We sold a lot of candy...
by Roger
(Poughkeepsie, NY)
I was responsible for raising funds for a boy scout troop in the Albany, New York area. Our troop maintained its own camping equipment for weekend trips. We first prepared a shopping list of essential supplies that would replace items in our collection. The list included around $400 worth of merchandise.
We spoke to some other boy scout troops in Upstate New York to learn about their fundraising efforts. One troop leader convinced us that candy sales was an effective technique that he had used several times, but some control steps were necessary to make it a success. In his troop, he reported that 30% of the fundraising scouts were eating the candy themselves, leaving their parents responsible for payment. So he advised setting up candy-selling stations at public locations, and having a responsible individual keep the candy in their possession with the boy scouts only responsible for sitting at the selling station and completing the sales.
The scout leader advised me to expect around 3% theft on the part of the scouts. I assured him that my scouts were all honest and we would only lose 1% due to counting errors, and not because of theft. He laughed at me.
Our plan was to ask each scout to pick a weekend day, choose a public location (malls, grocery stores, school sports events), and work a sales station (a table, two chairs, tablecloth, and some literature produced by our troop) for four hours or until their candy was gone. We had a few parents with extra candy supplies, waiting by their cellphones, who could bring extra supplies to any location that ran out due to strong sales. We thought this was a clever bit of organization, but it never turned out to be necessary.
On the first weekend of our candy sale, we actually raised $111. One scout turned in extra money because some customers wanted to pay extra as a donation. None of the scouts had any losses.
The second weekend featured most of our older scouts. They only raised $78 and there were $5 in losses.
The third weekend was marked by bad autumn weather and sales were only $33. At this point we were thinking up ideas for other fundraisers. We were counting on this fundraiser to bring in money for supplies that we would need for the troop's annual winter camping weekend.
One of the parents had the idea of asking another nearby troop if we could sell in their neighborhood. They agreed but suggested that we will be called upon to return the favor, which only seemed fair. So for the fourth weekend, we had a new area where we could sell. This turned out to be a smart move, as we raised $131, but we lost $10 here and we missed our overall target.
The lesson for us was that we shouldn't have expected a particular dollar amount basd on equipment that we needed to buy. We should have realized that we were going from nothing ($0) to something ($353), and that was all we could have asked for. The scouts certainly could not have been asked to do more than they did. And I embarrassed myself by having 4% in losses, which I later admitted to the other troop leader.