The Power of Wine: Donating with OneHope Winery Pt. 4

Welcome. Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast with Forrest Kelly

We also power wine tasting events all over the country.

The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast How does the charity portion work?

Yeah, we donate 10% of every purchase on OneHopeWine.com to the customer's cause of choice.

So the customer can go there, they can pick their charity on the top nav bar from a database of a ton of them, or if it's not in there already, you can put in your own charity. As long as they have a 501C3 and we have people submit all the time and then they go and purchase.

And if you become a wine club member, you can give back year round by just getting your favorite wines delivered. We also integrated into our hosting experience.

We have the ability to order a tasting kit and raise money for your cause of choice so the host can choose the cause if they're going to host a wine tasting event. And so those are the two main ways that we donate back.

We also power wine tasting events all over the country that are raising money and awareness for causes big and small. So everything from having our wine at galas to small at home wine tastings and everything in between.

And then we do have a great corporate gifting program where the company gets to choose their cause of choice and gets to donate 10% to their cause of choice as well.

So across all the different channels, we give the person who's buying the ability to feel good about their purchase and impact somebody in a really positive way. On the other side, how did you.

Come up with that plan of not only listing charities but for the buyer to designate a charity?

Because it seems like it would be less complicated if you just said 10% and it's going to make a wish foundation or just one specific thing, but you've opened it up. How did you figure that out?

Well, as our brand started to become distributed more and more winery direct versus through the retail shelves where we obviously couldn't track it, we were able to do this and we built our own proprietary software into our e commerce system to track this and automate these donations over time. And on the wholesale side, because it is impossible to connect directly with the end consumer, we do donate meals for every case we sell.

And so it's simplified there. We have generated over three and a half million meals to date through the sales of our wines.

And for people who are buying from us direct, if they don't have a cause to pick out, they can default to the One Hope Foundation. And our One Hope foundation focuses on funding Larger gifts like funding schools and education. Clean water for people around the world.

We've funded clean drinking water for nearly 100,000 people now all the way to greater access to food and health. All of those causes are kind of our pillars under breaking the cycle of poverty.

And we've especially been focusing on children's education as of recently.

In this coming year, our goal is to underwrite the distribution of over $10 million of donated school supplies, children and students in underserved areas of the U.S. wow.

A lot of this stuff, I'm sure, happens organically, but I'm sure you get people knocking on your door every day.

Definitely a lot of incoming demand from the recipients. So we go generate demand from the customers and from people selling wine. We really don't ask much from the nonprofit.

So we tend to be popular with nonprofits because a lot of times they're just getting a check without even knowing how it came. It's coming from one of our hosts or one of our customers who chose their nonprofit. They write us and they say, who are you guys?

And then they want to work with us, you know?

Yeah, fascinating, because I work with a lot of different charity organizations, too, and it's just kind of re energizes, you know, when the grind of business kind of tamps you down. Working with charities and different organizations, they tend to lift you up.

Yeah, definitely.

So going to OneHopeWine.com and then scrolling down to about the middle of the page says, cheers to 11 million donated. That's you sitting on the bench there, right? Yes.

Yeah, right. What is a typical month like for you? Are you going all over the world? Are you staying on site with all of these activities going on?

Because, well, to toot your horn a little bit, you're on top of the Napa mountain, and so you've got to be busy. So what are you doing? How are you staying alive?

My work from our flagship property in Napa, and there's just always people coming through, and I do a lot of business development here. It helps because you're kind of right at the heart of the brand and in the middle of everything. We have a pretty distributed workforce.

We have our hospitality team here, and then we have a team around the country, and we have a lot of people who put on tasting experiences all over the country. Thousands of people that are brand ambassadors of ours.

I do a mix of everything, you know, whether it's selling, raising capital, when it's time to expand, coming up with new innovative ideas to grow the business, and then just pure execution of current model. There's a lot of substance and a good baseline and then there's always new exciting things as well.

And I think it's really important to keep a balance of those things even as you grow bigger and bigger.

Do you sell all over the world?

We don't sell all over the world but we do sell to Korea and to Japan.

The United States is keeping you busy.

Yeah, the United States is the largest in the world and there's plenty of meat on the bone if you will. And you know, I'm excited personally about Japan and Korea.

I think they're both really cool markets and they have some similarities to each other as well.

And so I think the those are important markets and ultimately with our vineyard destination properties, I do vision us making our way to Europe as well.

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