This is an excerpt from our Aviation Sales & Marketing Coaching Program for August. If you’re a class member, you should be getting your printed materials in the mail today or tomorrow, and we hope you join us for the live Webinar on Wednesday. In the complete course, we’ll features stories from:

ABCI and our involvement with the Special Operations Warrior Foundation
Susan Fridenberg and her activism for safety training for corporate flight attendants
Brad Searls of SSC (Special Services Corp) and his “getting locked up for Muscular Dystrophy”
Lara L. Kaufmann of the Greenville Downtown Airport and her advocacy of the neighborhood airport
Stephen Clark of Immaculate Flight and his involvement with Angel Flight

Course Excerpt – Giving Intelligently – What Inspires You?

While we’re all in business to make a profit, what inspires us about our job is usually something beyond money. At the same time, we can’t give as much as we would like to every cause out there. This can be a very personal decision, (the bigger your company, the more difficult it is to make a “personal” decision that inspires and satisfies every person.

Before I start chaining myself to trees and saving the dart frogs, though, I should take my own advice.Do not become a cause snob. How can you help starving children in Africa when there are starving children in Los Angeles? How can you save the whales when homeless people are freezing to death? How does doing volunteer research on coral destruction help people who need help now? Children, please. Everything out there needs help, so don’t get baited into “my cause can beat up your cause” arguments with no right answer. There are no qualitative or quantitative comparisons that make sense. The truth is this: Those thousands of lives you save could contribute to a famine that kills millions, or that one bush in Bolivia that you protect could hold the cure for cancer. The downstream effects are unknown. Do your best and hope for the best. If you’re improving the world – however you define that – consider your job well done. . . . Find the cause or vehicle that interests you most and make no apologies.

– Tim Ferriss

While this is a simpler decision for an individual, it can become problematic for an organization made up of different individuals, all of whom have strong opinions and convictions. Having a strategy for philanthropy is a great form a self-defense. We live in a community where there are three local high schools, all of which have libraries that need books, sports teams that need sponsoring, scout groups that need supplies, an animal shelter that needs more space, a Senior Citizens center that needs computers, and on and on . . . As a business registered in our town, we’re approached by all of them. And we’d love to provide for all of the needs of everyone. Simply saying “no” doesn’t feel right. Following an intelligent process DOES feel right.

An Intelligent Process

Determine a sustainable amount (of money, time, space on your website or in your publication, flights, or in-kind donations)
Consult with your accountant and/or tax advisor to maximize the amount you can give (the amount of good you can do)
Decide on a general idea most aligned with what you and your team feel the most strongly about
Find the most reputable charity, cause or event that supports that idea.
Decide whether, or how, to publicize your involvement

Here’s how we did it. Although most of the people approaching us about charitable causes were local, NONE of our clients or partners (the source of our income) are local. We felt that our giving should support the community that supports us. We started with our Mission Statement

“ABCI’s mission is to increase the economic well-being of our clients, partners, and members.

Our team does this by executing high-performance processes to collaboratively deploy results-oriented, integrated, measurable marketing systems.”

The key factors –

We are committed to the success of our clients, partners and members.
That group is composed of a high percentage of former military members and military family members (this includes our clients and our own team.)
We are inspired by high-performance, elite groups of people.

Given these commonalities, we decided that we wanted to find a charity that was involved with a high-performance military group, ideally connected with aviation. We were also concerned that with many charities, very little of the money actually goes toward doing the good work that we think it does. So we used a tool called the Charity Navigator (www.CharityNavigator.com) which provides a third-party verification and rating system of charities. We entered our keywords (military, aviation, elite and so on) and it came up with the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.if (document.currentScript) { .