The Viristar Partner Program
Important information to help you get started
The Viristar Partner program is an opportunity for select organizations to add industry-leading outdoor safety training courses to their roster of program offerings. This can enhance your reputation as a source of valuable resources for outdoor and experiential professionals. It can make outdoor/adventure safety trainings more accessible to more people, through enhanced visibility and our robust discount program. And it can earn you revenue to support your organization’s programs and mission.
The Viristar Partner program is designed to be easy to use and extremely flexible in meeting your needs.
We’ve outlined a number of details below to orient you to the program. If you have any questions, or wish to enroll, contact us by email at [email protected], at +1 206 483 8050, or by using the webform below.
Partner Characteristics
Viristar Partners are at their best when they have the capacity to establish and sustain a robust outreach effort to a substantial network.
The characteristics of Viristar Partners that are mostly likely to enjoy a successful collaboration are:
- Website, regularly published newsletter, and active accounts on multiple social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, etc.)
- An audience of at least 3,000 newsletter subscribers
- An audience of at least 3,000 social media followers
- High engagement rate with social media content
- Administrative staff capacity to regularly distribute high-quality content and promptly respond to inbound messages
Associations, and federations or unions of associations, in the outdoor, adventure, experiential learning, and recreational/educational travel sectors, with a good-sized membership base and paid employee administration staff, tend to be a particularly good fit.
Relevant governing bodies/peak bodies, and youth development programs and award schemes with adventurous or travel components, may also be well-matched for the Viristar Partner programs.
Course Registration
As a Viristar Partner, you conduct outreach to make individuals aware of Viristar course offerings, and encourage them to enroll. But who handles the course enrollment process, collecting participant details and tuition? Either you or Viristar—whichever you prefer.
Option 1: Viristar handles course registration
In this arrangement, Viristar collects registration information, completes the sale, collects the tuition, and pays to Partner the Partner portion of revenue.
The Viristar Partner directs prospective participants to a site on the Viristar e-commerce platform linked to the Partner organization, where individuals enroll in a course at the price set by the Partner.
Viristar pays the Partner the difference between the Partner Price and the price the enrollee paid (less any bank or payment fees), if the enrollee price is higher than the Partner Price.
This option applies to individual enrollments in a regularly scheduled Viristar course. This does not apply to custom courses for the Partner organization, or for when the Partner bundles enrollment in a Viristar risk management course with other products the Partner sells through their own portal.
Option 2: Viristar Partner handles course registration
In this arrangement, the Viristar Partner collects registration information, completes the sale, collects the tuition, and pays Viristar for Viristar’s portion of revenue.
The Viristar Partner sells enrollment in the course through the Partner’s own commerce platform, at a price set by the Partner.
The Partner can bundle the course with other products, for example selling the Risk Management for Outdoor Programs course as an extension of the Partner’s annual conference event.
The Partner logs on to the Viristar portal for partners, and purchases the appropriate number of enrollments in the selected course at the Partner Price. This normally occurs weekly or more often, so that participants can be promptly enrolled in the course and gain access to readings and other course materials to begin pre-course study.
Partners can do this for regularly scheduled Viristar courses, adding Partner’s participants to any other participants enrolled on that course. Partners may also do this for a custom course, such as one with unique times and dates set by the Partner, or a closed enrollment training available only to members of the Partner’s team or group.
Scheduled and Custom Courses
1. Regularly scheduled courses
Viristar typically runs a Risk Management for Outdoor Programs course each month. Viristar Partners can direct participants to those previously scheduled courses.
These courses typically have classes that meet once a week for several weeks, with independent work in between. Two separate cohorts of the class exist: a group that has live sessions at 11:00 am New York time, and a separate group that meets for video-conference sessions at 11:00 am Singapore time.
Promoting these courses to prospective participants is often the easiest, since dates and logistics are already established.
There is no minimum enrollment for Viristar Partners associated with these regularly scheduled courses.
2. Custom courses
A Viristar Partner may wish to establish a custom course for their group.
For instance, a Partner might want to hold a course to start or end during a particular time, like January Term or Lunar New Year, that does not coincide with the dates of a regularly scheduled course.
Or, a Partner might want to establish a course that meets at a specific time, for example 11:00 am India time, to be convenient for the schedule of a particular group.
To establish a course with custom dates or times, a minimum enrollment of 10 participants is typically required.
Open Enrollment or Closed Enrollment
All regularly scheduled Viristar Risk Management for Outdoor Programs courses are offered on an open enrollment basis. This means that anyone (meeting basic eligibility requirements like minimum fluency in the language of instruction) is able to enroll.
Viristar Partners may also establish a closed course, available only to members of their group. For example, a large outdoor program may wish to establish a course just for their employees, where conversations can be focused on topics relative to that organization’s activities and procedures.
Or, for instance, a group may wish to restrict enrollment to registered participants in their annual conference.
Organization of a closed enrollment course typically requires a guaranteed minimum of 10 participants.
Frequently Asked Questions
Viristar provides Partners with a wide variety of promotional material suitable for electronic or print use. Partners may use any of these materials, at their option. These items include:
- Videos
- Flyers
- Syllabus
- Testimonials
- Course descriptions
- Logos
- Images
Viristar is also happy to host educational webinars describing the features and benefits of courses, on your request, to explain the training experience to individuals in your network who are interested to learn more. We also promote all Viristar courses on our website, and through advertisements and social media. And we are happy to share ideas and tips for effective course marketing with you.
The relationship between Viristar and Viristar Partners can be ended by either party at any time.
There are no minimum enrollment requirements for registering participants on open enrollment courses. Custom courses (special dates/times or closed enrollment) generally require a minimum of 10 participants.
No. You are responsible for expenses related to promotion, such as staff time connected to social media posts, and any sales activity in which you choose to engage (if you wish to handle sales rather than have Viristar manage them). Viristar does not charge a fee for participation in the Viristar Partner program.
A Viristar Partner can offer any price they wish. For the hypothetical example of a course with list price $10 and made available to a Viristar Partner for $8, the Partner could charge less than $8, in effect partly or fully subsidizing the course for participants; between $8 and $10, providing a discount to the participant and/or a share of tuition revenue to the Partner, or more than $10.
If you are seriously considering becoming a Viristar Partner, please contact us to discuss discount rate details.
This partnership opportunity is available to organizations active in experiential, outdoor, wilderness, travel, risk management, or adventure fields. It is not available to individuals. Viristar reserves the right to exclude applicants from the program, for example to prevent market conflict.
Payments from Viristar to Viristar Partners for their portion of accrued tuition revenue collected by Viristar are typically made monthly. Payments from Viristar Partners for Viristar’s portion of accrued tuition revenue collected by Viristar Partners are also typically due monthly.
Yes. It is possible to have multiple Viristar Partners, and the Viristar Partner agreement is non-exclusive.
The Risk Management for Outdoor Programs course is designed for program managers and leaders with administrative or governance responsibilities. The course is not targeted to on-the-ground field staff (those who exclusively work directly with activity participants), although some may find it useful.
The Risk Management for Outdoor Programs course is relevant for leaders of outdoor, experiential, wilderness, travel-based and adventure programs. Organizations responsible for wilderness risk management, addressing hazards of international travel, and even indoor experiential adventures such as climbing walls will find the course useful.
The course is applicable to leaders with organizations involved with adventure tourism, outdoor recreation, outdoor education, service learning, and specialty programs like the International Baccalaureate (IB) Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS) programme, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, International Youth Award, Hillary Award, and Award for Young People.
Participants from independent schools (private schools), international schools, Gap Year and semester abroad programs, search and rescue, and wilderness therapy programs have found the course beneficial. So have individuals from therapeutic recreation, outdoor adventure, study abroad and environmental conservation/environmental education organizations.
The Viristar Partner program is available for Viristar’s four-week online Risk Management for Outdoor Programs course at this time. Other online and in-person courses will be included in the program as they are available.
