Case Study: Patriot's Trail Girl Scouts
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Thin Mints, Peanut Butter Patties, and Caramel DeLites... Girl Scout cookies have been an American favorite since the very first cookie drive in 1917. In January of 2002, 18,000 Girl Scouts from the Patriots' Trail Girl Scout council went door-to-door across 65 communities in greater Boston, selling 1.6 million boxes of eight different cookie varieties.
Collecting, counting and organizing the annual avalanche of orders had always been a tremendous challenge to the Girl Scouts and their volunteer troop leaders. But for 2002, things would be a little different.
The Challenge
- Accurately track thousands of orders and delivery details
- Reduce the paperwork burden for volunteers and staff
- Create a central real-time source of sales data
The Girl Scouts' traditional cookie ordering process depended on mountains of paperwork. During the primary sales period in January, each Girl Scout would mark her sales on individual order cards. These orders were painstakingly retallied and regrouped at each level as they passed from the Girl Scouts to Troop Leaders to Service Unit and finally on to council headquarters, where they would be gathered into final orders for the manufacturer, ABC Cookies.
In addition to ordering, volunteers and staff had to coordinate the delivery of the cookies - no small feat, considering the cookies needed to travel from an out-of-state manufacturer to regional warehouses, to local drop-off sites, to the Girl Scouts and finally to the customers themselves.
According to Deborah Deacetis, associate executive director of the Patriots' Trail Council, "Our volunteers were saying to us, loud and clear, 'This paperwork is getting overwhelming. Isn't there a way to simplify this?'"
In response to the pleas, the Patriots' Trail Council attempted to resolve the paperwork nightmare twice with different automated systems. But, both automated approaches proved too time-consuming, complex and expensive. Nothing worked -- until Patriots' Trail turned to QuickBase® for Corporate Workgroups.
The Solution
- One clear central source of data for the entire council
- Easy one-time entry of cookie orders
- Elimination of paperwork and calculation errors
In 2002, Patriots' Trail became the very first Girl Scout council to use the Web-based solution QuickBase to handle its annual cookie sale.
"Easy as a mouse click" to use, QuickBase was perfectly designed to collect, organize and share data among a widespread team -- even an enormous 'sales team' of 18,000 Girl Scouts. Troop leaders -- mainly moms and dads using their own home computers -- collected the girls' order cards and entered them directly into QuickBase. That was the last time the numbers needed to be entered during the entire process.
As orders came in, local section leaders could track the data in real time. QuickBase made it easy to 'slice and dice' the numbers, both to total the orders and to determine which local delivery station should get how many cases of each variety.
The Council office took it from there, consolidating the unit totals with the click of a few buttons and sending the totals electronically to ABC Cookies. "Before, we had to rely on volunteers dropping off their paperwork, driving it here or dropping it in the mail," says Deacitis. "Now, we had a way to actually watch the orders coming in. QuickBase has reduced paperwork by more than 90%!"
After the initial sales period, new orders were entered and updated right on QuickBase, with appropriate adjustments made to factory totals and daily shipping logs. As the cookies were shipped to Boston, QuickBase made it easy to organize delivery schedules and get the right cases to the right Girl Scouts.
The Results
- Improved coordination across the entire team
- Simple, accurate ordering and delivery
- Time and money saved
- Re-energized volunteer force
"QuickBase eliminated a huge manual calculation process, where we used to see immense human error we now have a mere 1%," says Deacitis.
And QuickBase didn't require widespread installation or difficult training to use. "To design our own system would have taken us a year or more," says Deacitis. "With QuickBase, it ended up taking two months from the idea to actually using the system. Once we said 'go' we were off and running."
From gathering individual orders to tracking council-wide totals to delivering the right Thin Mints to the right doorsteps, QuickBase made the whole process faster, easier and more accurate. "The girls set goals as a troop," says Deacitis. "They knew as a team, for example, 'We want to earn $700,' and along the way QuickBase let them see at a glance how they were doing in goal achievement."
Will the Patriots' Trail Girl Scouts use QuickBase for future sales? Absolutely. As Deacitis reports: "The very first thing that happened at cookie sales training this year was a volunteer saying: 'When can we start using QuickBase?'"
So this year as the Patriots' Trail Girl Scouts spread out through towns like Scituate, Sudbury and Concord -- even from Hopkinton to Boston, the route of the famous Boston Marathon -- QuickBase will once again help them get the right cookies into the cupboards of their friends and neighbors.
