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Community Friends is offering students in the U.S. an opportunity to earn extra money this summer by selling carbon offsets to help the environment and help students in Sri Lanka. The benefits to U.S. students are:

• Earn extra money for yourself or for your school or sports team, etc. It is your choice.

• Work and earn as much or as little as you like. You get to run your own business and work your own hours.

• Gain experience in “green” business and add this experience to your resume.

• Learn how to create a marketing plan and become an entrepreneur.

• Your efforts benefit humanitarian programs for economically-disadvantaged students in Sri Lanka.

What is a Carbon Offset?

• When we drive a car or fly, CO2 or carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere and causes pollution.

• Imagine attaching a giant balloon to the tailpipe of your family car. Drive that car about 2,500 miles and that balloon will weigh a ton. That ton of carbon is released into the atmosphere and causes global warming and climate change.

• By planting trees, we can help the earth absorb this carbon since trees breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out clean oxygen. When you purchase a carbon offset for one ton of carbon, we use the money to plant enough trees to absorb that ton of carbon. Each carbon offset costs $27 so you can buy $27 worth of carbon offsets for each 2,500 miles of driving. Play with our carbon calculator to see how it works with car miles, air miles and even the monthly electricity for your house. http://www.communityfriends.org/carbon-offsets/

• When we fill-up our cars with gas, the price per gallon does not include the damage to the environment. If the costs to the environment were included in the price of gas, each gallon would cost about $7. With the BP oil spill, this cost is even higher. Buying carbon offsets means that we are paying the true cost of driving a car.

Selling Carbon Offsets

• Selling carbon offsets is just like selling anything. First you need to have a marketing plan to identify people you know who might like the opportunity to help the environment. This is your target audience. Then you want to start by approaching the easiest people on your list, we call them the low-hanging fruit on your marketing tree. These low-hanging fruit are people who may drive a hybrid, buy organic, donate to Sierra Club, etc.

• You can contact them by email or phone or in person, so you need a marketing script and a link to the Community Friends website where they can use the carbon calculator and hopefully purchase some offsets. They can buy $27 worth (one ton of carbon offsets) or more or less. Maybe they would like to buy enough to offset their annual driving or their next airplane trip.

• You can explain that you are trying to earn some extra money this summer and this is a way they can help you meet your goal. Some friends and relatives may not care so much about saving the earth as they do about supporting your business efforts.

Earning Money

• Community Friends pays 25% of whatever you sell. If you have a goal of making $1,000 this summer, then you will need to sell $4,000 of carbon offsets.

• In your marketing plan, you would identify a certain number of people to contact in order to sell $4,000 worth. You might have a number of people willing to buy only one ton for $27. And you may have one or two interested in buying enough for all the miles they drive in one year.

• The more people you contact the greater chance that you will reach your goal. Contacting people who already understand global warming or the idea of carbon offsets makes your job much easier.

Please contact us if you or someone you know is interested in learning more. And please visit our carbon calculator and other information about our carbon offset program:

Carbon Program & Calculator

Land Reforestation

About Carbon Offsets

1. What is your offset sales goal?

For example, sell an average of $1,000 of offsets per month for 4 months = $4,000 gross, net 25% = $1,000.

2. What is your target market?

The best target market characteristics include:
o People who already understand climate change and carbon offsets as a way to mitigate their emissions. You do not need to educate them.
o People you already know, like friends and relatives.
o Referrals from the above.
o People like the above that are planning a wedding or an event (we have recently inserted a card about our offsets in wedding invitations so that guests can buy offsets for their travel to the event).

3. Low-hanging Fruit

• A successful marketing formula is quite simple: the more qualified prospects that you contact the more potential sales and the higher probability of meeting your offset sales goal. The higher quality or more qualified prospects that you contact the higher probability of a sale. For example, a close friend or relative who drives a Prius and buys organic is most likely a highly qualified prospect. We call these prospects the “low-hanging fruit”; ripe and easy to pick.
• As you go further up the tree, you will not know the prospects well and they may not be well educated on environmental issues which requires more of your time to provide the education and convince them why there is value for them in an offset. Especially in the beginning, it is much better to start with the low-hanging fruit to practice before approaching somone who is completely new to the concept. Ideally, all of your sales will be from low-hanging fruit.
• With offsets it does not matter if you appraoch people who are local or live in other states. What matters is how well you know them. Customers recieve a tax deduction as long as they file U.S. tax returns. International customers may not have this advantage.

4. Developing the Sales Pyramid

Meeting your sales goal will require approaching X number of people, X number of these people you approach will purchase, and you will have a range of transactions based on dollar amount. The classic sales or fundraising pyramid generally includes a few larger transactions and a lot of smaller tranactions.
Assume sales goal of $4,000:

5. Developing the Sales Funnel

• The sales funnel is a way to organize your marketing and sales prospects. Identifying potential suspects by name is at the entrance of the funnel, followed by prospects and finally customers. Identifying them by potential dollar amount is helpful to see how the sales pyramid might begin to take shape.
• The first phase is identifying suspects.
• The second phase is moving suspects down to prospects by contacting these potential names and having the conversation that will hopefully lead to a sale.
• The third phase is converting a prospect into an offset-buying customer.
• The purpose of the funnel is to remind us to keep filling the top of the funnel as we work through the process of all three phases. In other words, all three phases should be full of names at all times. Give it a try; begin listing low-hanging suspects in your own funnel diagram and come up with 10 highly qualified suspects to start.
• Consider setting a goal of identifying X number of new potentail suspects every day and contacting X number every day to move them through the funnel.

6. Sales Methods

• Decide how you will contact prospects: email, facebook, phone, in-person and/or a combination. The method may vary by the type of prospect and your feeling about their preferred way of being approached.
• Email is a convenient way to provide the link to purchasing offsets on our website. However, a phone call or in-person meeting may be the best way to begin, followed by an email to compete the transaction. In general, in-person contacts will most likely result in higher sales; however, email contacts allow for higher volume of contacts given your time.
• The website requires PayPal or VISA. If the prospect prefers, they can write a check payable to Community Friends. Checks can be mailed to Community Friends or given to you to give to us.

7. Know the Product

• Just like selling any product, the more you know about it the better and the smoother the sale. The first step in getting to know the Community Friends story is to read everything on the website. The descriptions of our programs and the stories on our blog are actually the product. Offsets are simply a way to support our work. Offsets are of value to customers and there is some study needed to be well versed on the various aspects of offsets. All of this information is on our website.
• Once you have studied the website and written your marketing plan, contact us to go over your plan and to answer any questions. Remember, this is a pilot project taht we have never tried before. Your questions and suggestions for improving the materials and process will help other students who come after you.

8. Sales Script

The last step before contacting your first prospect is to write your script. You will probably want to have a different script for email than the script you might use for in-person or phone. Below is a sample email script. (need to insert a sample script here)

9. Transactions

When a customer is ready to purchase, the website is an easy way to make the transaction using PayPal or VISA. If the customer prefers to write a check, simply make the check payable to Community Friends and mail it to our address. All transactions are tax deductible (as allowable by law).

10. Record Keeping

Keep track of your suspects, prospects and customers using a simple spreadsheet. Input dates and notes based on your sales activity. We will provide an Excel spreadsheet format that you can email to us each week so that we can track your sales with money coming in from PayPal. We will then pay you your 25%.

Thanks!

Community Friends is offering students an opportunity to earn some extra money this summer by helping us sell carbon offsets. Mona Das is a student at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Washington State. She is leading the effort to support our summer student program.

Students can work as much or as little as they like since they receive a commission on offsets that they sell. The program is also a way for students to learn entrepreneurial marketing skills and build on their resume. Students can choose to keep the earnings or raise money for their school, sports team, or favorite cause.  Please contact us if you or someone you know is interested in learning more. And please visit our carbon calculator and other information about our carbon offset program. http://www.communityfriends.org/carbon-offsets/

We have been challenged by the drought for a year now. We lost most of the 9,000 new trees that we planted last year. Now the rains are starting again and we are beginning to plant once again. It takes so much labor to plant these nursery trees that we have grown as seedlings. We have to unload all 1,000 plants at the planting location by today before the rains start because with heavy rains the lorry will not able to make it all the way up the muddy mountain road.

So far in the last few weeks we have planted 4,000 new trees. Our hope is that the trees will survive this time with enough rain water for irrigation. If we are successful, the trees will absorb tons of carbon dioxide during their lifetime and help with the world’s need for environmental restoration. We join hands with others worldwide to help the planet and its people.

Deva Ratnakara