Businesses – Create Your Own Projects
STI can help you company or group create custom charitable giving and voluntourism programs. We start by determining your interests and goals, and identifying potential non-profit partners. We can then create a customized program and design the systems you need to administer and integrate it into your booking and sales systems, and measure its effectiveness.
We can also work with your inbound partners to develop projects and management systems in the destinations you serve. The fee associated with this service is based on the size and scope of the project. Quotes are available upon request.
Please feel free to contact us at any time to learn more about our advisory services. For those who prefer to establish their own travelers’ philanthropy projects, read on…
Establish your own Travel Philanthropy Project
Creating your own foundation for a travelers' philanthropy project that gives back to the people and places you visit provides an outlet for the public to contribute and further enhance your sustainability-related goals.
- Identify an opportunity. Begin by identifying what type of initiative you'd like to support. If community development is of interest, determine the needs of local and indigenous people where your business operates. If you're more interested in environmental conservation, determine ways to protect any unprotected environments that you visit from exploitation.
- Develop a strategy. Determine how you will contribute to your decided effort. Are you going to be managing goods, volunteers, donations or a combination thereof? Consider the following options:
- To raise money, build donations into your budget as a percentage of business earnings or a percentage of traveler fees. A reasonable percentage is 5% of traveler fees or 1% of annual gross business revenues. To ensure that you realize maximum benefit for your efforts, set up a charitable foundation or partner with a tax-exempt non-profit organization like STI.
- A "Donor Advised Gift Fund" allows you to set up a charitable foundation with a minimum initial investment. After the foundation is established, distributions can be made to any registered 501(c)(3) organization, and you will receive a tax deduction. As an added benefit, the money in your foundation will grow in the interim between distribution dates just as a mutual fund would.
- For more information on "Donor Advised Gift Funds", contact companies such as T. Rowe Price, Oppenheimer, Charles Schwab, and Vanguard. For information on obtaining 501(c)(3) status for your organization or foundation, visit the IRS' web site. Publication 4220 will be very helpful in providing you with legal guidelines for 501(c)(3) organizations.
- Establish mutually beneficial relationships. Establish partnerships between your clients, your business, local non-governmental organizations, and governmental agencies and try to compliment their community development and aid programs or their environmental conservation programs.
From the onset, empower local people to get involved in the management of funding resources and related community development and conservation initiatives.
- Educate your clients. Inspire your clients to donate financial resources and or their time to address environmental, socio-cultural and economic issues.
Let your clients discover new experiences in their own way with or without interpretive assistance. Afterwards, recap and discuss issues that may affect the experience and the means for support. It is important that you allow your clients to develop their own emotional attachment to an experience before they are introduced to negative issues and their potential roles.
By establishing your client's belief in and ownership of your project in this manner, you can transfer their positive experiences into direct support. To increase your effectiveness, consider the following:
- Learn the setting(s) where you'll be promoting your project(s) and determine how your message will be delivered to your clients. It's important that you know what it's like to be a client on your trip and what it's like to be a guide or trip leader.
- Determine key messages that lead to donations. Give your clients a reason to donate. Then create visual and oral communication media in conjunction with your staff, and make them consistent both conceptually and artistically with the type of experience you provide.
- The travel experience begins before departure and continues after leaving the destination. Take advantage of opportunities to communicate with your clients before they leave home, while they're on site with you, and after they return home.
Determine the Credibility of a Project
If you want to evaluate the extent to which a project supports sustainable development, consider asking the project provider a few direct questions like: What are the goals of the project? What percentage of revenue goes directly to the project versus going to administration / overhead costs? What does the project fund specifically? How is the money allocated?
If these questions can't be answered to your satisfaction, consider finding another project to support. As a rule of thumb, the more localized the project, the more likely your donations will directly support local environmental and community development initiatives.
