Motivating the Masses...

After delivering over 70,000 flyers, the kids' excitement has worn off and they really just don't want to be doing flyers anymore. We have done several things, sometimes they work, sometimes not so much. Here are some of our ideas.

1.   Race!  With 5 boys, this is generally a good, quick fix.  I give each kid 25 flyers and we race to see who can finish first.  The winner generally gets a mento, a tick tack, a piece of gum, whatever I have in my pocket.

2.   When racing doesn't work, we start stealing houses.  Sometimes this one backfires, but sometimes it makes the 'victim' of the theft is thrilled to have someone finishing the bottom of their street.

3.   When the whining starts before we've even left the house, I pull out the chocolate koalas and kangaroos.  I bought some chocolate molds and I try to keep some home made chocolates always on hand for moments just like this.  The bonus with this one is I've gotten REALLY good at making them and can whip up a batch quick!  Also, I've started experimenting with putting a nice caramel filling in the middle of them.  Nougat is next!

4.   When all else fails, I give the kids $1 if they deliver x number of flyers.  We stop at All-A-Dollar on the way home and they pick out a crappy toy that'll be broken before we get home and everybody's happy.

5.  Occasionally the littles will dress up on their way to bed--either in their star wars outfits, or their star trek shirts, or their ninja costumes or ... you get the idea.  They think it's fabulous to go out in character--it's almost like they're not working at all!

6.  The prize of all prizes--for the kid who did the best job over any two week period, taking into account how many flyers they ran, how good their attitude was, how easy they were to wake up and get ready etc; they would get to go to Artic Circle for an ice cream with Mama and Papi.  Over the course of the summer, I think everyone 'won' that prize at least once.

Now, you'd think these ideas would only work for the littles, but surprisingly most of them work on the bigs as well.  They're not big on dressing up, but they love the chocolates (so long as it's white for K), they even like the $1--although they usually buy chips or candy.

Ideas that only work for the bigs are math games--how many steps between houses, how many flyers can you do in 1, 5, 10 minutes, how much money did you make in the last 5 min, etc.  During the summer when the older boys were running 500-800 flyers a day, we'd offer a 'free meal' coupon to the kid who delivered the most flyers that week.

Chocolate Kangaroos are a great motivator to walk another 25 flyers!

Saturday flyers--2000 flyers = 2 hours of work for 10 people (lucky for us the teenage boys can do 100 flyers in 35-45 min so the fact that the 4 year old only does 50 flyers per hour doesn't slow us down)