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Be Prepared Kit Market

One of the clauses in the BP Award is to create a Be Prepared Kit and market it. This is how my Unit tackled the clause recently, and it was an outstanding success.

Here's what we did

After discussion with all the girls doing the BP Award, I sent out the following reminder email to them, three weeks before the date scheduled for the market:

We discussed last week that we would have a night where the BP girls present Be Prepared Kits as part of the Guiding Traditions section of the BP Award. Here is more information for you:
  • Choose what your kit will prepare for (e.g. Guide meetings, fire emergency, bush survival, city survival, come up with something innovative that really needs a Be Prepared kit).
  • Decide what will go into the kit.
  • Consider size, portability (if appropriate), cost.
  • Make up a mock Be Prepared kit - either with pictures of the contents, or the actual contents.
  • Create marketing materials for your kit, e.g. poster, brochure, flyer, movie, booklet on how to use, game ...
  • Decide on the Recommended Retail Price for your kit.
  • Prepare a sales pitch.
  • Show how your kit is different to/better than/ worse than the Be Prepared kit for a Girl Guide in 1910.

In three weeks' time (I inserted the date), all of you will man a stall at Guides with your materials, your kit, and your sales pitch. The idea is to sell your kit to the Guides.



On the designated night, the girls who brought BP kits prepared their stalls while I told the other girls what I wanted them to do:

  1. Listen to the sales pitches
  2. Ask questions about the contents
  3. Decide whether each kit is something that you would want to buy, using the following criteria:
  • Is the situation for which the kit is made of interest to you?
  • Are the contents useful?
  • Did the seller do a good job of selling the kit?
  • Is the price reasonable?
  • Are the supporting materials (e.g. brochure, poster etc) useful?
  • Would you buy it?

Evaluation of the Be Prepared Kit Market

Everyone really got into this exercise. The BP girls set up tables with promotional material, stall signs and order forms. The other girls seriously studied every aspect of the sales pitches and the products. At the end of the market, everyone was given time to go around and put their names down on the order forms of those kits they would like to buy (realising, of course, that the kits didn't exist, and they didn't actually have to buy anything).

Some of the girls brought the physical kits, some brought protoypes on paper. Each seller went through every item in their kits and explained how they could be used. They had put a lot of thought into this exercise, and they all did a fantastic job. I was most impressed with a kit suitable for two or three days in the bush: the contents all fitted into a very small pack, and when unpacked the contents covered an entire table!

The girls currently doing the Junior BP Award can't wait to do their own Be Prepared Kit Market for the BP Award!

Follow-up exercise

To finish the evening, the Unit was divided into three groups. Each group was given a piece of paper with three items written on it. Their job was to find each item and prepare a skit on how each item could be used in an emergency.

The skits were hilarious, but showed that the girls had learned something from the Be Prepared kit market. Items included:

  • matches
  • rope
  • blindfold
  • bandage
  • and other items found in the hall.

 

© Gaye Wilson 2007–2013. All rights reserved.
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