Feeling stuck growing my social impact business

Hello everyone!

I'm trying to develop my social impact business, but feeling stuck right now.

The main idea behind it is to give individuals an opportunity to gradually build a tangible, positive environmental impact by joining forest restoration at scale, and to make it as easy and convenient as possible while addressing downsides of existing tree planting and voluntary carbon offset initiatives.

I've managed to get a small grant to formally register a company, and create a simple website and web application. I’ve also already got a few municipalities interested in partnering, pledging the land for over 10 million trees, with the potential for much more! Also have a few subscribers to our planting plans across the EU and the US.

The problem is, I struggle greatly with getting enough people to contribute, to jumpstart our field operations.

I was thinking that I am doing everything by the book regarding initial outreach (posting in relevant social media groups, launching platforms, direct messaging and mailing), but just can’t get much positive results, while competitors (on whom I improved to create my project) managed to get decent success even in the first year of operations. Although I don’t know what budget and connections they’ve had.

I don’t know if I have such bad luck or what, but I have a tremendous problem when reaching out to people, organizations, or media. If anyone even bother to respond, then it is either just a statement that this is ‘such an important and needed project’ (but it seems not so important for them to support it), and they ‘wish me luck’ (I can’t do anything with wishes), or if they even declare initial interest and support it ends with ghosting. Not to mention a few openly hostile encounters.

If everyone who declared their support went through with their promises, we’d be already planting, and here I am, stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation, where people expect me to show completed projects to even consider contributing, while I need initial support to even start them.

I just don’t know what to do to keep it going…