Forest Bathing Finder – A Great Service for Guides!

Recently, a new web tool has arrived for forest bathing and forest therapy guides. Called the Forest Bathing Finder, this new website service holds great potential to help guides get the word out about themselves and their walks to a hungry audience.

In this article, we’ll consider three main sets of information to understand how guides can best add this new tool to their marketing toolkit. (Click the headings in the numbered list below to jump to that section of this article.)

High Level Tour
We’ll take a high level tour of the Forest Bathing Finder (FBF) website, including some visuals of how the main features work and look.
Feature Summary
Next, we’ll summarize the functionality of the FBF service to understand what it offers.
Cost and Value
Finally, we’ll explore the pricing of Forest Bathing Finder and consider how it compares to other services. (Guides can use this discount code to get an additional 10% off the annual fee: “10%OFF”)

Forest Bathing Finder High Level Tour

Built by the daughter of a certified forest bathing guide, the Forest Bathing Finder website is well informed and aims to support guides with a key challenge – quickly and easily establishing a presence on the web to notify prospective customers about their guiding practice and walk events and be able to link to the organizations hosting their walks or enable registration and purchase directly.

Forest Bathing Finder has focused the current feature set on solving this marketing problem for guides. Guides can create accounts to “hang out their shingle” online with a profile that can showcase their practice with a bio, image, location, upcoming walks, certifications, service languages and more. Guides can also create event pages for their walks that either:

link to third party hosting organization websites and corresponding registration and purchase functionality or
link to on-site Forest Bathing Finder event pages that support registration and purchasing directly.

Let’s take a look at how this functionality is set up. We’re not presenting an exhaustive tutorial on all the site functions, but providing a visual overview of the key features.

Members of the public arriving at the site can easily search for guides and for walks using the top right menu, or the prominent buttons located on the home page that features an inviting full width photo of a summery forest walk scene as captured below.

Clicking or tapping on the Find a Walk button takes website visitors to the search function for walks as seen in the screenshot below.

By default, all walks are listed, and a control panel to filter the search by date and location is available to narrow browsing focus on specific walks. Clicking one of the cards that summarizes walks in the list takes website visitors to a detail page for that walk event.

In this example, the registration and purchase functionality is contained on the Forest Bathing Finder site, so visitors can use the site’s WooCommerce ecommerce functionality to add this walk to the shopping cart to purchase attendance at this walk. Full details are listed in a well organized layout including a photo and a map in addition to all the pertinent detailed location and timing information and coordinates.

Visitors can also search for guides on the site. The functionality is similar to the walk search; after clicking the Find a Guide button, Forest Bathing Finder presents a list of all guides with a control panel to narrow the search:

Presenting a similar list of results with each guide showcased on nicely formatted cards featuring a profile photo and basic info, visitors can then click through to individual guides’ Profile pages. The Profile pages have some at-a-glance data points listed in panels down the right hand side and by default the main area of the page displays the guide’s photo and bio. There are three more tabs in the main area that provide access to additional key information about upcoming walks, photos and videos that guides can provide.

A final set of data, adding the where to when and who, provides listings of various venues that offer forest bathing activities. By clicking on the Find a Venue button, visitors can explore location based organizations and businesses with a focus on nature connection. A set of such venues is presented in a similarly well formatted list. Each venue is presented in a card with a photo, the name, the location and a brief description. This attractively laid out information makes it easy for visitors to quickly scan the list and choose a venue of interest.

Once a visitor identifies a venue of interest in the list, clicking on the Learn More buttons in the bottom right of each Venue card leads the Forest Bathing Finder visitor to the detail page for the corresponding venue. Here, useful information about each venue is presented in a layout that is consistent with and familiar from the Guide profile as described above. The Venue detail page provides relevant information of interest including tabs for Walks, Photos and Videos along the top, and panels of specific information down the right hand side including the location, online connection points, and activities offered.

Furthermore, Venue listings have another big benefit related to costs that will be described in more detail in the financial analysis below.

This is all very easy and useful for website visitors. In just a few clicks of the mouse or taps on the mobile screen, visitors can explore guides, walks, and venues in their area, or anywhere they want to search. The information is well-organized, using attractive graphics and consistent layout styles. It’s all intuitive and logical, making it easy to quickly find information of interest and presenting guides and their walks in a professional yet friendly manner.

Forest Bathing Finder Features

The Forest Bathing Finder application offers easy tools for guides to set up this information once they have a subscription and account. As an application, Forest Bathing Finder lets guides avoid the challenging obstacle of building a customized website using a web builder or content management system approach. I’ve compared two of the most popular such tools, Squarespace (which is a website builder) and WordPress (which is a content management system) in another article, Squarespace vs WordPress for Forest Therapy Guides, here on Among The Trees. As that article provides more detail about those tools, I won’t dive in too deeply here. Instead, I’ll focus on a higher level feature summary, now that we’ve described generally what Forest Bathing Finder can do.

Comprehensive Online Presence – Guides and Walks

A simple dashboard offers easy access to set up the guide profile and walks using a menu with four main buttons seen below:

In this screenshot, the Manage Your Profile section is expanded, listing the key pieces of information available to be specified; including Certifications, Languages, Social Media Links and Locations served. Clicking each of the items in the Profile list opens up small forms where guides can enter the corresponding detailed information. It’s all quick and easy. Once the information is entered, guides can click the Profile Preview item at the top of the list so they can see exactly how their profile will look in the public search.

Once the profile is complete, guides can then move on to the next section to provide information about their upcoming walk events. It’s important to emphasize that these aren’t just simple event listings. Full ecommerce functionality is built into Forest Bathing Finder. Your walkers will be able to not just register but also pay for walk events quickly and easily online. Guides receive payment through the My Wallet function of the service in the Manage Your Account section (more on this section below).

As with the profile section, clicking the Manage Your Walks button opens a list of items below. Initially, guides will start by clicking the Add A Walk item to begin the workflow to create walk listings. The first step is to specify whether the walk will use Forest Bathing Finder registration and purchase functionality or whether there is a link to a third party website for information and registration.

Guides simply click the corresponding button to move on to step two. In this step, all of the detailed information is provided in one form and some beautiful photos are provided by default as well.

In this example, since it is a Forest Bathing Finder hosted walk event, guides specify the cost, including the option for Pay What You Can, and set the maximum attendance quantity. The form is very similar for third party events, simply replacing these two controls with a text entry field to provide the link to the third party website registration page.

Additional features in the walk management section enable guides to;

review and update existing walk events they have previously posted,
review past walk events,
set a message to display when there are no upcoming walks configured, and
create a template from a walk that can be used to quickly set up future walks.

This is an elegant solution to make it easy for guides to work with other organizations to provide walks and alternatively to host their own walks directly through Forest Bathing Finder. This core functionality works quite well.

To extend guides’ online presence even further, Forest Bathing Finder website provides some excellent additional features in the final Manage Your Content section by also supporting guides in sharing photos, blog posts and videos. As shown above, photos appear with each guide’s profile under one of the tabs on the profile pages as do videos, while blogs are a common area of the site as a whole. Blog articles link back to the guide profile pages using a link on the author byline, but, since videos are hosted on YouTube, this handy feature isn’t available for videos, though thumbnails to videos are located on guide profile pages under the videos tab. Taken together then, Forest Bathing Finder provides guides with their own online presence including a Photo Gallery, Blog Posting and Video Posting. But, the service goes beyond just a multi-faceted online presence with some great additional features that help guides operate their business online.

Email Features

Forest Bathing Finder provides a feature that lets guides upload PDF waiver forms and sends a confirmation email with a waiver attached to customers when they register. Guides can also, for FBF hosted events, use a manual feature to send a message to a customer registered in one of their walks. These email features enable guides to automate time-consuming administrative communication tasks. This gives guides effective communications capability with their walk clients.

Marketing

This is where Forest Bathing Finder really shines. As a single site that aggregates many guides and walks, FBF has the potential to be a destination site for members of the public who are looking for forest bathing and forest therapy walks and guides. This is the core benefit of the worldwide directory of guides and walks that FBF provides the public.

The potential reach of this broad service is much greater than what an individual guide or even a single local organization could expect to achieve. As FBF optimizes its search engine indexing, it should be able to attract and channel interested web surfers to local walks and local guides in a powerful and effective manner.

This potential marketing power gives FBF a significant edge and reflects valuable outreach potential that is not available from any other service. These Forest Bathing and Therapy specific functions are extremely valuable in supporting guides in their business development and ability to reach their audience.

Advanced Features – Coupons and Gift Certificates

The icing on the cake is that Forest Bathing Finder gives guides some sales tools that are really unexpected in a service this affordable. In the My Account section (where payments are received as mentioned earlier in the My Wallet section), guides can set up coupons including setting the percentage of the discount, a usage limit and an expiration date. Coupons are great sales tools!

In addition, as a function of the service as a whole, visitors to Forest Bathing Finder can buy Gift Certificates that can be redeemed by gift recipients to register for walks on Forest Bathing Finder. As I said, these powerful sales tools, coupons and gift cards, really are the icing on the cake of the amazing set of features offered by Forest Bathing Finder.

Forest Bathing Finder Cost and Value

Forest Bathing Finder (FBF) includes a base subscription fee, which can be paid for a year in advance for the lowest rate. To facilitate online purchasing with its full ecommerce functionality Forest Bathing Finder does all the hard work so that the 3% transaction fees charged by online payment companies are easily settled when walkers register. To be clear, there is NOT a 3% fee that is always charged with the annual subscription – 3% payment company fees are ONLY incurred on transactions when walkers register for walks on FBF.

In the charts that follow, a color scale is used to show ranges of values from low to high. For each chart, the caption below it states whether the range is defined by row or column.

You can see in the price comparison below that Forest Bathing Finder is far more affordable than even the least expensive website builders. A Squarespace Business subscription costs about the same for the basic level, but adding email and walk scheduling adds expense. The transaction fees include the same online payments fees from the online payment companies, but a Squarespace Business subscription also adds 3% on top of that, making it significantly more expensive.

As compared to competing services such as EventBrite and AirBnB, Forest Bathing Finder has much lower transaction fees. However, Forest Bathing Finder does have a base subscription price. Does that make it more expensive than competing services? To find out, we need to use a cost model.

Cost Model

To see what using Forest Bathing Finder for ongoing walk registration and sales looks like, we can consider a basic cost model. In doing so, I’ve made 2 assumptions about forest bathing and forest therapy walks. I think they’re reasonable assumptions, and, anyway, it’s the total sales dollar volume that really matters. Still, to make it easier to imagine how an independent guiding business operates, the model is based on:

a group size of 10 attendees
a walk price of $40 per attendee

This means that a fully attended walk in this model has a gross sales amount of $400.

Cost Analysis

It’s important to understand how the subscription and transaction fees combine as the total expense of having a Forest Bathing Finder online presence as an ecommerce solution for guides. This is calculated by considering the base subscription price and adding the transaction fees based on various sales volumes.

For example, with a base fee of $200 and transaction fees of 3%, Forest Bathing Finder (FBF) would have total website fees of $248 a year if a guide does just 4 walks a year with 10 walkers each paying $40, a total sales volume of $1,600.

$200 + ($1,600 X 3%) = $200 + $48 = $248

The table below presents this FBF scenario first and, in subsequent rows, increasing sales volumes and the online presence expense and percentage of sales. The columns show comparisons to the much more expensive Squarespace Business subscriptions with the added costs of email (SSBiz+E) or both email and scheduling (SSBizA) as well as competing application services EventBrite and AirBnB. As we saw above, EventBrite charges $1.59 for every purchase and 6% transaction fees while AirBnB charges a whopping 20% transaction fee.

Without base subscription fees, it turns out that the overall expenses of EventBrite and AirBnB vary. AirBnB, with its sky high 20% transaction fees, starts out as the second most expensive service and becomes the most expensive at volumes of only 1 walk per month. With 6% transaction fees plus the ticket surcharge which adds up to a 10% expense combined, EventBrite is a bit less expensive, but only at very low volumes. Once guides reach the modest level of just 8 walks a year (one a month in the warmer months), EventBrite’s higher transaction fees catch up and the expense of Forest Bathing Finder is the lowest. Even at lower sales volumes, the higher quality and wider range of Forest Bathing specific features and audience focus make Forest Bathing Finder a better value.

Service Value

As guides get busier, the Forest Bathing Finder service value increases. At low volumes, with as few as just 4 walks in a year, guides keep an excellent 84% of their gross sales after expenses with Forest Bathing Finder. Even if guides carry out guiding on a part time basis, doing as few as just one walk per month, Forest Bathing Finder would allow guides to retain an amazing $4,456 of $4,800 in gross sales, or 93% of the gross volume. For busy guides who can provide a walk every other weekend, a rate of two walks every month, guides keep an amazing 95% of gross sales after expenses, over $9,000 in total. These are all much better margins than custom website subscriptions with Squarespace or competing application services, and a lot less work too.

As mentioned above within the description of Venue functionality, there is a bid added cost benefit related to Venues. For Guides who work in conjunction with larger venue organizations, the organization can cover the Forest Bathing Finder subscription fees in having the venue listed by joining Forest Bathing Finder. This means that guides would not have to pay the annual fee when they can develop a strong relationship with a venue organization, particularly when they focus their walks on one or two specific locations – a fairly common situation that many guides are good at arranging!

Conclusion

The analysis shows clearly that Forest Bathing Finder is much less work and expense than a custom website. Furthermore, competing non-specialized application services such as EventBrite and AirBnB are also much more expensive. For guides, there is no better solution dedicated to forest bathing and therapy than Forest Bathing Finder! Get your account today and join me and all the other guides on Forest Bathing Finder. (Guides can use this discount code to get an additional 10% off the annual fee: “10%OFF”)

Categories: Business, Marketing
Tagged: comparison, directory, features, Forest Bathing Finder, internet, Squarespace, website