There’s no easy way to classify CircleAround. It’s a new digital content site for adult women, but it’s so much more. It’s the first wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary of a major national nonprofit, the Girl Scouts of the USA. It meets a gap in the content marketplace for women, with useful, inspirational, and real content across the most important categories for women. It transforms social good, with every click and ad dollar going back to Girl Scouts to fuel programs for girls. It does it all with best-in-class product in a business structure never seen before.

The Girl Scouts of the USA were looking to drive greater relevance in today’s world, and we recommended tapping into their more than 50 million alums—a group that believes in the Girl Scouts, a group that loves the Girl Scouts, but a group that has not engaged with the brand in a long time. Doing so wouldn’t be easy – we needed to meet these women in their everyday lives, outside of the Girl Scouts itself, and fulfill an open need. And we needed to do it all in a way that would satisfy very strict rules governing the Girl Scouts brand and its status as a 501(c)3. Finally, our idea had to be built on a shoestring budget to drive real revenue back to Girl Scouts, while also creating relevance, meaning every dollar had to do triple work.

Our solution was deceptively simple yet bold, a never before tired idea. We would create a wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary of the Girl Scouts—the first-ever of its kind for a major non-profit organization—that could engage in business operations to serve women. And those business operations? We would fill a gap in a content landscape driven by celebrity gossip, fashion, and information overload through a media site from a voice women trusted, which also delivered useful and positive content that acknowledged the grittiness, and the inspiration, of everyday life. Our content and brand would drive ad and sponsorship revenue to fuel the company, all while returning profits back to Girl Scouts to fuel more programming for girls. The company could scale rapidly, and as it did, it would remake both the media and charitable landscapes.

Unlike other companies, we didn’t have the luxury of picking a single niche of women. Because Girl Scouts alums reflect every woman, our site needed to serve every woman. From millennial and Gen Z to Boomers and reitirees. From every ethnic and economic background, to every geographic area and industry. We could not be everything to every woman, but we could have something for every woman. Our approach was to stay grounded in a friendly, trusted voice—the voice of a Girl Scout all grown up—and focus on content that was inspirational, useful, and most importantly, acknowledged the realities of everyday life with an uplifting swing. From building custom psychographics based on our extensive data around former Girl Scouts and marrying that against general consumers, to building key verticals and content operations capable of scaling rapidly, we delivered.

The site had fewer than four months of lead time before going live, from first design to consumer launch in July 2020, in the middle of a pandemic. That timeline was also tight for legal, brand, and operational clearances. We were, after all, attempting a business structure that had never existed. The very concept was groundbreaking and required delicate negotiation. The company had to scale quickly, both in terms of audience and advertising. And it did, all on a shoestring budget. Other product launches might find themselves with millions of dollars, but we had a small, pre-set budget. And we didn’t have any of the Girl Scouts resources; the firewall between the non-profit and subsidiary meant we were on our own to meet women in their time of need, in the middle of a global pandemic where our primary sources of funding—advertisers—were withdrawing from the marketplace. We met every challenge.

CircleAround launched in July 2020 with countless media hits from trade organizations admiring the unique new business structure – with the site itself scaling to more than one million monthly visits of American women. It is just as popular in the middle of the country as it is on the coasts. Its audience is multigenerational, over-indexing in both 18-24 and 35-54; multicultural, over-indexing in both black and latinx. Its content has drawn millions of views, including five live events in 2020 that drew over 250,000 attendees and viewers. It’s become a respected voice, generating millions of dollars in ad sales. The company is approaching profitability under a year after launch, and is projected to generate more than $1 billion in profits back to Girl Scouts within five years—more than ten times the charity’s current revenue. CircleAround is laying the foundation through a first-ever business structure for a major national non-profit.