Hello everyone! With this post I would like to show you guys the mandatory steps you need to fulfill to create an environmental charity project. The last five months I’ve been researching and planning my business steps, so I can start my project in the next semester.

First of all I’d like to share my video pitch with you guys to show my initial thought process:

Now that I’ve shared my initial plans I can show the steps that I planned and then accomplished.

First of all I planned out all the posts I wanted to publish on The Horse (our student protected working environment) to share my process with my fellow students.

Post 1 (Introduction):
Pitch Video & a short introduction text & Mindmap

Post 2 (Set up):
Start of Homepage, Social Media & Bank

Post 3 (Collab Idea’s):
E-Mail & Social Media contact with NIKIN & Nandu

Post 4 (Permit & Land):
Explanation of receiving the permit & finding a piece of land for the planting

Post 5 (Marketing):
Designing flyers and start collecting donations

Post 6 (Goal):
Planting trees, improving my environmental footstep

Post 7 (Purchase):
Buying the trees locally

Post 8 (Planting):
Organization, finding helpers, filming & pictures

Post 9 (Write):
Write a draft post for dontwastemy.energy

Post 10 (Publication):
Publish my text, pictures & video on dontwastemy.energy

After planning all of my posts I started with the marketing steps. How can I attract attention to this project?

 

I created a Homepage using wix as a template. So people would have a landing page to inform them about this hopefully life changing project. I still use the wix url because a seperate domain would cost me and I haven’t achieved any donations yet to finance it. In case you are interested in helping with my project just send me an E-Mail.
E-Mail: treenovice@gmx.ch (website is still in progress)

Of course I also created an instagram account to attract people on social media. Social Media is used by almost everyone every single day so it’s a direct way to attract them to my project. Instagram: @treenovice

But how can people donate to my organisation? I wanted to use Twint, because it’s an easy cash free payment method that most people in Switzerland use. So I created a business acoount and linked it to a seperate account. I recieved QR-codes to scan, so everyone passing by a poster of mine can just scan it and choose how much they would like to donate. I’ll show you what I recieved from twint in the following picture.

So now that I’ve done all of these steps I still need a place to plant the trees and a permit to be allowed to do that legally. I met up with my friends dad who’s a farmer. He’d like to stay annonymous. We had multiple meetings and after explaining him what my goal is he agreed to my propotition of using his land in the canton of Zurich for my trees. He needs to cut down a lot of trees this year anyway and with my project we can fill the newly empty space with trees.

But only with the farmers agreement itself it would still be illegal to just plant trees. So I went to my local community council and asked to get a permit. After weeks of waiting I finally got an answer and it was positive. I can now legally plant the trees on the piece of land.

 

What does the future of Tree Novice look like? 

Now that the business steps have been completed, I can start doing the fun parts. A friend of mine is creating my posters as we speak.

The next steps will be to choose what trees will be planted and how many we can plant with the amount of donations we receive. So my goal over the summer will be to collect as many donations as possible.

When there’s enough money for a first planting day, I’ll invite my whole class so everyone can learn how a tree is planted. I’ll document that day with a video which will be uploaded in the follow up post.

I also participated in an environmental competition hosted by Clima Now (climanow.ch), where I  could win 10‘000 CHF for Tree Novice. Sadly I haven‘t received any feedback yet. But as soon as I do I‘ll make sure to update you guys 🙂

If you have any questions or feedback please let me now in the comments below 😀

Author: Iain A. Weder

On-topic posts on dontwastemy.energy
City Trees in ZH
How can plants survive in the climate change?

☷ See the project teams here »
☵ Some words about the contributions »