To help promote participation in the Girl Scout Cookie Program, and get girls and parents excited to jump into the FUN, the social media team at Girl Scouts of the USA launched a national Bling Your Booth! Facebook contest. The contest served as a unique, creative way to highlight to girls how much fun selling Girl Scout Cookies can be, while also showing adults how much girls learn through the sale, including awesome skills like visual merchandising, entrepreneurship, and marketing (whoa!).
For the contest, girls were asked to "bling" out their cookie sales booths, to not only increase cookies sales, but also to learn how to connect with customers using their creativity. (Every budding entrepreneur needs to tap into their imagination!)
During our submission period, girls were asked to pick an original cookie booth theme, using cool color combinations, posters, props, and any other elements they could think of to bring their visions to life. Then we asked them to take a photo of themselves and their troop at the blinged-out booth, and submit it on our Facebook contest page. More than 1,600 troops submitted photos of their decorated booths—that's a whole lot of cookie love at work!
Once the submissions rolled in, cookie fans everywhere got the opportunity to vote on their favorite entries. At the end of the contest, the six Girl Scout troops with the most votes won $500 toward their cookie sale goals—they were sooo excited! More than that, every girl who participated had the opportunity to get really creative, have tons of fun, and see firsthand the impact a great point-of-purchase display can have on business—cool!
The contest ran all cookie season long (four months) and was promoted through Twitter and Facebook, making for an impression on nearly 4 million people. The campaign was also promoted to members via e-blasts and a blog series. And that's not all. We created an awesome promo video that our 112 council affiliates (local councils) aired at cookie rallies and other council events.
1,633 troops entered the challenge, sharing pics of their best cookie booth creations. The entrants rallied their friends and families to vote for their pic, generating 990,825 votes! Impressive, right?! Of the nearly 1 million votes, 276,041 were from unique visitors to the contest Facebook page—nice!
