• 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

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!

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/

The good news is that one of the neighboring tea plantations is now helping with the clinic by supplying a full-time nurse practitioner as well as a nurse midwife who visits during the month. This is a wonderful step up in the quality of life for the village. And it is also consistent with the philosophy of Community Friends to seed a project and get it started with the hope that the project will transition into local support. We used the same process with our school lunch program. That program is now administered by the local government. By seeding projects that the community has identified and communicated to us as key areas for assistance, we are able to establish a successful working pilot model. Once the pilot has proven success, it is easy to transition the program to local support. This frees up Community Friends’ resources to then begin seeding a new pilot project. 

This process is at the core of the Community Friends philosophy.  It is also a way for Community Friends to create long-term relationships of trust in the community. We always work from the bottom up in collaboration with the communities we serve. We prefer to operate our programs on a human scale to ensure meaningful relationships and minimize unintended consequences. Our experience with the health clinic has created trust and improved lives…even saved lives in the case of Latha’s baby. We constantly see lives changed through our work and this is at the root of the human experience of helping each other.

Carsten Henningsen

“Community Friends Social Investment Fund takes investors’ principal and lends it to projects in Sri Lanka intended to keep money and jobs in local communities. It launched a chili-powder collective and a rice-flour collective with $1,000 each, employing teenage girls who otherwise might be sent to work in foreign countries. You can also buy carbon offsets to finance the nonprofit’s reforestation and economic development projects. ”

http://blog.oregonlive.com/finance/2010/04/flirs_retiring_cfo_issues_last.html

The women don’t make enough money from the collective to support their living expenses so they also work in the fields growing vegetables. This type of farming program is called Chaina Cultivation and has a long tradition in Sri Lanka. Government land is made available in the jungle at no cost. The jungle area is cleared by entrepreneurial villagers through field burning and then villagers grow vegetables which they sell at a farmer’s market in town. Everything is organic because they cannot afford chemical fertilizers or pesticides. The land is in rotation and after cultivation it is given a 6-month rest.   

One of the big problems with the farms in this area is the wild elephants which trample the gardens and cause mayhem. The villagers have built huts in trees where they take turns guarding the land 24 hours a day. If they see an elephant, the villagers light a “cracker” which is like a very large fire cracker or small explosive device. The loud sound scares the elephants. 

Deva Ratnakara

She does not want to spend the money for cataract surgery because she feels that she will not live long. The medical care is actually free through the government’s socialized medical system. However, there would be some fees, transportation, food and housing costs of perhaps $250. She would have to travel to the capital city of Colombo or Kandy for the operation. This could be a 15 to 20 hour journey by bus and Abehami has never been far from her village. She seems content with her small contribution to the chili collective and she receives a small portion of the profits. 

Deva Ratnakara

After exchanging news, we explained to Geetha what had happened with the collective in Ulla. That we had taken back the rice flour grinding machine and were looking for a new group who wanted to get into that business. Geetha was stunned. She said that she and a group of women in Panama had formed the Panama Women’s Cooperative Society. They worked together as a team and would find various businesses to get into. Currently, they had a baking business – making roti, pitu, string hoppers and this sort of thing. As a group, they had decided that their next step needed to be grinding their own flour, since their profits were being stifled by the high cost of ingredients.

Being both familiar to us and well established running a business, we felt this was a perfect match for the equipment in our possession. So we entered into a deal with them on the spot, ran over to Mr. Piyasena’s house, collected the grinder and within an hour the whole thing was concluded. Good luck ladies!

Jay Goodfriend

Fortunately, this incident ended well – the monk found an opportunity to escape captivity and somehow found his way home. But our inability to visit the community due to this danger created an obvious gap for us in our relationship with the two collectives. This problem was made worse by the fact that the school principal, Mr. Piyasena, who had been instrumental in overseeing the two collectives, was transferred to the school in Pottuvil. So for nearly a year we went without any reports from Ulla about the state of the two collectives.

With the war ending in the summer of 2009, travel has once again become possible to the East. And so it was with this in mind that we came to Ulla in December of 2009.

Coming here to Ulla again, it is obvious that the community is rebounding in most ways. Schools are open, restaurants and hotels are flourishing, roads and infrastructure has been rebuilt and everyone is generally back to work. You see small children everywhere. Now trees, scrubs and other vegetation have rebounded as well, giving the impression that the soil has managed to shake off the layer of salt that was deposited by the tidal floods. Still, the question remaining for us was, what has become of the two collectives that we had set in motion.

Parents from the community had volunteered to act as mentors for each of these collectives. Each also had a designated spot where the grinding machines were to be housed. The expectation had been that the mentor would supervise the four or five teenage girls in the respective collectives, one with the mission of grinding rice into rice flour, the other with the purpose of creating chili power.

The rice flour collective was supervised by a local fisherman named Shanta. His work shack, a small space standing next to the school, was our first visit. Regrettably, we found that the collective under Shanta’s supervision was not running. After much discussion, we concluded that this collective was not a good candidate for additional support from CommunityFriends, so we effectively terminated this venture.

The chili power collective was supervised by a woman named Latha. She and the young women originally set up their work in a small house located in Ulla. After finishing with Shanta, we made our way to Latha’s house to see how things were going there.

Like Shanta, Latha was very surprised to see us. After serving us tea, we explained what had been happening since our last visit. The house she had been using for the work had become unusable – she had difficulty accessing the property and the electricity was too sporadic. So, for mostly practical reasons, she relocated the business to nearby Panama.

There, the collective has been experiencing success. In fact, Latha’s group now nets 200-300 rupees/week ($2 to $3 USD) for each participant. These are:

Shamali, aged 17, student in Panama school
Nirosha, aged 29, Panama resident
Sabitha, aged 25, Panama resident
Abehami, aged 75, Latha’s mother

The five women feel that they now have a stable business and are looking to expand. They are now saving for a second grinding machine. Latha also wants them to go into rice flour grinding business. Good luck Latha and great job with your success so far!

Jay Goodfriend

Through generous donations, we were able to purchase the land and give it to the school so that the school could continue, hopefully forever. Then the flood came and closed the school for several days. Food was scarce during this time. Community Friends received additional donations to buy food and also bicycles for the children.

The director of the school, Cha Cha, is an amazing man who founded the school to assist the poorest of the poor children in the area. He teaches them English and Japanese so that one day they can more easily find employment in the city through the tourist industry. Cha Cha supports the school out of his own pocket from working as a part-time tour guide. Cha Cha sent these photos after the children received the bicycles and food.

Thanks,

Carsten Henningsen