how much we increase our sales from last year. So a possible 35%. I believe that with the proper motivation we can easily increase our sales by 30% from last year and earn the extra 5%.

They also have a prize list, which is basically lots of little stuff, ie sell $35 you get a keychain, $75 you get some toy etcetc. We can choose to opt out of this prize list (this doesnt effect the council/large campmaster incentives) and get an extra 3%. I am thinking it would be best to take the 3% because then we can just buy our own prizes/trophies and having to go through a possible 40-50 kids and have them pick prizes out of the list would be a bit much clerical work and easy to make errors on i think?

I had quite a shock when I called our local grocery store to get a date in October to sell popcorn and they said they had been booked up since January for aug/sept/oct !!!

I had no idea in January I would be in charge of the popcorn, but this year I am going to call 7 months in advance!

I ended up getting us a spot at Lowes for the September distribution date. Anyone ever sold at lowes/home depot type store? Our lowes is located in the same parking lot as Walmart (I called walmart also, but they were booked for that day, and the lady in charge said they had been booked for a long while as well).

I am just hoping since its a store full of mostly men, that some of them might have been boy scouts and want to buy from our kids This will be my first ever show and sell of any time, so any hints/tips/tricks are appreciated. (we are cub scouts)

PS one more question, I have read on various internet sites, that people buy the boxes of microwave popcorn and break them up to sell for $1 a pack. My two questions about this are:

1. Are you allowed to do this?

2. I *think* at a show and sell, that I wouldn't want to have a $1 option as people who might have spent $10 for a tin of popcorn will opt for the $1 instead and you need to sell to 10 people to get $10 rather than one person to get $10. Any thoughts on this?(This message has been edited by jc2008)

Speaking from the other side of the coin (Cub scouts), can your troop offer their help to Cub Scout packs in the area? We ask troops to come in and help us with certain events and it lets the Webelos 1 and 2 get to know the older boys and helps them decide where they want to go when they cross over to boy scouts.

We actually have a troop coming in this fall to help us with a 4 hour day camp we are doing for the cubs. They will come in and help run events and I love having the boy scouts there as it shows our cubs that its still cool and fun to be a boy scout after cub scouting

I don't think moderators/admin here exist. Took me like 5 months to get an account because the sign up page would just cause errors and emailed repeatedly with no response. Finally, one day the sign up page magically worked for me

This is our first year with campmasters and they have a $10 caramel popcorn TIN. At least it should look a bit more valuable than a box of microwave popcorn, and $10 is a good price point that won't scare off too many people.

I was thinking of splitting up the boxes of 20 for $20 to sell for $1 each. Trying to sell one bag of microwave popcorn for $2 would be a bit too much imo. But if the popcorn was chocolate or caramel, that would be a great price point.

Yeah, he didn't exactly sign up for this, its more like the guys in charge of our district/council are noticing him and getting him more involved. We show up for everything (round tables/council events/pack events/district events) and are usually one of the first to arrive and last to leave. This is our second year in cubs. My husband was involved in scouts all throughout his youth. His mom was a Guide leader (the UK version of girl scouts) and he got to Queen's Scout (UK version of Eagle Scout). The methods are a little different over here from how he grew up in UK, but the premise and core values are the same.

I am just wondering how taxing this will be on his time/energy. We work together on the Den. I normally make the den meeting schedule of what we will be doing/working towards and he will take charge and lead it.

Thanks for the information of what will be required of him. From what he was told, he will have 3 packs in our town to go look in on and be available to. I guess we can just see how it goes this fall. He isn't taking the job from anyone else, if he wasn't doing it, no one would be.

At the Council Calendar planning meeting last spring, my husband got asked to be a Unit Commissioner. He will go to the specific training this fall. We run my son's den and plan to take on a few other things this year (helping with the popcorn and day camp planning/organization).

Can anyone with first hand experience at this job elaborate a little more on what it actually entails, or SHOULD entail? Apparently our district hasn't really had unit commissioners in a while, I have never seen one at a pack meeting at least Googling it brings up things like helping webelos get into scout troops, making sure everyone is registered etc. Its all pretty broad, as how will one guy who visits the packs once a month be able to facilitate these kinds of things? Exactly how involved is this position?

Thanks a lot!

Are you sure the leader even notices? I know our son can get into his spoiled or bad boy act and my husband is the den leader. If I wasn't there I don't think he would even notice the little things my son does that may not be quite right. He is too busy trying to lead as a whole rather than pay attention to one child. Luckily I am there to correct our son, but if i wasn't it would probably be the same situation.

But most of our parents are and do correct/guide the children to the right behaviors. Of course our parents consist of police officers, child social worker, teacher, full time mom etc

Its very common for people to just not respond. I do our Den's email, which is only 8 families. But even with the 8 families I often have to do several emails to get them to reply if they will/will not attend. I usually send the first email, get a few responses, then i send out another email saying I still have not heard from X, Y or Z yet if they will be attending, and this usually gets the parents to respond at this point.

I did make a point at one of the den meetings, that if they will not be attending a den meeting or event to email me and let me know so I know how many kids to prepare for.

Doing it pack wide must be a nightmare. The only suggestion I would have is to put the invitation out to your Den Leaders, then contact them individually and ask how many from their Den will be attending. This will break down the work and make personal communication a bit easier to all the families.

This is the first year with Campmasters. We did trails end last year.

But thanks everyone, have a lot of good questions to bring to the council popcorn informational meeting next week and to the cubmaster later this week.

Thanks for all the helpful replies. There is a popcorn meeting on may 29th for our council which I am attending. But I would like to have a lot of questions to ask, which is why I wanted to discuss it here first. I am sure I will learn there about the council having show and sell or if we need to front for the show and sell as a pack, but I also know now to ask just in case!

The only incentive we had last year were a few giftcards and a big watergun. I really don't think half the kids noticed it. And I know being a new tiger pack, only one of our families actually sold. The rest of us didn't realize how integral it was to the program, like i said the brochures were just passed out at our very first packmeeting when we were all still getting our footing. I plan to run the program a bit more personalized. We have around 6 dens and I plan to visit each one, not just present at the pack meeting where people don't really pay much attention.

I am very interested in the pack paying for things for the kids like summer camp or activities. Like i said, our pack only paid for leader training and belt loops/advancement stuff. Every other activity, even the Fall Encampment Saturday dinner, we had to pay individually for.

Campmasters.org offers online sales. Is anyone familiar with this company? or sold from them before? Do the online sales go to the pack and council or only the council if you know?

thanks again for all the help! Its going to be quite an eventful year!

I am thinking of taking over the popcorn kernel position for our pack. This is my second year (my son will be in wolves) and last years popcorn sale was not very advertised within the pack. We had two new tiger dens and there was a short 2min presentation by the popcorn kernels husband at our first pack meeting which was hectic/confusing for most of us first time tigers.

This year I think it would be very important to actually make a small presentation at the Den meetings, especially for the new tigers, and have some great incentives for the kids to want to participate.

So basically my questions are these, for more experiences popcorn people:

1. Our pack has never really done a show and sell, they only order what people preorder. When you do a show and sell, say at a grocery store or walmart, how much do you usually preorder for this? We will be with campmasters and their cheapest tin of popcorn is $10, and i think that would be a good and easy price point to sell in front of a store?

2. Rewarding the kids. The rewards last year were giftcards or some sort of cheesy watergun (I don't think 6-9 year old boys care much about giftcards). I believe they were given by the council or the popcorn company. It was not something done by our pack. But as a pack we can do special rewards as well? I was thinking along the lines of trophies. Having a few trophies out during the popcorn presentation to the kids would give them a visual and an actual award to achieve. Is that allowed?

3. Trying to keep selling popcorn in the mind of the parents/kids throughout the month or so that we sell it for. One of the ways I thought to achieve this was to give the kids postcards addressed to me and when they achieve the goal on the postcard, they would mail it to me. Kids who mailed all the postcards to me over the month would also get a special trophy/award. The goals on the postcards would be:

A] Ask your Parents

B] Ask 10 neighbors

C] Ask Mom/Dad to take the order sheet to work/gym/club

D] Ask at your sports/church/other activity places

I took those 'goals' from one of the popcorn selling tip sheets.

I think with how lax our pack has been in the past from popcorn sales (we don't really do anything but buy belt loops + pay for training , no events), that it would take a bit more involvement and motivation from the popcorn kernel.

Any advice/comments on my ideas/questions above? Am I just being too gung-ho over selling overpriced popcorn tins?