Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania announced for the first time in its history, girls from local troops will be part of Girl Scouts' new national Digital Cookie platform, an addition to the Girl Scout Cookie program toenhance and expand the program's ability to teach girls new skills for business and life.

The platform adds a digital layer to broaden and strengthen the essential skills girls learn in the traditional cookie program, including goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills and business ethics.

The future of the Girl Scout Cookie program, Digital Cookie will introduce lessons about online marketing, application use, and e-commerce to more than one million Girl Scouts.

Digital Cookie follows Girl Scouts' classic "hands on" approach to teaching girls new skills. Through the platform, friends and family can order cases of cookies online, pay for them online and have them shipped directly to their homes.

Over two-thirds of the female CEOs on the Fortune 500 list learned basic business acumen by selling Girl Scout Cookies and are part of the more than 59 million living Girl Scout alumnae today. Yet only 21 percent of chief information officers at Fortune 100 companies are women and an even smaller number are CEOs of firms engaged in science, engineering, technology, or mathematics, known as the STEM fields.

Digital Cookie tailors the traditional Girl Scout Cookie program to fit the modern world, helping give more girls an important foundation in technology. It also gives customers a new way to help girls learn skills that dovetail with traditional door-to-door and booth sales to combine customer relationship and interpersonal skills with e-commerce training.

As with the traditional cookie program, the net revenue earned from the cookie sale will remain with the local Girl Scout council. Scouts decide how to spend their troop cookie money and reinvest it back into their neighborhoods through community service projects and learning experiences, like travel opportunities.

Because 100 percent of the net revenue raised through the Girl Scout Cookie program stays with the local council and troops, customers who purchase Girl Scout Cookies are not only getting a delightful treat they are also making an important investment in their communities.

Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania will begin using the platform at the start of its cookie-selling season Jan. 15, 2015.

For information about Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania's 2014-2015 cookie season, visit www. gsep.org.