A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

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.

So, I thought this through.  How do women relate to the world?  Through relationships.  What if we spoke directly to that in addition to acknowledging the things that make them reluctant to become a leader?  We have a strong service unit and pride ourselves on supporting our troops and leaders, so why not promote that strength to let potential leaders know they won’t be alone?  And let them know what THEY’LL gain out of it?  And show pictures of leaders in our service unit carrying this out?   Seeing the faces of who they’ll be meeting makes it REAL.  It’s not just a stock photo featuring a model.  So, we decided we wanted to promote this via trifolds for the recruiting booths and events and asked our service unit leaders to send in pictures of themselves with their girls and pictures of themselves with other leaders.

To go along with this trifold, we also wanted to show parents and girls what we DO.  We talk about what the Girl Scout program does for girls, but to really hit home, they need to actually SEE it in action.  Again, we asked our service unit leaders to send in pictures of their girls at events doing a variety of things.  Like the leader board, seeing faces of local girls participating in these activities makes it REAL so that when we say our program offers the four pillars of outdoors, STEM, life skills, and entrepreneurship, here’s proof positive.  It gets the girls excited because seeing pictures of other girls like them makes them want to do those things too!  And if they see a face they know, it makes an instant connection!  So a trifold to key in on girls was created as well.

Here’s what they looked like at a school recruiting booth:

From all accounts, the boards were a hit (I made five sets due to overlapping events – yikes!).  Leaders reported that they drew parents and girls in and made it much easier to talk about Girl Scouts and why they should join.  This particular booth convinced two parents (and a grandma!) to become leaders.  Hopefully there’s follow through, but that’s another process altogether!  I haven’t talked to our SU recruiting coordinator to find out if there were more interest sign-ups than last year, but there was a very positive response at least from the leaders who worked the booths.  Again, we won’t know for sure if they were effective until our numbers come in down the road.  I personally overheard a girl at my youngest daughter’s school orientation tell her mom that she wanted to be in Girl Scouts.  I saw them later on at the booth.

If you’re curious about what’s on the leader board, here’s what’s on the left hand side:

MYTHBUSTERS about becoming a GS Leader:

I don’t have time!
That’s the great thing about Girl Scouts – you make it work around YOUR schedule!

I work full time.
Most of our leaders work too with some having multiple jobs!  You make it what you want to be and what works for YOU.

I don’t know anything about Girl Scouts.
Not a problem!  You’ll get plenty of support in THE best service unit and a full team of volunteers who have your back!

I don’t know if I can do it.
Girl Scouts builds girls of courage, confidence, and character – and it builds adults up as well.  Our volunteer-driven service team has your back and will help you every step of the way.  We’ve been through it (and are still doing it!) so you won’t be alone.

I borrowed some of these answers from a recruiting coordinator handbook from another council (sorry, don’t remember the council):  answers to excuses for not volunteering.pdf  Here’s the word doc for the above text if you would like it for your own use: mythbusters.docx

This is at the bottom of the trifold:

What you get out of being a Girl Scout leader:

1. 1. Time with your daughter and her friends
   2. New skills & experiences
   3. Confidence to do things you’ve never done before
   4. An instant sisterhood with fellow leaders
   5. Knowing that you’ve made a difference in the world

Here’s the Word doc for that piece:  What you get out of being a Girl Scout leader.docx  And what about Rosie?  Here she is.  Click on the picture itself to download the (rather large) graphic:

If your service unit is in charge of recruiting events, I highly suggest you use photos of volunteers and girls (assuming they have media approval, of course) to drive the message home.  I’ll be curious to know if you get the same sort of response that we did.  We’re following this up with council-run informational meetings, plus our service unit is putting on a kick-off event for our troops which will double as a recruiting event.  We promoted it at our booths and invited parents and girls to it.  I’ll report a few months from now with our numbers to see if our efforts paid off!

To go along with the theme of telling others what Girl Scouts does for both girls AND adults, here’s a video made by a volunteer doing just that: