Our Relaunch FAQ

Since 2016, we have certified the donation of time and money to fish and wildlife conservation efforts through our “2% for Conservation Certification” program.

To earn the certification, businesses would need to commit to donating at least 1% of their gross sales and 1% of one employee’s time in their first year of membership. After that first year, they would need to submit recertification data to show where they gave at least 1% of their gross sales and 21 hours of volunteered time (that is 1% of one employee’s time over the course of a year) to wildlife conservation efforts.

The initial intent of this program was solely to certify dollars and time donated.

Individuals could take a pledge, but could not officially be members themselves due to privacy laws around financial reporting. Programming for individuals was limited due to the staffing needs of tracking down dollars donated by the business certification.

Our new certification program, launched in Spring 2025, is called “Fish & Wildlife Volunteers” and does three things:

• Certifies businesses that donate 20 hours per every 5 employees, annually.

• Provides training, best practice standards, and bespoke assistance for those businesses to build and maintain internal programs for company culture, external communication programs for brand awareness, and community/networking engagement for building public good will at scale.

• Through a new Individual Membership; provide training, group education, and community building tools for private individuals to help them build and maintain effective, healthy, and long-lasting commitments to conservation in their personal lives and for the causes they support.

Unlike our “2% for Conservation” program, the “Fish & Wildlife Volunteers” program comes with an equal directive to not just certify what a business has done, but to also help them become more effective in their support of conservation — at launch.

Over the last decade, we have had to turn away so many wonderful businesses (from many different industries) because they could not meet our financial giving standard.

From small startups to large box stores, our financial requirement was a hurdle that excluded brands from engaging in our best-practice volunteer programming.

Not anymore!

Whether you have >10,000 employees or are an army of 1, we are excited to help you develop a comprehensive and holistic conservation volunteering program for your business.

Your volunteer programs should enhance both customer and employee experiences, scale with your business, and have a positive effect on your bottom line.

We specialize in partnering with and empowering businesses to give back to wildlife conservation in meaningful and authentic ways that your community will respond positively to.

If you would like to learn more, contact us!

In a world of eroded public trust, reduced employee retention, market volatility, increased chronic depression rates, and unsustainable volunteer burnout — people need to be able to accomplish something genuinely good.

Volunteering and spending time outdoors has been proven by thousands of peer-reviewed studies to improve public health, mental health, employee satisfaction, and ties to community.

Our new Fish & Wildlife Volunteers certification and individual membership is launching after nearly a decade of helping businesses and individuals do just that!

By the end of 2017, we had noticed that most of the businesses that had signed on with us needed assistance developing and maintaining their charitable programs — especially on the volunteer side. Providing this assistance was paramount for businesses to retain their capacity to give back to conservation in a way that made sense to their employees and customers.

The vast majority of businesses that have ever signed on with us initially had an owner or CEO that was passionate about the outdoors… but they had no idea what their employees or customers cared about when it came to wildlife or the outdoors.

In 2018, we implemented best practice training and volunteer education as part of this certification program. It immediately resonated with our membership and their needs! This programming addition made our membership base double, year over year, up through 2022. We certified thousands of volunteer hours and helped our members improve on their unique volunteer programs and the employee incentives tied to them.

Our business members saw their employee turnover rates drop and consumer trust levels rise. We had multiple business members engaging in large-scale multi-year volunteer projects directly tied to employee and customer interests. Hundreds of miles of road, trail, and beaches were maintained. Hundreds of acres of forest, desert, alpine habitat and wetlands were rehabilitated. Several literal tons of bad old fences and trash were removed from migration corridors and sensitive ecosystems.

And the market rewarded our members at a rate that far out-paced their competitors that had internal volunteer programs but were not affiliated with or certified by us.

Unfortunately, this success made these businesses attractive to be sold off by their investors. They had high employee retention and morale, as well as growing and passionate consumer bases. Between 2022-2024, many of these business members were sold to entities that ate up their margins for financial donations.

Yet, more than half of the businesses we lost to buyouts asked if we could still help with their volunteer programs and public engagement initiatives.

Their margins to meet our financial standard were lost in the sale, but the team still wanted to follow the “why” we had helped their former leadership build… and the new owners wanted that too.

Regrettably, we couldn’t help a business unless they were certified with us, because that would be unfair to our members who still met our standard.

At a time when both businesses and individuals are financially struggling, refocusing our efforts to make wildlife conservation volunteering accessible will empower anyone to bring positive action into their own lives and communities.

The intent of our 1% of Gross Sales requirement was to allow for giving capacity to scale with a business’ sales. When we launched in 2016, the markets and economy had developed to a point of relatively dependable profit margins.

Many of the businesses we certified gave well above 1% of gross sales, often allocating their giving of products, services and cash through their marketing budgets. It made good financial sense, especially with strong and generally predictable P&L sheets (profit/loss).

However, 2022 brought a dramatic shift that directly impacted the ability of our business members to not only report their giving, but how much they could give to conservation causes with their dollars.

Private equity and corporate conglomerates started to invest in and gobble up businesses at an unprecedented rate.

When a business is bought, or takes on major investment partners, it is exceedingly rare for them to maintain their capacity to financially support conservation causes because the new owners/investors expect a direct return on their investment. Their charitable giving capacity disappears.

Since 2016, we have tracked what percentage of their gross sales our members were able to donate to conservation.

Our membership’s average percentage of gross sales donated to conservation grew every year, peaking at 5.5% in 2022…
and then plummeted to barely hit our standard of 1% of Gross Sales the following year after private equity/ corporate market consolidation accelerated. Since then, most of our membership have had to cap their charitable giving at our standard, and even that was a great sacrifice for many of them.

Most economists report that the 2022 post-COVID inflation spike (which peaked between 7-9%) played a role in charitable giving decline across the board. However, we have confirmed that was not what caused the decline in financial giving capacity for most of our members.

We know from reports directly from both our current and former business members that the primary cause of the decrease of their financial giving % and the cancellation of certification memberships was market consolidation.

Either their new owners would not let them give the way that they used to (even if they were wildly profitable), their business was sold off for parts after purchase, or their competition had been consolidated in such a way that the cost to compete outpaced the capacity of the conservation industry to advertise on their behalf.

No matter their reason, our old financial standard has now become unattainable to the vast majority of businesses.

There is a not-so-fine line between enforcing a standard to prove validity of merit, and financial gatekeeping of collaboration and respect.

The former brought real value to consumers and wildlife conservation when we could offer it to virtually any business.

The latter is a tool that has too often been used to make the outdoors and conservation exclusively the domain of the wealthy and well connected.

We will not land on or advocate for the latter side of the line.

Conservation non-profit employee turnover rates and an increasing lack of transparency by many organizations is both removing our ability to track donations and eroding the trust of businesses wishing to financially support conservation.

In 2018, the average employment length for conservation non-profit Development Coordinators was just shy of three years, and just over two years for Executive Directors. Because this duration was relatively close to that of the private sector, certifying donations from individual businesses did not take very long.

We were able to certify the millions of dollars in product and cash donated by our members with limited difficulty.

In 2024, the average employment length for a conservation non-profit Development Coordinator dropped to 14 months, with Executive Directors dropping to 18 months. That is what the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, but our direct experience is that they are actually shorter. This is not only a major institutional knowledge threat within the industry, but significantly confounds tracking who donated what and when to an organization. Many are keeping undependable donation records between employee changes, if at all.

It now takes us 3x longer, at a minimum, to certify each business member’s financial giving.

Our lowest dues bracket is for small businesses making <$250,000/yr. and costs $300/yr.

On average, it now costs us nearly a week in staff payroll to certify their donations because it is very rare to have the same contact person at any conservation group keeping track of who donated what to them. For larger business members, who donate >$100k/yr., it now costs us nearly a month of payroll to track down and certify their donations.

With all that time allocated only to the financial certification, there has been little to no time left for us to provide community-building support, volunteer training, or brand storytelling collaboration.

When people have asked why we had to scale back our engagement and programming for private individuals who signed on and took our Personal Pledge, this is why. By the end of 2022, staff time became 90% tied up in tracking down and certifying business member donations.

We have never once “spoofed” a certification, but far more time than what is good for our members had to be taken to accomplish that.

This challenge has developed at a time when the conservation nonprofit industry has become more divided and competitive over fundraising while also becoming less effective in financial transparency and project development due to political connections and forces.

In 2023 and 2024, we received more consumer complaints than positive comments about the organizations that our members chose to financially support. The most common complaints were: a lack of real-world projects in the places the groups had fundraised, the groups spending money hosting luncheons to give awards/certificates to elected politicians, and giving awards and board seats to people whose businesses were in direct conflict of interest with the organization’s advertised habitat goals.

Our certification was supposed to build consumer loyalty, but the behavior of some conservation groups has greatly eroded the public’s trust about what our members’ donated dollars are being used for.

In contrast — over nearly a decade and thousands of comments from consumers, we have only received ONE negative comment about our members volunteering… and it was about a few of them volunteering at a large conservation group’s awards gala!

Positive change has to happen in the industry, and it will happen through a passionate and robustly equipped volunteer base.

Every time a company prints or publishes a “X% for [name of outdoor thing]”, our attorney has to send them a notice that “2% for Conservation” is trademarked. Every. Single. Time.

And it has to turn into a “cease and desist” letter if it is too close to “2% for Conservation” — even if it is just an internal giving program at that business.

If we do not, we could someday lose the trademark, for lack of defending it.

Not only is it an awful way to have a first-contact with a business that is clearly trying to do something good and who we certainly could be wonderful partners for, but it costs money every time.

And it happens several times a month. And attorney fees have kept pace with inflation. And there is no way to catch them all.

Currently, the average number of potential trademark threats we catch, and these are just the ones we catch, would cost us nearly $2,500/month in attorney fees if we wrote to every single one. That’s what a legal retainer fee would cost because it would be cheaper than the volume of one-off initial letters providing documented proof for every single new case.

We believe that fully defending this far-too-easily-infringed-upon trademark would be a waste of our member dollars.

In contrast, no else certifies businesses that volunteer time to conservation.

Building expertise and compiling extensive data on conservation volunteering best practices for various of species, habitat regions, organization and chapter structures, agency requirements, volunteering across national borders, and especially how to coach businesses on profitable integration of volunteer programs that are meaningful to consumers — and scaling those offerings from side-hustles all the way up to billion-dollar corporations…
Well, that takes about a decade of dedicated engagement and standard-building in that space through a couple hundred businesses and their thousands of volunteered hours that you helped coordinate, improve upon, and certify.

Which thankfully, and not without great difficulty, we have done.

And now we can leverage all of that for you and the vitality of our world.

• Our url has always been fishandwildlife.org. That was lucky, right?

• The name highlights what we specialize in helping businesses and individuals become.

• There are no certifications with similar names.

• The name invokes passion for conservation.

• The name is easily understandable. Our old program name required people to do math to understand (1% Time + 1% Money = 2% for Conservation).

• The name is not built from high-value adwords on any service. Google and Meta throttled our reach and increased our ad costs because both the “%” symbol and the word “conservation” are high-value adwords on all the platforms they control.

Yes. Our board of directors went through an organizational SWOT analysis and 1, 3, and 5 year strategic plans with our Executive Director shortly after the new board members were onboarded at the end of the winter outdoor tradeshow season.

They voted unanimously for these changes.

There will be no increase in member dues because of this programming change.

The only change to member dues that we are making is bracket a fairness update that we needed to make anyway.

More details on that, in its own section of this FAQ page.

Yes! Whether they donate their time, their talents or their treasure to conservation - we will still support and promote their charitable giving to the public.

Though we can no longer certify dollars given to conservation, we will always continue to uplift our members who are able to continue supporting conservation financially.

Not yet, for two reasons:

1. To give our members time to get through their packaging inventory that has our “2% for Conservation Certified Business” badge on them.

2. Refiling a DBA for our organization with all the government entities that we are legally required to refile with will take over a year. This programming change needed to happen now.

No! All business members who are current on their recertifications from through 2024 are automatically enrolled in the new program.

For those without “2%” branded packaging inventory:
We will start helping them convert their digital assets to the “Fish & Wildlife Volunteers” branding immediately.

For those with “2%” branded packaging inventory:
They have until December 2027 to update their packaging. Many buy their packaging in bulk, up to three years in advance. We do not want our members to have added cost outlay to have their packaging match our new program branding.

For businesses that have “2%” branded packaging inventories, we will still provide our original “2% for Conservation” certification.

We will certify both their donated time and dollars and they will still operate under the old standard until they can update their packaging.

We will provide this service until they either order new packaging or December 2027 — whichever comes first.

“Fish & Wildlife Volunteers” is launching as a program under the parent organization “2% for Conservation”.

This gives:

• Time for our members who need to get through “2%” branded packaging.

• Time to refile with all federal and state agencies while also building the replacement brand.

• Us the ability to maintain our charity license plate in Montana without paying a significant information update fee.

• Our members who have yet to file their 2024 taxes will not have to update their accounting records until we make the change.

Either January 2028, or when our members get through their “2% for Conservation” branded packaging — whichever comes first.

That might seem like a long time, but federal offices are severely backlogged, so we are being realistic about the timeline.

No! Donations will be processed through the parent organization, but entities will be able to donate specifically and exclusively for the “Fish & Wildlife Volunteers” program.

The money will be donated to the parent organization of “2% for Conservation”, but can be allocated to the new program to fulfill our organizations programming mandates.

The removal of this limitation has opened up countless partnership opportunities to help our members and conservationists at large!

Because we live in a different political reality than when our old branding was introduced in the spring of 2016.

Our founders chose the color purple to lead in the ideal that conservation should transcend political party lines.

Politics were far less divisive and blood-pressure-spike-inducing back then.

The last thing we want a volunteer to think about while they are trying to volunteer their time out in nature is what the current political climate is… even if it were in the promotion of a collaborative ideal.

To that end, we chose a brand color palette closer to the habitat areas we all enjoy and wish to conserve.

Nothing. It was all volunteered time and resources. Our members will not have to pay for penny of it.

The updated dues structure ensures fairness and sustainability by aligning contributions more closely with business revenue levels. This allows us to better serve all members while expanding our resources, programs, and advocacy efforts.

This dues change is not because of the programming change. A dues bracket equity update was separately needed.

The new dues structure will take effect on March 17th, 2025.

Affected members will see the updated pricing reflected in their next renewal cycle.

New business members will adopt the new dues pricing structure.

Smaller businesses will experience no change in dues, ensuring continued affordability. The adjustments mainly impact mid-sized and large companies to ensure a fairer contribution model.

Your membership will now contribute to more robust programming, advocacy, and resources tailored to support your business. With a fairer structure, we can focus on delivering even more value to all members.

We analyzed our past membership structure and compared it with industry standards to ensure fairness. Our goal was to maintain affordability for small businesses while ensuring larger businesses contribute in proportion to their revenue.

We understand that some businesses may face financial challenges. If you need assistance, we offer flexible payment plans and sponsorship opportunities to help members continue their involvement. Please reach out to discuss options.

We have no plans for another adjustment in the near future. However, we will continue to evaluate our structure to ensure it remains fair and beneficial for all members.

Yes! All members will receive a detailed breakdown of their new membership tier with their renewal notice.

Our new Individual Membership is different in a few key ways:

1. It extends far beyond the original intent of the individual membership program that was launched alongside our business membership in 2016. That intent was two-pronged:

• Build a loyal consumer base for 2% Certified Brands.

• Give individuals “vetted” bragging rights. (you might remember the “True Conservationist” ad campaigns from the summers of 2016-17.

Those goals didn’t go far enough in some ways and too far in others.

The new objective is to develop conservation volunteers who are well educated on best practices, stand up for their own well-being, are resilient against burnout, collaborate with and support brands that support conservation, and who can make an outsized positive impact throughout their lives.

2. It is more than a pledge — it is an actual membership with perks. We could not offer true membership to individuals under the old program because we could not (and did not want to) verify the financials of private individuals.

3. It is not free. Part of why programming for individual pledge makers was removed from priority was that they brought in no income to cover the staff time required to support them. Many individual pledge makers generously donated to us directly, but we actively discouraged it because we wanted them to donate to their local causes first. We still want them to focus on their local conservation causes first, but we put in more than we take out of our members.

We are keeping it simple:

1-Year: $35

Lifetime: $750

Those are both industry average, but if you look at the perks, they are anything but average.

To start, these are the individual membership perks:

• Training modules to help you become more effective in your volunteer roles as a conservationist.

• An e-newsletter support network designed specifically for our Individual Members to share ideas, what is working, and developed expertise with each other in a curated format.

• Discounts with select FWV Business Members.

• Exclusive FWV Member decals.

In addition to those perks, Life Members also have the options to:

• Have your name listed on our Life Member Supporters page.

• Have your membership sponsor one regular Individual Membership for a university student pursuing a career in conservation or environmental work through the duration of their formal education.

• Receive the exclusive Life Member t-shirt. Depending on how long you have been volunteering, the message and intent of this optional perk will mean different things to you.

For the just over 80 incredible individuals that were Committee Members of non-profit Community Partner pilot program back from 2018-2020, most of these perks should be familiar.

Anyone and everyone from everywhere!

This membership is about making and retaining great volunteers for conservation for generations to come.

No matter your walk of life or where you live, we can help you be a more effective conservationist!

Also, memberships make great gifts for your friends and family.

We can’t force them to care about volunteering for wildlife and wild places as much as you do, but we can sure help make it more fun!

A few important reasons:

1. Not everyone will be able to get their employers to sign up for our business membership. Everyone should be able to benefit from our programming.

2. Our original mission statement, and even more so our updated one, speak about building “…an alliance of businesses and individuals….” We should not have a membership for one and not the other. Our business members are much more effective when they are connected to capable and passionate individual volunteers.

3. Volunteering your personal time for wildlife shouldn’t be sending people into the hospital with depression and stress-related physical ailments. Lack of support does that.

4. What you do with your life matters.

For some, yes, but not all.

Unfortunately, in the past we have dealt with a few large national groups taking, rebranding, and publishing our materials to their own networks.

We would have happily shared the content with them for free, as we have never charged a conservation cause for anything, ever.

But not locking our content down meant that our hard work and the best practices learned by our our members was stolen without anyone knowing that it was ours or referencing the members who we developed those best-practices with.

We care about our members too much to let that happen again so easily.

Is that what you want us to spend your membership dollars on? ;)

Our new Mission Statement is:

“To ensure the vitality of our world by creating an alliance of businesses and individuals that volunteer their time for the conservation of wildlife and wild places.”

The old Mission Statement was:

“To ensure the future of hunting and angling by creating an alliance of businesses and individuals that give their time and money to fish and wildlife conservation.”

Here are the key differences:

• The old one was written in a way that made it seem that we only cared about the future of hunting and angling — that the purpose of conservation was to make sure hunters got to hunt and anglers got to fish. That is both a severely underdeveloped view of conservation and not at all what our founders intended. Nor is it how we have operated or promoted our work in the past. It still misled a large number of prospective businesses and individuals to think it was our intent, at first glance, though.

• The old one mentions fish and wildlife but does not mention habitat (or, “wild places”). This led many to believe that we did not certify or develop programming around habitat work or the conservation of ecosystems. On the contrary, habitat work and ecosystem conservation is the bulk of what we help our members do. And, it is some of the most accessible conservation work a business and individual can partner around!

• The old one mentions money. We would be very tone-deaf to our fellow conservationists if we kept a mission statement that mentions money at a time when most people cannot afford to buy a home. Money is important, but it is no longer part of our focus. Especially with the ever-decreasing financial transparency shown by some large national conservation groups. Our focus is shifted to the inclusive, encouraging, and near-unimpeachable: Volunteered time for wildlife and wild places.

Most organizations update their mission statement between their 5th and 10th years.

This is because mission statements, while meant to last, are products of a moment in time and often do not meet the breadth of the reality that an organization faces as it matures and grows.

There were a few specific limitations and challenges we had with our old mission statement:

• The old one almost exclusively served the hunting industry. Though it mentions “hunting and angling”, the angling community does not like being lumped in with the hunting community (they do not have the same social forces against them unless they get paired to hunting).

• The old statement did not resonate with the rest of the outdoor industry and outdoor recreationists as a whole because it exclusively mentions hunting and angling.

• It led many to assume that we only certify volunteering that directly benefits hunting and angling opportunity -- not landscapes as a whole or non-game species.

The isolation to hunting meant that, even if we were to engage the entire hunting public in the US and Canada, we would still only gain the interest of <5% of the population.

The work that we all need to join in if our grandkids will have anywhere outdoors to enjoy requires the interest of far more people than that.

A mission statement should encompass and inform your entire ethos and build the strongest support base possible.

Our new Mission Statement is more:

• Precise

• Direct

• Available

• Relatable

No, like the dues update, this was something that needed to happen independently from whether or not the other changes took place.

The timing aligned well, though.

Our Executive Director presented the change to our Board of Directors and they unanimously voted to adopt the change.

Our focus is now directed at the volunteer aspect.

We will focus on helping our members, both business and individual, make the largest possible impact for wildlife with their most precious resource: Their time.

We will help them maintain their volunteer commitments and communicate the value of their volunteered time effectively so as to inspire more people and businesses to become conservation volunteers.

We will no longer have the distraction or limitation of a Mission Statement that excludes other forms of outdoor recreation than hunting and angling.

This refined focus will enable us to accomplish far more beyond the original intent behind our first Mission Statement.