TreeSisters: Delivered Online Programme & Increased Reforestation Funding by 300%
2014-2105
TreeSisters is a UK registered social change and reforestation charity that places tropical forest restoration into everyone's hands. Through partnering with Earthself's Founding Director, TreeSisters was able to evolve their business model by offering online courses to their audience and increase their reforestation funding by 300% in one year.
Participants
Countries
Revenue (GBP£)
Increase in Reforestation Funding
TreeSisters is a UK-registered social change and reforestation charity that places restoration into everyone's hands. TreeSisters' vision is to ethically expand the green cover of the world. Their mission is to work with trees and their communities for the planet to survive and thrive.
Their activities focus on Conservation and Education whilst building gender equality into everything they do, ensuring their planting projects include at least 50% women. At the same time, their educational offerings encourage women's voices in the reforestation sector. TreeSisters want the world to reconnect with nature so that we can protect and restore our planet.
They bring communities together and put solutions in their hands. By ethically funding the planting of over 26 million trees in places like Brazil, Borneo, Kenya, India, Madagascar and West Papua, they provide a measurable way to restore life and mitigate climate change.
In March 2014, Earthself’s founding director approached TreeSisters and offered 100% of the revenue from a five-week online programme called The Nature Process she intended to run that May.
Following its success, the programme was run again the following year again giving 100% of proceeds to go towards reforestation of Earth. The second time the programme ran, it was promoted solely through the TreeSisters' network and was extended into a seven-week online programme based on initial feedback.
These programmes helped enable the planting of TreeSister’s first 15,000 drought defence trees in Tamil Nadu through Project Greenhands in September 2014 and the planting of mangroves in Madagascar through their second reforestation beneficiary Eden Projects in June 2015.
They also inspired a shift in business model. By October 2015, the TreeSister’s board and team had created a plan to earn towards financial self-sustainability through the offering of courses that delivered on their mission of feminine empowerment through nature connectedness.
575 women from 15 countries registered for their first free introductory call for Earthing the Moon. Courses have run every season since, raising funds and planting trees.
By the end of our partnership together, over 170 people from 18 countries around the world had taken part in The Nature Process online programme. In total, £16k from the revenue of the online programme was raised to help further TreeSister’s mission.
The learnings from delivering this programme are embedded into Earthself’s NatureProcess Coach Training with the guided exercises that were created for the programme now available online for free in the Earthself resource section.
Edveeje Fairchild, Director of Operations: TreeSisters
“Tabitha’s commitment to putting the planet’s wellbeing above profit isn’t just a jazzy slogan.
Ms. Jayne lives what she promotes and her ‘planet first’ business model inspired us to evaluate more deeply how – even as an ecologically focused non-profit charity – we could put the planet first within our emerging business strategy.
For the past two years Tabitha donated 100% of the profits from her on-line course, The Nature Process, to TreeSisters.
Her on-line course was so successful that we realized we could shift from being a non-profit charity asking for donations to offering on-line courses that fund our organization and reforestation efforts.
Our business model has shifted from asking to earning. Tabitha’s ‘planet first’ business model also inspired us to reassess the business motivations behind the instructors we hire.
Through Tabitha’s example we realized we wanted to partner with instructors who view their TreeSisters courses as a means of actively helping to reforest the Tropics rather than simply being another marketing venue for their teaching career.
Along these lines we created a new fees for services model in which all of our instructors agree that 20% of the gross profit of our courses goes directly to reforestation before any other distribution occurs.
We also began creating mini-courses and mini-tree campaigns that would enable us to direct 100% of that income directly to reforestation.
Reimaging these key business areas enabled us to increase our reforestation funding by 300% in one year.”