One challenge of having a very active troop is that outings to interesting places tend to cost quite a bit. We need to provide opportunities for scouts to pay their own way.
The troop has historically sold Christmas wreaths and Trails End popcorn in October to raise funds. Our policy has been to have money from each sell go into an individual scout's account so that scouts making more sales have more money to pay for camping.
With the popcorn, Trails End receives 1/3 the price, the council receives 1/3, and the troop receives 1/3. Our troop keeps 1/3 of its 1/3 and puts the other 2/3 of its 1/3 into the scout's individual account. Not confusing, is it? Anyway, a scout sells $90 of popcorn and receives $20 in his account while the troop receives $10.
With the wreaths, a scout receives $5 per item sold no matter the price just to keep things simple. Prices range from $12 to $40 with $15 being the most popular.
We have 6 troops and 8 packs in the area and competition to sell wreaths and popcorn has gotten pretty strong. So, the troop has begun looking for new fundraising ideas. The scouts came up with ideas, from selling Girl Scout cookies to Saxophone reeds. :-) They then whittled down the ideas to a few and the troop committee decided to support a Flag Service idea for this year to see how it goes.
The criteria used to determine how good a fundraising idea is included:

• renewable - will the customer buy again next year or just once?
• investment - what costs will the troop have to get started?
• profit - how much will be made from each customer?
• pay rate - how much per hour can a scout make? how many customers can he manage?
• competition - how new is the idea? are other organizations doing it? will it take work away from someone's job?
• appropriateness - does the product or service reflect well on the values of BSA?
• accountability - can the income be fairly distributed to scouts that put in effort?

The flag service met our guidelines and we are now in the process of surveying the community to get an idea of the level of support for such a program. If it turns out that enough probable customers exist and enough scouts will participate to manage them, then we'll go ahead in 2006. I'll let you know how it goes.

Scout On!
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