Exclusive: Joe Fijol on ETHOS’s passion project to give back

Joe Fijol, founder and principal of ETHOS Event Collective, launched a passion project that puts giving back to the local community at the heart of what the company does.

ETHOS Event Collective has just launched a passion project that not only connects its meeting and event clients with charitable organizations in the communities they serve, but also pledges to give 1% of program profits back to those charities. The company serves multiple destinations, including Amelia Island, Orlando, Palm Beach, Miami, Naples, Savannah, Las Vegas, Napa/Sonoma, Monterey Peninsula, San Francisco, and Grand Cayman.

As part of the new passion project, ETHOS connects clients with four local nonprofits and four national organizations, offering a wide range of corporate social responsibility events for clients to choose from. The company has also pledged to give 1% of its annual profits back to these organizations, which have been vetted by ETHOS’s philanthropic department, which is led by Lexi Matias and Raquel Santo. The move is designed to deepen connections between client organizations and the local communities where events are held.

Joe Fijol, who founded destination management company ETHOS Event Collective three years ago, says this passion project is a natural extension of his company’s mission to not only create memorable events, but also to make them catalysts for meaningful change. The company’s core philosophy can be summed up in two words – purposeful planning – meaning that successful event design and execution depends on understanding and integrating the unique characteristics and goals of clients and communities, fostering meaningful connections and positive change. Each ETHOS team member also participates in quarterly volunteer projects – projects that have cumulatively contributed more than 226 hours of time to create meaningful change for various organizations.

Prevue recently caught up with Fijol, who was honored to receive this year’s Inspire Research Foundation Volunteer of the Year Award, to learn more.

Previous post: What brought you on this journey to make conferences and events more meaningful by giving back to the local community?

Fijhor: I left a big company during the pandemic to start ETHOS because I realized we needed to give back more and that connecting with local communities is the lifeblood of what we do. That’s why people go to cool places, not just to experience the destination, but to connect with that place and those communities. A lot of people do CSR activities, but they don’t put money into it. We give 1% of our profits back to the local area every year, which was inspired by what Delta does.

Previous post: How did you get started with this passion project of giving back?

Fijhor: Vetting programs ended up being a lot more rigorous than we thought, but you really need to know them if you want to support them as a company. Some may be nonprofits, but the money they give back may be minuscule compared to their overhead. So we vetted their financials to make sure they were reputable and what percentage of donations went to overhead or to national organizations outside of the local community to make sure they were impacting the local community in a meaningful way, not just their marketing efforts. We had to make sure they were aligned with our core values ​​and the core values ​​of our clients.

We select four nonprofits in each market, and four times a year our local team members volunteer a full day with these nonprofits so they can really understand how these organizations operate. We introduce these ideas to our clients without them having to ask—which makes it easier for them to get involved in their local communities.

We also chose to include four national charities because some clients hold multiple meetings in multiple destinations and want to be consistent. For example, Wounded Warriors is one of the national charities we vet, so if someone is working with us in Savannah, Las Vegas, and Orlando, they can donate to Wounded Warriors at all of their events.

To be clear, we do not use this as a profit center – there is no markup on anything associated with the passion projects. Any costs associated with the projects are the minimum necessary to carry out the activity. The 1% of profits we donate each year are our actual project profits – there is no profit on the passion projects themselves.

Of course, some clients have their own charities they want to support, and we can certainly do that. But if they don’t, we can offer them options that align with their core values ​​without them having to vet them. Every client we work with will benefit a local charity, whether they choose to run a CSR campaign or not. Through our 1% Giveback program, we will donate a six-figure sum to these 20 charities.

Previous: What has the customer response been like so far?

Fijhor: Earlier this year we did a big event for a Fortune 50 company and when they found out we were donating 1%, they matched that amount and then did a CSR event with a local charity. Clients also like that even if they don’t do CSR with a charity, 1% of our profits each year will still go to support those charities.

Some of the clients we work with spend millions of dollars each year communicating what makes them different. But when they come to the event, they often just see a logo and don’t really connect it to the core values. We take the time to deeply research our client’s goals and objectives and how they connect to the company’s core values, and then match them to local opportunities that fit those goals and values. We then weave those connections throughout the event narrative. This way, we capture the pain points of the audience you’ve come to celebrate, honor, or educate.

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