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Have to ask why.


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Okay, in the past few days on our local TV stations there have been two area wide pieces on Girl Scout Cookies, including phone numbers and web links. Also have been similar items in the LA Times, and a couple of more local papers. this morning it is on "Good Morning America".

 

This is great. My question is why cannot BSA get similar coverage on occasion, whether it be Popcorn, or some other widely done thing, like "Scouting for Food"?

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GS Cookies are $4.00 a box.  They taste good. BS popcorn has a higher buy-in, and tastes like flavored cardboard.

On our streets the first customer question when asked to buy popcorn is "How much?" often followed by "No way!"  Sell the camp angle all you want, few people are interested in plopping down $10 for 4

Peanut butter jars with the massive indentation at the bottom.

Ian's right.  There's a long history of Girl Scout cookies as part of the American culture.  Boy Scouts, on the other hand, help old ladies across the street and they don't get paid for doing Good Turns.

 

And don't worry about the PR media image of the Girl Scouts, according to my daughter, GS/USA Gold Award recipient, the cookie sale effort around here is run by the "Pigtail Mafia".  :)

 

I have learned how to make thin mints on my own, but the Samoans/Tag-alongs, or whatever they call them is a bit too tedious, so I stock up on them.  The prices are up, the weight/count is down, and the quality is reduced, but they still sell like hotcakes.

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Okay, in the past few days on our local TV stations there have been two area wide pieces on Girl Scout Cookies, including phone numbers and web links. Also have been similar items in the LA Times, and a couple of more local papers. this morning it is on "Good Morning America".

 

This is great. My question is why cannot BSA get similar coverage on occasion, whether it be Popcorn, or some other widely done thing, like "Scouting for Food"?

 

The Girl Scouts push 200 million boxes and have $700m in revenue. I don't think the council-based sales come anywhere close to that.

 

Look at the BSA annual report. they simply don't have the money to spend on things like advertising. They're too busy over-paying their executives and spending money on other frivolous things.

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It is all local. 

DO NOT depend on the Council or National for PR.   If you have the ear of the Council's Media Director (I bet there is one named on the payroll), by all means prod him/her.   But it is YOUR units that provide the fun and adventure,  YOU need to get that word out. 

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I agree that a lot of the reason for the attention to Girl Scout cookies is that they are so "institutionalized." Girl Scout cookies - not just the cookie sales themselves, but the concept of "Girl Scout cookies" - have been around for as long as I remember, so I checked Wikipedia (The Source of All Knowledge, Most of it True) and found that Girl Scouts have been selling cookies for almost 100 years on a local and often home-made basis, but that the first National licenses for bakeries to produce the cookies were given in 1936. (And yes, there is a Wikipedia article on "Girl Scout cookies". A search for "Boy Scout popcorn" also turned up a page, but it is a "redirect" to "Weaver Popcorn Company", which makes (or made) the popcorn.)

 

So it is really part of the national consciousness. On the other hand, I never even heard of BSA units selling popcorn until my son became a Cub Scout. When I was a Scout we did a variety of things to raise funds, I remember selling lightbulbs and also that we collected newspapers for recycling. We collected a lot of pounds of newsprint and it is likely that we got something in the local newspaper about it, since the Scoutmaster (my father) was big on creating local publicity for the troop.

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It is all local. 

DO NOT depend on the Council or National for PR.   If you have the ear of the Council's Media Director (I bet there is one named on the payroll), by all means prod him/her.   But it is YOUR units that provide the fun and adventure,  YOU need to get that word out. 

 

There are a ton of cheap and free tools for creating videos and promotional stuff. Heck, most middle schools and high schools have at least one class that has a project assignment to create a video or teaches these skills.

 

Our unit's kids in A/V have done some stunning things over the years.

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I guess I just wonder mostly WHY national cannot get similar coverage for something like SFF or their exceptional winning Eagle projects and such.  As far as popcorn goes, if I could avoid it, I would; but we sort of have to give it a nod minimally if we want to be eligible for certain benefits, especially camperships.  

 

It is still hard to get much more than a buried paragraph most of the time, though on occasion the local paper features a COR.  But our local council seems to not have the desire to find a PR person for getting Eagle dinners or Silver Beaver presentations in the media.  Oh well, as noted, we can simply try to make people aware on the unit level as best we can in a positive manner.

 

Thanks for the thoughts.

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Or you could buy the popcorn to help the boys go to camp and then give it to someone you don't like.

The scout hut has BSA popcorn from 3 years ago that the boys won't even eat.

This is from a group that invented the 'pizza bagel'!

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The scout hut has BSA popcorn from 3 years ago that the boys won't even eat.

This is from a group that invented the 'pizza bagel'!

 

Good point. We had a lock in one time where 8 hour left over pizza and Trails End popcorn were the only things left. The boys literally "Hunger Gamed" for the last slice of pizza. The popcorn went in the bin.

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Just a thought - There is at least one, but likely multiple, copies of cookie order forms going around the offices of these media outlets and that has gotten the editor's to decide to make a story out of it.

 

How often do we see Boy Scout Popcorn order forms at offices?

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