DONOR TRAVEL
DONOR TRAVEL SERVICES
There are so many ways to tell your story, and the most effective of these is not telling, but showing. Major donors are already on board with your mission, they care about your success and they are invested in the cause. Travel that is meaningful, inspirational, and sustainable for your organization is the secret to turning donors into champions.
Travel Program Consultation
As the industry’s leading expert in donor travel, we provide insight into your travel program operations to help you forge lifelong bonds with donors, staff, and service populations.
Assessment and Plan Development
We assess your current donor travel program, clarify your most important goals, then design a plan to help you achieve them.
Executive
Coaching
We work with you and your development or travel team on an ongoing basis to implement new initiatives, build skills, ensure accountability, gain access to expert advice, and ultimately, be more successful.
Training and
Workshops
Using a combination of training, discussion, and dynamic interactive activities, we create transformative learning sessions that help your team develop critical skills in hosting, guiding, storytelling, and marketing trips to improve success.
More articles on the topic
Donor Travel: Is It about Acquisition, Qualification, Cultivation, Solicitation, or Recognition?
What our
clients say:
“We first reached out to Caliopy to get support on how best to engage our amazing group of supporters in project tours. Caliopy has just such a wealth of experience in this area. And then 2020 happened and Caliopy was such a key resource for us and shifting our collaboration with her to think about engaging our supporters in a new world.”
Andrea Johnson, Executive Director, Green Empowerment
“My work with Caliopy and Philanthropy Without Borders has been instrumental in ensuring the successful launch of our newly structured Educational Travel Program. Caliopy’s guidance, tools, thought partnership and strategic support have significantly advanced our member trip offerings, improving our ability to create transformational relationships with our donors. In addition, Caliopy has helped us establish a formal private custom journeys program and invitation-only major donor trip model, which have helped us better leverage our midlevel, planned giving, and major gifts donor strategies. She really spent time understanding our organizational needs and challenges so she could help us truly optimize our processes for impact and efficiency. Caliopy’s background in fundraising coupled with her extensive knowledge of affinity travel positions her perfectly to help any organization that is trying to build out or enhance their place-based (and virtual) donor engagement tools. Our entire team has benefited from her work and I can’t recommend her enough!”
“My work with Caliopy and Philanthropy Without Borders has been instrumental in ensuring the successful launch of our newly structured Educational Travel Program. Caliopy’s guidance, tools, thought partnership and strategic support have significantly advanced our member trip offerings, improving our ability to create transformational relationships with our donors. In addition, Caliopy has helped us establish a formal private custom journeys program and invitation-only major donor trip model, which have helped us better leverage our midlevel, planned giving, and major gifts donor strategies. She really spent time understanding our organizational needs and challenges so she could help us truly optimize our processes for impact and efficiency. Caliopy’s background in fundraising coupled with her extensive knowledge of affinity travel positions her perfectly to help any organization that is trying to build out or enhance their place-based (and virtual) donor engagement tools. Our entire team has benefited from her work and I can’t recommend her enough!”
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5 Donor Travel Myths Busted
I‘ve been consulting on donor trips for a while now, and have come across a fair share of assumptions and ill-informed beliefs. In this article, I spell out the most common myths and misconceptions I have encountered…and saved the very best for last.
1. Donor trips have low retention.
Like any event, donor trips attract both those who may be good prospects for our organizations and those who may not.
2. We can’t talk about our program too much because people are here for vacation.
Donors absolutely want to have fun on these trips, and that’s exactly why we always balance programmatic work with fun and educational experiences that provide a reprieve and additional context about the location they are visiting. But donors know this is no ordinary vacation – or at least they should – if we have prepared them appropriately.
3. The work speaks for itself.
Nothing speaks for itself—all of it has to be interpreted and runs the risk of being misunderstood. There’s that adage “seeing is believing.” But really, it’s more like “we see what we already believe.”
4. If travelers could just see the work, their gifts will come automatically.
We directly solicit and explain matters to donors though mail, social media, events, and campaigns. Yet when it comes to trips? There, we just assume our donors know what to do. How does that align with the rest of our fundraising strategies?
5. People should donate $5,000 instead of spending it on traveling.
I usually hear this response from board members, who, upon learning that the $5,000 trip fee literally only covers hard costs (meals, lodging, in-country transportation) and is not an actual donation to the organization, feel it a waste to see so much good money pass through the organization’s budget and into the bank accounts of the operators, hotels, restaurants, guides, etc.
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At Philanthropy without Borders, we help nonprofits clarify their priorities, tell powerful stories, and raise more money so they can continue to tackle the world’s toughest problems.
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Philanthropy without Borders is not in any way affiliated with Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières. Doctors Without Borders and Médecins Sans Frontières are registered trademarks of Bureau International de Médecins Sans Frontières International.