In your wildest dreams, you probably couldn't imagine a Cyber Monday deal this huge. For the for time in its nearly 100-year history of selling cookies, and long after the Internet made such a thing possible, Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. has approved online cookie sales.
The new sales platform, Digital Cookie, was developed in long-overdue recognition of the fact that selling boxes door-to-door or hawking them for hours outside shopping malls is no longer the best way to teach girls valuable business skills. Through the use of either a mobile app or a personalized website, officials said, Girl Scouts will develop skills like digital order tracking and "more efficiently processing credit card information."
“Online is where entrepreneurship is going," explained chief digital cookie executive Sarah Angel-Johnson.
“A lot of people have asked, ‘What took you so long to get online?’ We spend a lot of time thinking how do we make this safe, scalable and smart,” Kelly M. Parisi, chief communications executive for Girl Scouts of the USA, said at a recent demonstration for select media.
Councils were offered one of the two platforms but not both. For web-based sales, scouts customize their pages, using their first names only, and email prospective customers with links to click on for orders. They can also put up videos explaining who they are and what they plan to do with their proceeds.
The mobile platform offers tabs for tracking sales and allows for the sale of bundles of different kinds of cookies. It can be used on a phone or tablet.
It's going to be far from a Samoa free-for-all, however. As Mashable explains, the organization has taken a number of steps to ensure online safety. To start with, you'll only be able to access a scout's website if she personally sends you an invitation (email forwards won't work). If any Girl Scouts are reading this, it's labrams@salon.com.
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