What's already known, what isn't, and what we're finding out.
Conservation Wellness certifies at the point of guest experience, but the certification sits on top of an active, ongoing research question. If a guest gives directly, on the NGO's own donation page, to a frontline organization we have no prior arrangement with, and that NGO is only later asked to account for what it received. Does hearing back actually change whether those guests give again? Here's what the published research already tells us, where the gap sits, and how we're measuring it.
Conservation philanthropy in travel is a real, active field.
This isn't an untouched subject. Researchers have studied whether nature-based travel prompts people to give to conservation for years, through large tourist surveys, controlled donation-design experiments, and reviews of how NGOs and the tourism industry work together. The table below summarizes five studies that inform our approach, including the closest published work we could find to the specific question this pilot tests.
Journal of Sustainable Tourism
Journal of Environmental Management
Annals of Tourism Research
Systematic Review & Meta-Analysis
Impact Genome & ideas42, funded by Fidelity Charitable
What's been studied, and what hasn't, as far as we can find.
Based on the published research available to us, travel prompting a first conservation donation has been studied, and so has the effect of impact data on an upfront giving decision. What doesn't appear to have been tested is the second half of the loop: whether an NGO sending a guest a direct field report on where their money went changes whether that guest gives again. That's the specific question this pilot is built to answer.
The model this pilot is following isn't new. It's borrowed.
Costa Rica's own Certification for Sustainable Tourism (CST) didn't launch as a finished checklist either. It built credibility first, through years of field verification, and earned the recognition that came after, not the reverse. That's the sequencing this pilot is copying: publish the two gating numbers before writing a single certification criterion, so the standard is built from what the data showed rather than from what sounded defensible in advance.
The donor-behavior research field follows the same pattern we're relying on here. Experiments on the giving decision itself are well developed. What happens to a donor after that first gift, once an NGO reports back, is comparatively untested. Sector-wide fundraising data backs up why that specific gap matters. See Methodology below.
Three ways conservation philanthropy in travel usually breaks.
None of these are hypothetical. They're the default outcomes this pilot's structure is built to interrupt.
Guests give directly. Then we ask what happened.
This is deliberately structured as a blind study, not a marketing partnership. The guest chooses which eligible organization to support and gives directly on that organization's own donation page. Conservation Wellness never touches, pools, or routes a single dollar of it. What's blind is the organization's side of it: no organization is named publicly, and no organization is told in advance that its incoming guest donations are part of a study. Only at the end of an initial three-month window are we in contact with the receiving organization at all. At that point, the ask is simple: here is the total our guests gave you directly over the last three months, please account for how it was used in the field within the next three months. What happens after that ask, and whether it changes guest behavior, is the actual subject of the study.
| Months 1–3 | Guests independently choose an eligible organization and give directly through that organization's own donation page. Conservation Wellness does not receive, hold, pool, or route any of these funds. It observes and records which guest gave, to which organization, how much, and when. The organization is not told during this window that its donations are part of a study. |
| End of Month 3 | First contact. The organization is told the total amount its own records show it received directly from Conservation Wellness-referred guests over the prior three months, and asked to provide a field report on how those funds were used within the following three months. |
| Months 4–6 | If a field report is received, it is shared with the original donors. Whether those same guests make a second contribution over the remainder of the study window is then tracked, alongside a comparison group of guests whose organization did not respond. |
| Eligibility Criteria | Organizations eligible to appear as a guest's giving option operate directly in the field on the Osa Peninsula, are small enough that guest donations are a meaningful share of budget, and have some existing public financial record. No organization is named publicly or described as a partner unless and until a formal agreement is separately in place. |
How the pilot is being measured.
Transparency here matters as much as the result. This is what we're tracking, how we're defining it, and the external benchmarks we're measuring against.
| Study Period | Six months total, split into two three-month phases: an initial window in which guests give directly to their chosen organization with no organization contact from us, followed by a measurement window that begins once the organization is contacted and asked for a field report. |
| Unit of Measurement | Each individual guest contribution, meaning the amount, date, receiving organization, and whether that guest gives a second time after a field report is shared with them. |
| "Response" Defined | An organization is counted as responsive if it returns a field report accounting for the specific three-month total it received, within the three months following the initial ask. |
| "Repeat Donor" Defined | A guest who makes a second contribution following receipt of a field report tied to their first gift. Guests whose organization does not respond are tracked as a comparison group, not counted as failures of the mechanism being tested. |
| Minimum Sample Size | Set before enrollment opened, not after data came in: the repeat-donation rate is only reported as a directional result if at least 25 distinct guest contributions are recorded across the six-month window. Below that threshold, we publish raw counts only, for example, "3 of 5 guests gave again," with no rate language, because a proportion calculated on fewer than 25 observations isn't a meaningful statistic. |
| Pre-Specified Threshold | The repeat-donation rate is described as directionally supported only if it exceeds the new-donor retention benchmark below by at least 5 percentage points, sustained across the full measurement window. A result within that 5-point band is reported as inconclusive. A result below the benchmark is reported as not supported. This band was fixed before the pilot opened and will not be adjusted once results are visible. |
| Benchmark Source | Thresholds are set against the Fundraising Effectiveness Project's most recent data (AFP / GivingTuesday). Overall sector donor retention currently sits near 43%, but that figure is driven by repeat and major donors. The more honest comparator for this pilot is new-donor retention, which FEP's own reporting describes as flat and calls the sector's most consequential unsolved problem. That's the number our repeat-donation threshold is actually being measured against, not the blended average. |
| A Tension We're Tracking | FEP's own recommendation for improving first-to-second-gift conversion is to report impact back to donors quickly. This pilot's design withholds any organization contact for a full three months, by design, so a real funding history exists before any organization is asked for a report. We're tracking whether that three-month delay costs us on the repeat-donation number, and will say so directly in the results if it does. |
| Fund Handling | The guest gives directly, on the receiving organization's own donation page. Conservation Wellness never receives, holds, pools, routes, or processes guest contributions at any point. Data collected is limited to what was given, to whom, and whether a report followed, not the funds themselves. |
| Tax Treatment | Conservation Wellness is not a party to any guest contribution and does not provide tax advice. Deductibility depends on the guest's country of residence and the receiving organization's status there. Guests should confirm treatment with their own advisor or the organization directly. |
| Analysis Method | Given the sample sizes involved, no inferential statistics, no p-values, no confidence intervals, are calculated or implied anywhere in this pilot's reporting. This is an exploratory, descriptive pilot, and every internal report and public update describes it in that language, not the language of a controlled trial. |
| Stopping Rule | The six-month window is fixed in advance and will not be extended or shortened based on how results look partway through. If fewer than 25 contributions are recorded by Month 6, that shortfall is itself reported as a finding, evidence the model doesn't yet reach scale, not a reason to quietly extend the window until it does. |
| Known Limitations | A small founding cohort means results won't be statistically generalizable on their own. They're a first data point in an open question, not a definitive finding, and we'll say so plainly in what we publish. Because no organization is contacted or named in advance, response rate itself, not just the repeat-donation rate, is part of what this study measures. See "What This Pilot Can and Cannot Show" below for the full account of what a result would and wouldn't prove. |
What this pilot can show, and what it can't.
The biggest risk in a pilot this size isn't a bad result. It's an ambiguous good one getting read as more than it is. So before any data exists, here's the line we're committing to hold, in both directions.
Four specific reasons this stays a pilot, not a controlled study:
Why this isn't randomized. A randomized controlled version of this pilot would mean assigning some guests to a group that never receives a field report, on purpose, to isolate the report's effect. We chose not to do that. Deliberately withholding a report from a donor is the exact failure mode, funds going quiet, that the certification standard exists to prevent. We're not willing to manufacture that failure in order to measure it more cleanly. That's a deliberate trade-off, not an oversight: it means this pilot can't isolate the report's causal effect from organizational differences, and we've said so directly above. A future, larger study, run with outside researchers, with guests' informed consent to being part of a control arm, is the right way to test that causally. This one is designed to answer a narrower, more honest question: is the mechanism worth building the standard around at all.
Why the organization isn't asked first. We don't seek an organization's advance consent before guests give, because nothing is being asked of the organization at that stage. The funds are the guest's own, given directly, with or without this pilot existing. Asking an organization to agree to a "partnership" before we even know the funds arrived, or whether this model is worth pursuing at all, would put them in a position we have no business creating: implying a relationship neither side has actually agreed to yet. So we wait. When we do make contact, it's an honest one: here's what your organization received, and here's an invitation, not a requirement, to tell us how it helped. This isn't an audit. We're not evaluating the organization; we're evaluating whether a giving-and-reporting model is worth building a certification standard around. An organization that doesn't respond isn't penalized or named. It's evidence that, for now, the model doesn't yet work the way we hoped, which is exactly the kind of finding this pilot exists to surface, disappointing or not. We recognize this means an organization's response is observed before it's told that, and we'd rather publish that trade-off plainly than pretend it isn't one: this is a business deciding whether a model is worth pursuing, not an academic study of human subjects. The goal on the other side of a report, if one comes, is simple. Share it with the guests who gave, and see if that's the start of an ongoing relationship and a second round of support, not the end of a transaction.
Language we will not use, regardless of outcome: published results will describe what was observed, for example "in this pilot, X of Y guests gave again," and will not describe the field report as the cause of that outcome, and will not imply the result generalizes beyond this guest population and this geography.
What gets published, and when.
Results are shared as they happen, including if the answer turns out to be discouraging.
Paul Rajput is the founder of Conservation Wellness and is personally designing and running this study. His BSc in Sports Science and Nutrition from St Mary's University, London, UK, trained him in the same discipline this pilot relies on: defining a measurable outcome, controlling for variables, and tracking results over a set period instead of relying on impression. That training was originally applied to human performance data. Fifteen years as a somatic wellness practitioner, the past several based on Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula, is what puts him in direct contact with the guests and NGOs this study tracks. This pilot is being built and tracked directly by him, not outsourced to a research team, with methodology and results published openly as they come in.