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hello troop cookie managers here's a quick training to go over some of the basics for placing your initial orders for brand new tcms you might be asking yourselves what's an initial order exactly an initial order is the cookie order that tcm places prior to the beginning of the cookie program so the girls have cookies in hand to sell the first day cookies placed during the initial order will be picked up before the program begins and distributed to girls in the troupe troops may enter their initial order in ebuddy as soon as they have access to ebuddy just a reminder to gain access to ebuddy you must have an approved tcm agreement on file and a current gseo membership and background check troops must also have submitted a current ach form it does take a couple of days at least to process the tcm agreement and the ach and to approve tcms in their role if possible please do not wait until the last minute to submit your troop i o now i've heard from some volunteers that there have been delays in getting their tcm approval so there is a workaround to help you to get your initial order placed if you do not yet have access into ebuddy the deadline for troops to place initial orders is this coming monday january 11th at 8pm if you're a tcm that does not yet have access to ebuddy the workaround is to contact your service unit cookie manager who can help assist in placing your initial order please do be considerate of sucm's time though and understand that they're managing or working with a lot of different volunteers and that's why i say if you know you don't have ebuddy access now it's best to reach out to your service unit manager as soon as possible so that you can let them know that you're going to need assistance in placing your initial order a few helpful resources for ios are the tcm guide on pages 22 and 23 there's some information about initial orders there there's also an io calculator on our gseo website under the cookies tab on resources page i'll show you how to access that io calculator in just a moment let's review a few strategies for how many cookies to order in your initial order there are some things to consider do you have new girls in your troop are you a brand new troop and this is your first cookie season do you know how many girls in your troop will be participating with cookies does your troop want to earn the initial order rewards we'll take a look at those in just a few minutes what does family support look like for the girls participating in your troop if you haven't done so already that's something to discuss during the caregiver apparent meeting training talk about the cookie program and expectations and get feedback from families and girls for existing troops pcms should take a look at what the troops sold last year does the troop have the same number of girls participating this year were there cookies left over at the end of the program and did the troop have enough booths and how successful were the booth locations that you signed up for another important consideration is goal driven decision making what are the goals for the girls in your troop have you had conversations about the goals yet what's the troupe's overall goal how many booths does your troop want to participate in and i realize there are a lot of questions right now about what booth availability is going to be like and i'll say that we posted a booth update to our blog which i'll link that article in the description box for this training you can take a look at that our staff and key volunteers are working really hard right now to secure as many booth locations as possible and as soon as we have them secured they will be added to ebuddy and as we continue to get updates around booths booth locations and availability we will of course share those with our volunteers along with council booth locations my sales booths are another option those are secured by troops and they're usually at local businesses in your community there's more information about myself booths in the booth update article and i will also add a link to the booth guide that has lots of detailed information about council booths my sales booths and some alternative booth options this year so be sure to take some time to check that out in addition to factoring in all possible booth options you also want to factor in how close is the nearest cupboard because if you need more cookies after cupboards open and you know that you'll have to make that cupboard run fairly frequently you want to factor in how far is that covered if it's a good distance away then you may want to go a bit heavier on your initial order if it's very close then you could consider going a bit more conservative on your initial order but understand that that could mean more frequent trips to the cupboard as you're having conversations with girls and family members about cookie program goals a few other things to pull into those conversations are asking girls what reward level do they want to reach the tcm guide the family guide and the girl order card that includes images of the rewards make great resources for talking about and deciding on true and individual goals with the girls and as you work with the girls to set the overall troop goal few questions to pose in that conversation are what troop activities does the troop want to fund this coming year is your troop saving for a long term or future activity possibly travel or troop camp together is your troop interested in doing a community service project and what will that project cost it's ideal to have these conversations with the girls in your troop and at the family meeting but i know that coordinating that just before the initial order isn't always possible or perhaps you've worked to do that and haven't received the feedback yet so sometimes it just comes down to you have to make the best call possible and that's where the initial order calculator that's available on our website can make it easy for you to play around with different numbers and create some sample projections of how many cookies you want to order and what seems reasonable for your troop before you actually place the order itself and we are going to take a look at that i o calculator i promise but first i just wanted to take a quick glance at the initial order rewards that i mentioned earlier you can find this graph it's in the tcm guide on pages uh it's either 22 or 23 and we have initial order rewards every year the new rewards this year are for first-year troops with an initial order of 125 or more packages per registered girl the rewards are one gsco tablecloth to use at cookie booths and then cookie rookie patches for all the girls in the troop for troops new or existing with an initial order of 275 or more packages per registered girl the initial order rewards are a goal getter patch for the girls and two padfolio notebooks for adults in the troupe i wanted to take a moment to highlight these initial order rewards because they're popular with girls and adults and also the 125 packages and the 275 packages were also used as examples of initial order calculator estimations we'll see those in a minute but you can also find that in the tcm guide how many of what here we are the i o calculator which will help you to estimate the quantity of each variety of cookies for your initial order as mentioned previously for existing troops it's great idea to review your last year's order which you can do in ebuddy and also to factor in think about reflect on how things went with your troop during the cookie program last year if your troop wants the initial order rewards the i o calculator will help you to calculate the per registered girl average based on the troop overall goal so what does that mean exactly you would input the total goal or number of packages that the girls want to sell and then the number of girls in your troop and the i o calculator will recommend the number of packages per variety based on percentages of statewide sales and the best tip for new tcms is that colorado is a chocolate loving state all right so let's go ahead and take a look at where the initial order calculator is located on our website to access the initial order calculator you want to go to the home page of the girl scouts colorado website go under the cookies tab and then open the resources page and in the menu at the top of the page you're going to see the i o calculator and just click on that and it'll take you right to it there's a few things i want to point out before we do a couple sample calculations first is this message here that the totals are in packages of cookies and when you place your order in ebuddy it will round to the nearest case it's 12 packages per case when you scroll down here what you'll see these little percentages are the percentages of cookie varieties sold statewide thin mints are the most popular samoa is next and then you see that the tagalong comes in third chocolate heavy council all right let's scroll back up to do a sample calculation so it asks you for the troop goal number of registered girls selling and this will give you your per-girl average so if we use those initial order reward examples we'll start with let's say you've got 10 girls in the troop and your girls want to earn that initial order reward so that's 125 packages per girl and 10 girls in the troop so your troop goal then is going to be 1250 or 1250 packages sold number of girls in your troop 10 and you can see that brings it to a girl average of 125 and then it breaks it down by cookie variety keep in mind two things that the initial order reward at 125 packages per girl is per girl in your troop even if all 10 of those girls aren't participating like maybe there's one or two girls who aren't participating in the cookie program the reward is based on the number of girls registered in your troop any other troop incentives or troop rewards besides the initial order reward are actually based on the per selling girl average which you're going to see here and which is why i'm clarifying this because i don't want that to confuse you so there is a troop incentive where troops with a higher per selling girl average allows troops to earn a larger percentage of troop proceeds but for the initial order reward it's based on the number of girls registered in your troop whether they're actually selling or not so i just wanted to point that out and also the initial order reward at that 125 packages per girl is for new troops going into their first cookie program let's say you're an existing troop with some real go-getter cookie sellers in your troop and let's do one more sample calculation so if the girls in your troop want to go for that second initial order reward of 275 packages per girl and you've got 10 girls in your troop that means that your troop goal is then to sell 2 750 packages of cookies through the program bringing the average to 275 and then this will show you the number of packages per cookie variety a few additional reminders to share lemon ups were a new cookie last year and they were seven a little bit over seven percent of our sales because there was a lot of buzz around the new cookie we do expect that lemon up's popularity will dip a little bit this year cupboards are going to open on thursday february 4th most troops will be picking up their initial order cookies on the main cookie delivery day which is saturday january 30th and in order to place the covered order to pick up that thursday there's a 72-hour window so you would need to place the order on monday february 1st so you want to be sure that you have enough cookies to allocate to girls and to cover any booth sales that you have during those first two weeks plus keep in mind that we do have girl delivery opening up in digital cookie this year and girls will be able to take orders for girl delivered cookies starting as early as january 17th but of course those cookies won't be delivered until after the 31st and i'm going to get into a little bit more on that in just a second but i also want to share that girl scouts of colorado makes every effort to keep up with the inventory needed during the cookie program but all of the initial orders from troops are what we use to calculate our own council initial order and of course we order in extra but we can only guarantee the quantity of each cookie variety that you order through the initial order so keep that in mind when deciding on the quantities in your i o one last but important consideration in planning and strategizing for your initial order is yes girl delivery opens in digital cookie on january 17th that's something that's new this year we've had a lot of volunteer questions around it like how will that impact how many cookies they should order for their initial order but for experienced troops it's very similar to the fact that you place your initial order before you actually do those booth selections so it's really just calculating based on previous cookie years how many cookies your troop needs for those first about two weeks of the program and for all tcms new or not i do want to make the point don't let the girl delivery cookie inventory needed throw you off too much because girls can choose and communicate when they will start delivering those cookies to local customers who have placed them on or after january 17th they don't need to happen in the first week of the program girls can email their customers after accepting the order and let them know and coordinate what date they'll be delivering those cookies on so that gives you some room as the tcm to pick up additional cookies needed at a cookie cupboard after february for on or after february 4th tcm's will be able to see how many girl delivery orders girls have in their digital cookie you can see that on your dashboard but also we will be reminding families and you should remind families to communicate with you about the varieties and quantities that they need to fulfill those girl deliveries placing your initial order tcms are going to place their initial order in ebuddy i'm going to go ahead and read through these steps quickly and then we're going to pop into ebuddy i'm just going to show you the couple of tabs that you'll be working within which is the initial order tab following that it'll be you'll be selecting a delivery site and following that if your troop has placed an initial order that will qualify you for those initial order rewards you'll go to the rewards tab to complete that information so does min and i o and ebuddy go to the initial order tab located on the top row of the dashboard troops order cookies for the entire troop the total amount of cookies is in packages and will be entered under the appropriate variety on the other line the cookies from this order can later be credited to girls once the girls and their caregivers have accepted the cookies and the cookies have been sold but when you're replacing your initial order it's going to be on the other line and in a minute i'll show you what that means troops will place this order in packages in increments of 12 and e-buddy will automatically calculate those packages into cases rounding to the nearest case when working in this tab and when working in ebuddy generally please remember to save frequently and don't hit the submit button until the order is ready to be submitted because once you hit the submit button the tab will lock all right so here we are in a buddy on a troop dashboard and the tabs let me show you the tabs that i was talking about so you can see all of these tabs up here at the top and there is one initial order so i remember i was talking about that other line and the steps we just went through if i scroll down this is a large strobe this is the line that i'm talking about and you can see they've entered their varieties in here lemon ups trefoil these are all the cookies here at the top and they've placed their order here in this other line a bit further down you can see it broken down by packages number of packages ordered and this line does a breakdown of cases for the order with the total that you're going to pick up on delivery day so once you've placed your initial order you're going to move over to the delivery tab it shows your total order for your initial order then it's going to ask you who is picking up your cookies and you would select someone from my troop or perhaps someone from your service unit or another troop is picking up but for the most part it's usually someone from your troop picking up once you select that it's gonna drop down a menu of different times for you to pick up here you can choose the location this is for region one so there's only one pickup location for denver colorado springs and northern colorado there are multiple pickup locations so it will give you a whole drop down menu you can choose the location you want to pick up from and then select a time you want to print your information and submit your info and then like i said if your troop placed an initial order that will qualify you for those initial order rewards your next step would be going over to where is it where is it the rewards page i'm going to hit ok here because i don't want to impact that troops actual pickup date time and location so now you're on the rewards tab and you can see here's where you're going to place that initial rewards order so once you've done that you can go back and view it but for right now you're going to want to just fill it out and you can see nothing has been submitted yet because this troop hasn't actually submitted their initial order so you can see here that for the troop order for initial order rewards there are 39 girls in the troop and the troop placed an order that qualifies them for this first initial order reward and then you would want to enter the number of adults up to two and then go ahead and submit that reward order but i'm going to cancel this because again i don't want to impact anything that they've got pending that wraps up the quick demo and ebuddy of the tabs you'll be working within as you're placing this initial order choosing a delivery site and then if your troop qualifies placing that initial reward order but i pop back to this screen and i'm just giving you a little bit of time in case you want to take a screenshot of it because i know it's a lot of steps it's just something that you can refer back to if you need to so take a picture there's a screenshot of what it looks like in ebuddy and now i'm just going to quickly run through those additional steps so delivery site location remember to click on the delivery tab you need to select who is picking up your true cookies you can also have that option of clicking on the button if you're going to be picking up cookies for more than one troop then you select the delivery station or site from that drop down menu you choose your pickup time and then you submit your info at the top of the screen i do highly recommend printing out that information however this year we have some new features and i believe you will also be sent a confirmation email or text that will have your order information on it here's the refresher of what it looks like in ibuddy oh and with another thing that i wanted to mention is that something that's new this year is troops who are picking up an initial order of 500 cases or more will be able to pick up at regional cookie concierge sites and that will actually happen i believe the day before that main delivery day we will be managing that and kind of filtering that those large orders on the back end of things if your troop is actually going to pick up on the cookie concierge site you will be notified with instructions and where you are where that pickup will actually be and those initial already rewards remember click on the rewards tab click fill out next to the initial reward order if you order the recommended number of cookies you qualify for those click the submit to submit your troops initial reward order click ok when that pop-up box comes up to confirm your submission and just remember once the rewards are submitted you can't make any changes in the field however in every instance when you need assistance in ebuddy or you realize maybe that you put in the wrong quantity or the wrong information your go-to person is your service unit cookie manager you can notify them and they are able to make changes for you within a day or so after any deadline of what to look for under that rewards tab when ordering the initial order rewards thanks everyone for watching this micro training be sure to check out the information that's in the description box below i've placed a couple of links in there good luck with placing your initial order and thank you so much for all that you do for girls