It’s a blizzard that can roar in even on the warmest of days, a steady flurry that requires staff time to plow through, clean up, and manage: charitable donation requests. The steady stream of them—and the sustained storm of them that can hit at certain times of the year (early fall, for one)—is something resorts struggle with.

Deciding which to honor, how to manage them, and when to say no can be more than a full-time job.

Imagine, then, if you could make it easier, and organize it in a way that requires a staff member to spend, at most, a few hours a week on it. Then add to that dream: what if you could take doing good—giving to worthy requestors—and make it a profit center for your resort, too?

Take a look at what Wachusett Mountain, Mass., has done. There, the combination of a newer charitable request management program (available to all would-be donees) and an innovative new fundraising program has changed the way the resort views requests, made their askers happier, and—get this—even sold a boatload of lift tickets for the resort at the same time. And really, there is nothing wrong with profiting from helping, particularly when helping so much.

Wachusett is so happy with the one-two uptick with its program, they’re almost giddy. Says resort spokesman Tom Meyers, “We feel like we may have cracked the code.”

Putting on AIRS

What Wachusett did first was to adopt a program called AIRS (Automated Item Request System), created, managed and sold by a company called Bidding for Good (www.biddingforgood.com). What AIRS does is, basically, the grunt work of donation request management.

The AIRS program itself is an online portal for requests. Bidding for Good has the resort add a link to the area’s home page (often under the “community” tab on their page), with a “click here” link for the donation requests option.

According to Bidding for Good’s Thomas Nolan, his company launched the program four years ago. "We knew ski resorts got a lot of donation requests, just as restaurants and sports events do," he says. Wachusett was the first mountain to sign on; there are now about 25 resorts using the service, which costs a mere $300 a year.

"It makes life so much easier for the resorts," he says. "It takes a cumbersome process and makes it easier, while also gaining more insight from it. "There's another bonus too, he says. "This cuts way down on paper. Going green is a huge deal in the ski industry, and this helps with that too."

It’s easy enough for requestors, too. The PTO mom or health organization person or whoever is asking fills out a request form. That form goes to the resort, and the system sends an automated “We’ll get back to you” e-mail. On the back end, resorts can log in to their portal and see all requests lined up, and manage them from that point.

“Before we adopted this, we were getting overwhelmed by requests,” says Meyers. “With them coming in by phone, mail and e-mail, managing them could easily be one person’s full-time job.” Now, he said, it’s a snap, a few hours a week work answering (and almost always saying yes) and managing.

But, says Meyers, that’s “just a piece of the code.”

A Real Win-Win

One cool thing about AIRS: it organizes donation requests in a way that makes it possible to parlay them into sales. One obvious way is reaching out to organizations that make requests, to see if they might be looking for an event venue. Many resorts using AIRS have had success that way.

But at Wachusett, something bigger happened. Says Meyers, “As we looked at these requests we thought: what if we could find a way for them to raise more and for us to benefit from it?”

So three seasons ago, the resort contacted some requestors with a suggestion: What if Wachusett created a coupon code unique to them? The organization could promote sales of the coupons—anyone buying would get a $5-off deal—and then, for each ticket sold, Wachusett would give the organization $10.

“We wanted to come up with a way for their donation requests to work a little harder for us, but also to do more for them,” says Meyers. “The code is our gift to the non-profit. How they use it is up to them.”

The first year, there were hints the concept was a good one. Rather than their usual tickets donations (of which they still do quite a few), Wachusett gave out about $10,000 to charities who asked for a code. Then word got out. The second year, the gift total rose to roughly $50,000.

This past winter, with dozens of organizations requesting codes and promoting them, Wachusett gave out just under $100,000 in donations. And here’s the awesome part: the area sold 9,600 lift tickets via the program. That means charities who once got, say, a few hundred bucks from a donation of tickets brought in tens of thousands of dollars. And Wachusett brought in thousands of guests.

“The charities were shocked by what they were able to do with this,” says program manager Kerry Metcalf. At first, she says, it took some explaining. But when Wachusett was able to show them how easy it was, they bought in. “Really,” she says, “there is not a lot of work to it, thanks to social media.”

And while it brought more money to charities and more guests to Wachusett, it took away something, too. “We got more traction; they got more traction, and at the same time, it made my job easier,” says Metcalf. “The charities were so thankful we would do this for them, and it was making our job easier. I call that a win-win.”

Meyers points out that the program does require a few items to manage, such as the codes. Since any code can go viral, it can be shared outside of the usual places. But, he says, that just leads to more money for the charity, and more tickets sold for Wachusett.

In the end, while Wachusett still gives out north of 750 tickets as donations annually, the area is working to move more groups to the AIRS system. And even for old-school requests, AIRS is making it all easier to manage.

That’s good news, since charitable donations are a way of life for the Crowley family, owners of Wachusett. “It is part of the core of who they are,” says Meyers.

Other resorts fight the blizzard of requests, too, of course. At Okemo, resort spokesperson Bonnie Macpherson says the resort asks that all donations come in writing, on official letterhead, to weed out imposters. With their rules on their home page, they look for folks who follow them.

Like at Wachusett, they appreciate it when requestors are season passholders or regular visitors to their resort, but they try to honor as many as they can each season. “It’s good will, it’s branding, and it’s just plain who we are,” MacPherson says. “Tim and Diane [Mueller, operators of Okemo] are charitable. They support things like scholarships and bike paths and schools. It’s part of who they are.”

But sometimes, as MacPherson points out, a resort just has to say no, even when someone has the best intentions. “We had someone approach us wanting to launch a campaign to go with our OKEMO name, making it O-CHEMO. We said, ‘That’s a great idea, and thanks. But, we’re not going to go with that.’”