Business people searching our site count on us to list high quality Opportunities. Therefore, we review a submission to help you to improve it before we approve it for the site.
Submitting an Opportunity takes a fair amount of work. Why? To motivate a busy professional to use vacation time and pay his or her own expenses to help you! Business people stay away from proposals that are poorly thought out.
Read through this info tab by tab, starting with the first one and working your way across.
To navigate our instructions and forms you’ll need to understand the labels we use.
Opportunity – A distinct way in which you need help from a business person. Each distinct person you need to help in a specific way generates an Opportunity.
Project – The larger task that may need help from several different business people. Therefore, one Project might prompt you to submit multiple Opportunities.
Project Owner – The point person responsible for all Opportunities linked to a given Project. This person communicates with Transformational Ventures and any potential volunteers.
A Project Owner needs to register with us to submit Opportunities and a one-time donation of $10 USD allows you to submit up to 15 Opportunities at a time.
Aligned with our values and strategy.
We need Opportunities that align with our values and strategy. If you go to our Home Page and look under Strategy in our main menu, you will discern what kind of Opportunities we want. You can also look at some of the Opportunities already listed to get a feel for this.
Real Business.
An Opportunity needs to be about real business. Some people interested in business and mission set up businesses that barely function. They are a “platform” or excuse to live in a location and pursue other worthy purposes.
That is NOT what we want! We want Opportunities that involve real business or that need real business skills to improve a non-profit’s operations.
Spiritual Value
Our strategy adds economic, social, and spiritual value. Therefore, a Project Owner that submits an Opportunity must understand and promote the spiritual impact of an Opportunity and the Project behind that Opportunity. For that reason, the following two statements are true:
1. Transformational Ventures cooperates with a wide variety of people and organizations that share our humanitarian ends, even if we are not on the exact same page spiritually.
2. Project Owners who submit Opportunities on our site need to have the a similar spiritual orientation with ours, for the sake of values alignment and our own sense of doing the spiritual part well. For a description of our spiritual worldview, Click here
If all this spiritual focus seems a bit odd and you want to talk about it with us, we are happy to do that. Just send us an email to start a conversation.
No Fundraising
Our list of Opportunities is not about raising funds. It is about helping Christian business people match their skill sets with strategic situations that need them. If the Project behind your Opportunity needs funding you will need to pursue that through other means.
Because of United States tax laws, we cannot receive donations for specific Projects or Opportunities not under our control, even if someone wants to donate to it through us.
Costs Involved In An Opportunity – Your Responsibility
All costs involved with executing your Opportunity and receiving a visiting business person are your responsibility to negotiate and manage. Transformational Ventures does not assume any responsibility for any cost related to your Opportunity, visiting professionals, or visits that might not materialize even though you put work and money into setting up the details.
The Business Person’s Responsibility
We tell interested business people that if they engage with an Opportunity they:
- Donate their time.
- Pay their main travel and lodging/food expenses or raise that money from their own circles of influence for their “short-term mission trip.”
- Can anticipate that their hosts will show them hospitality but that their hosts will usually be just making ends meet.
Our Placement Donation
We request, from you, the Project Owner, a Placement Donation of $50 once a business person is working with your Opportunity. Why? To help offset our expenses. Successfully delivering a qualified business person to volunteer for you requires a lot of time and expense.
Our Donate Button
You will see that every Opportunity viewing page has a passive option for someone to donate to Opportunity Development, if they can’t personally engage with an Opportunity. These donations help defray the costs of making Opportunities available on our site.
You do, as Project Owner.
We welcome Opportunities from every organization and individual doing BAM or qualified social enterprises, from every corner of the world.
We simply broker the connections between pre-qualified Opportunities and pre-qualified potential volunteers. That way all involved know they are dealing with high-quality, like-minded people.
As the one responsible on the ground, the Project Owner/organization retains the necessary control over the situation.
- The final decision to engage is made by the volunteer and the Project Owner/organization.
- The volunteer, if doing a trip or longer stay, goes out through whatever systems the Project Owner/organization normally use. Transformational Ventures can offer great sending systems, through WorldVenture, but using them is entirely optional.
- Ownership and control of the situation is in the hands of the Project Owner, not Transformational Ventures. All we need is a finder’s fee from the Project Owner and an administration fee from the traveling volunteer, to help our sustainability.
The following steps are for a first-time submission.
- Think through what you need help with and make sure it satisfies our requirements of involving real business, adding spiritual value, and aligning with our Values and basic Strategy. (If you have questions or doubts, fill out the Submit an Opportunity page as best you can and put your questions in the "Other Info" box in the form or in a separate email.)
To see examples of Opportunities that are well-written and cover key questions business people ask, follow these links...
Open Country -- Agri business or Business Coaching
Secure Country -- Small business coaching or Retail Supply.
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- We recommend that you become a registered Project Owner before filling out the Submit an Opportunity pages. Doing this will allow you to save your work and come back to it later.
(You may fill out the pages without being registered but before your Opportunity goes live you will need to register.)
We ask each Project Owner for a $10 donation to help defray our costs. Once registered, you can have as many as 15 active Opportunities at a time.
Click here to become a Project Owner.
- Go to the Submit an Opportunity page and fill it out as completely as you can.
Create a new Opportunity for each specific person or team you need, even if several persons or teams are helping with one larger Project.
Click here to see a couple examples of the need for a specific person generating distinct Opportunities.
- Submit the Opportunity. We will review it and, if necessary, contact you. Once approved, the Opportunity goes live on our site for one year or until it gets filled or you decide to remove it.
1. We will be in touch with any follow up questions and about any business people that inquire about the Opportunity. To see the process we follow when a Field Volunteer expresses serious interest, Click Here...
2. We will do basic training and orientation of any business volunteer that commits to your Opportunity. We will communicate the equipping we do to you. You are responsible for any additional training specific to your Opportunity and location.
3. We will help the business person know what questions to ask regarding basic logistics involved with consulting by Skype/email or with traveling to your location. Any logistics unique to your Opportunity and situation will need to be communicated by you.
4. We will contact you and the volunteer at key points during or after an Opportunity engagement, to debrief and capture successes and ways to improve our services.
5. As Project Owner, you agree to communicate to us observable results that might contribute to our ‘metrics’ – our attempts to measure our effectiveness. We will send you a simple tool to do that once or twice after an Opportunity has been fulfilled.
6. We reserve the right to post appropriate stories and pictures of Opportunities, success, and impact on our web site and to reference stories for training purposes.
