I would like to share something our service unit is using for our recruitment efforts this year.  Our catchphrase is “We Got It Goin’ On!” and we hit the ground running when it came to our Back to School booths.  A few months ago, I spoke with our SU’s Recruiting Coordinator about a few thoughts I had on the subject.

Later on, I rolled some ideas over in my head.  Our numbers were actually UP this past year – 14%, in fact!  This was after a steady decline since the merger, so we were very excited.  We live in an area that’s growing pretty quickly, so there’s no reason why our numbers shouldn’t grow too.  But even with the growth, we still didn’t create many new troops, and we feel that’s the lifeblood for continuing our increase.  Right now many of our troops are full, and we need to spread the wealth.  So this year, we wanted to put an emphasis on getting new leaders.

But how do we do this?  That was the $64,000 question.  Everybody these days is struggling to get volunteers.   Many parents want to find troops, but there aren’t very many that want to step up and take the reigns to start a brand new one.  I realized that we needed to take a new approach.  In the past, it seems like our organization just relied on recruiting girls but crossing our fingers that the leaders and new troops would follow.   We needed to be more aggressive.   We go all out to show that Girl Scouts gives girls opportunities and an experience that they wouldn’t necessarily have elsewhere.  Well, what if we showed women that they’ll also get that in return if they become a leader?  Side note:  I realize men can be leaders too.  In fact, we have a male leader in our service unit!  But for this, we specifically targeted women.
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