Girl Scouting builds girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.
Girl Scouts Nation’s Capital is the largest Girl Scout council in the nation, with a commitment to build and maintain an inclusive community that respects and supports all our members. The council is an independent 501(c)(3) organization with 125 full time staff and a $23 million annual operating budget. Girl Scouts Nation’s Capital serves over 76,000 members in 25 counties in Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, and Washington, DC.
Girl Scouts provides grades K-12 the opportunity to discover, connect and take action. Girl Scouts learn new skills, explore STEM, discover the outdoors, and become entrepreneurs, all while making new friends and having fun.
Girl Scouts Nation’s Capital is looking for a Fels Institute student to build a framework for evaluation that will measure the strength of local jurisdictions within the council’s large geographic footprint.
Girl Scouts Nation’s Capital has a volunteer-led infrastructure to support program implementation at the local level in groups called ‘Service Units’. Members and troops are assigned to a Service Unit based on its geographic boundaries. The council sets expectations and policy as well as provides general guidance, resources, and networking across each unit. Within its geographic jurisdiction, Service Units (and the volunteers who manage and lead them) are responsible for implementing council policies and procedures and are responsible for meeting a minimum standard of program delivery and volunteer support. In addition, the council has chartering authority over Service Units, and can decide to merge, divide, or make other substantial shifts to geography when necessary, in order to better meet the needs of the local community.
These Service Units are one of the most important contributors to members’ longevity in the Girl Scout program. Service Units are the primary support structure for volunteer Troop Leaders, who directly work with youth Girl Scouts. In addition, Service Units play a role in recruitment of new members and volunteers, and when functioning well, extend the reach of the Girl Scout program to new communities to ensure all have access and understand how to become a Girl Scout. In informal analyses, we have found a positive relationship between ratings of Service Unit strength with youth and adult member retention.
At an organizational level, Service Units have contributed to the council’s financial stability and ability to provide effective programming across the region. Over a turbulent past decade of Girl Scouting nationally, Girl Scouts Nation’s Capital remains one of the strongest councils in the country, in terms of membership numbers, youth member retention rate, product program participation, and financial standing; much of that success has been linked to the strength and reliance on this group of volunteers. However, Service Unit strength has steadily been declining over the last 5 years, and the council needs to be able to evaluate and strengthen these Service Units in order to sustain itself. The success of local jurisdictions is key to implementing and managing the Girl Scout program across the council’s 31,000 volunteers and 45,000 youth members.
With 128 Service Units across 25 counties and the District of Columbia, analyzing the success of these small, local areas has proven challenging. Individual staff are responsible for ensuring that Service Units meet minimum standards, and support each Service Unit as they set goals for improvement and sustainability. However, without quantitative analysis, it is difficult to provide the oversight necessary to guarantee sustainability of each group, as well as to pinpoint key target areas that could quickly improve the strength of a failing Service Unit. Without data-driven insights on these local jurisdictions, the council cannot continue to effectively execute the mission of Girl Scouting.
Moving into the future, Girl Scouts Nation’s Capital would like to build a robust and long-standing evaluation process for Service Unit health. This evaluation process will provide initial key insights into the strength of Service Units for near-term strategic planning. In addition, it will allow staff and volunteers to measure change over time as well as identify areas for growth and goal-setting, and provide data to drive decisions regarding geographic boundaries. We believe that by setting clear measurement criteria, we can better support both staff and volunteers in strengthening and sustaining these key units, and can ultimately better meet our mission of building girls of courage, confidence, and character.
At the end of the project, Girl Scouts Nation’s Capital would like to have an overall evaluation of the current health of Service Units, in a way that makes it easy to evaluate overall success as well as pinpoint areas for growth. Our hope is that this evaluation provides a framework or rubric to provide an objective and quantitative assessment of the strength of these smaller jurisdictions that can be replicated annually to provide measurement over time.
This framework or rubric should be able to give an overall evaluation score for broad reporting to the executive team and board members, as well as be able to provide a more detailed picture of specific focus areas and room for improvement in each particular jurisdiction. The data provided through this framework will inform strategic priorities, provide insight into possible geographic shifts, and support staff goal-setting and accountability.
We would like to have collected a first round of data by July 2025 so that we can use that data to set staff targets and strategies in time for the 2025-2026 fiscal year.
