Are you scratching your head and shoving your face into a pillow looking to start justice pricing for your offerings? Are you wanting to move beyond donation based classes into a more sustainable long term pricing rooted in equity but don’t know how?

According to a report by Nasdaq ‘funding for racial equity causes abated in the last half of the year, falling to just 5% of donation share in December 2020, showing a gap between intention and action.’

A big part of that is large corporations performing charity reactively which one could argue “better than nothing” and more importantly, it also highlights the need for a longer term solution, a pricing structure that is more proactive when it comes to equity.

While we busy ourselves with dealing with all other aspects of our business, sometimes we get caught up in meeting the business projections and can get stuck on how to make our business models move in the direction of justice.

In my experience of working with people who want to move into financial abundance, grow their work and stick it to the system, I have found that thinking about this early on in this process is more helpful than not.

Because I personally think that everyday is a day to design for justice, it is in situations of social uprising that businesses rooted in inclusion and equity need to walk the talk beyond donation based classes.

If you think this is something you want to do, you can easily learn and get inspired from these real life businesses and organizations.

4 creative ways to embed justice into your pricing.

If you’re ready to take this on, here are some examples by real life business and organizations if you have never done it before:

1) Pay it Forward Wall

A coffee shop here in Charlotte, called Queen City Grounds, or now known as The Landing, offers a Pay It Forward wall where you can walk up to the counter and let the baristas know that you want to buy someone a drink and they will place your Pay It Forward receipt on the wall, so that someone who needs a coffee/drink can use it.

I am curious about how this would work in a yoga studio. If someone could purchase an extra class to pay it forward. Or if a class pass expires by a certain date and there are some classes left in the package, can these classes be given to someone?

If you do try this out, I’d love to know how it works for you.

2) Sliding Scale Pricing

According to The Oshun Center of Intercultural Healing’s survey, who published a report that ‘stands on the shoulders of the work of elders, visionaries for justice who have come before us, and is itself the collective experience of over 50 practitioners surveyed or verbally interviewed over several weeks’

They considered a sliding scale as any pricing guide that has a range of pricing for customers/clients to choose from. In their article, they provided sliding scale examples such as these:

“Choose your price between $0 and $100”
“Choose your price between $75 and $100,”
“Choose your price between $175 and $25” for a product valued at $100.
“Sliding scale $75 – 175. Suggested payment for financially stable households with a total income at or above $50,000, including tax and tip: $140 + 11 (8.025%) sales tax + $23 (15%) tip = $174”

Personally, I do incorporate this in my web design pricing packet and I highly recommend reading their article in full by clicking here. because they provide many examples and also speak to the challenges of this model such as financial unpredictability and trust required for this work.

3) No-shows become donations.

I came across this example when I signed up for an online class with human.kind studios based in Australia. In one of my reminder emails for class, they mentioned that “Late cancels of in-studio classes incur a $10 fee, donated to our Ripple Effect Charity. No-shows incur a $24 donation fee. You can cancel via the MindBody app or website.”

As a customer when I got this email, I immediately felt less stressed if for some reason I had to miss the class.

4) A Give Back Percentage.

I first started doing this in a newsletter workshop where I did not offer a sliding scale but offered that 10% of the funds go towards someone who took the workshop.

I did that because I knew that if the workshop was priced at $10, I had a feeling that people would sign up and if I can get 10 people who had the financial means to sign up, $100 could be given to someone who could use that to purchase a year of email marketing services from Flodesk or Mailchimp.

Alternatively, you could also offer various Give Back percentages depending on what you are comfortable with as a small business.

So, after trying all of these pricing models in the past three years, I realized that there isn’t a one size fits all justice pricing. As an entrepreneur and/or small business, or a multi-hyphenateI hope these suggestions will encourage you to brainstorm and plan for strategies to move towards an economic model built on solidarity.

It won’t be easy. But if you’re reading this, you most likely want to find a pricing model that is sustainable for you and also honors your client’s needs. And we need more folks like you to share their stories of moving in this direction.

Wherever you are, I want to know and hear more about how you are thinking about incorporating justice pricing in your offerings or perhaps you have a way that is working well for you!

And per usual, I welcome conversations!

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