Being Buff: Marketing the social economy

This Transfair USA ad from the San Francisco craigslist popped up in my Google Alerts yesterday. I reprint here in its entirety in case anyone wants to apply. I have also highlighted things of note and commented in the text.

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Social Media & Communications Intern (oakland downtown)

About Us:
TransFair USA, a four-time winner of Fast Company Magazine’s Social Capitalist award, is an entrepreneurial non-profit organization that is the only 3rd party certifier of Fair Trade products in the U.S. We currently certify nine product categories – coffee, cocoa, tea, rice, sugar, fresh fruit, honey, vanilla and flowers. Our unique market-based model links 1.4 million farming families in the developing world to more than 700 companies in the US to bring more benefit to farmers and the best products to U.S. consumers. TransFair is a fast-paced, dynamic environment driven by a passion for doing good in the world by harnessing the power of markets and corporate partnerships.

Outreach:
Research potential partner organizations and coordinate collaboration via web links, joint campaigns, Fair Trade Month events, etc.
Discover and communicate with members of new networks and groups, as appropriate.
Research and build content by partnering with organizations that have a Fair Trade focus.

Online Communications:
Review and coordinate content revisions for TransFair website.
Search for Fair Trade Certified label use and mention of TransFair USA and Fair Trade on websites, coordinate corrections and updates when appropriate.
Update and disseminate news and content to relevant social networking sites, including Facebook, Flickr, Change.org, YouTube, and others.

[Clearly, Transfair gets the power of both social media monitoring and social networks.]

Research:
Research blogs, networks, publishers and influencers for SEO and SEM opportunities.

[I didn’t know what SEM was until I Googled it and found this great post from the Raise My Rank blog which explains search engine marketing beautifully – including how it’s different from SEO (search engine optimization).]

Requirements:
Applicants must possess excellent written and verbal communication skills. Experience in marketing, communications, grassroots outreach, social media and/or graphic design desirable. Must be a self-starter! TransFair USA is looking for an intern willing to work between 15-25 hours a week. TransFair USA is flexible around scheduling, and offers the possibility of completing some tasks out of office.

[The line about offering the “possibility of completing some tasks out of the office” surprised me – especially for a social media focused job. These jobs are about being mobile - getting out and talking to people and using mobile technology as one tool to grow those relationships.]

To Apply: Please submit a cover letter, resume, writing sample, and two references to: www.transfairusa.org/content/about/intern_volunteer.php

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The one huge problem with this is that it’s a volunteer position. This may mean that Transfair doesn’t have the money to hire someone to do social media or they have the money but don’t believe it’s worth it. Whatever the issue, they should think twice before bringing in someone who will leave when they find a job. This volunteer’s job is to start and build relationships and the worst thing you can do to a relationship is start it and then take off.

Posted in Fair Trade, Social media jobs | 1 Comment »

Welcome to Episode #11 of Looking Good Naked – Marketing the Social Economy – The ConsciousImages Podcast for Sunday, July 6, 2008. This week: From Fair Trade 2.0 to Fair Trade 101.

· Welcome to show #11…10 more to go until it’s habit!

· Phone Number: 206-202-6340

· Email: consciousimages(at)gmail(dot)com

· iTunes!!

· This show answers Andrea Matyas’ audio comment about Fair Trade in Canada from episode #9.

· Interview with Cynthia Wagner, communications manager with Transfair Canada.

Two things made me go “Mmmm..”” this week…

1. is the thing I am working on…

2. saying goodbye to some friends who are going away to work Mozambique for two years and the sadness of seeing them go being lessened by the realization that with the internet in general, and Skype in particular, they will only be far away physically.

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I have always believed that the most powerful way to show how the actions of companies engaged in the social economy help improve people’s lives is to tell those people’s stories.

I had the rare opportunity yesterday to meet five people involved in fair trade, organic shea butter production in Mali and Burkina Faso, West Africa. Fatoumata Natié Coulibaly, Lalayssa Niare and Souleymane Traoré all work with the Mali-based Cooperative of Shea Butter of the rural district of Siby (COPROKASI) that runs La Maison du karité. Abou Dradin Tagnan and Mariane Bassia work with Burkina Faso’s Union des Groupements de Productrices de Produits de Karité (UGPPK) des provinces de la Sissili et du Ziro.

Bridgehead, that sells fair trade coffee, hosted the event at their store on Albert and Bank St. in Ottawa – a great marketing move by them.

They were all here on a tour to market their fair trade, organic certified Shea butter products. A few things they said stuck with me in particular:

• Shea butter is produced exclusively by women – the men I met were coop managers. This is because, before shea butter was a business, it was used for a variety of household and personal needs like cooking and moisturizing skin. These were activities done by women so the women have simply been helped to commercialize what they were already doing.
• 30% of the UGPPK’s products are fair trade – and this accounts for 60% of their revenues.
• UGPPK uses the fair trade premiums it gets for a variety of community-based initiatives including literacy programs for women and HIV prevention programs. Abou said Burkina Faso has the second highest HIV rate in West Africa after Ivory Coast. Ivory Coast produces nearly half the world’s cocoa making it literally the largest cocoa producer on earth.
• Guarantee fair trade premiums give women financial security needed to plan and the cash to afford things like clothes for the family, health care, transportation and educating their kids.
• 65% of Burkina Faso workers make less than $1/day whereas the women producing fair trade shea butter products make $3.50/day.
• Non-fair trade, non-organic shea butter is made with chemicals that greatly reduce its benefits.
• Fair trade makes shea butter, and therefore shea trees, more valuable. People, therefore, protect the trees.

One thing that Abou said that I really didn’t expect was that he does most of the UGPPK’s marketing…over the Internet. He uses the UGPPK website and targets small companies that have expressed support for fair trade.

It may take a village to raise a child – but one laptop can help raise a village….

                      Abou

        Mariane

Lalayssa, Souleymane and Fatoumata

Posted in Africa, Cosmetics, Fair Trade, Producers, Testimonials | No Comments »

Yes, I am proud to say that episode #3 of Looking Good Naked went live at about 1am this morning! Sticking to my once a week production schedule. It features an interview with Ten Thousand Villages store manager Ian Brown about what his west Ottawa store did for World Fair Trade Day on May 10.

And you can now subscribe to the show in iTunes! Just go to Podcasts in the iTunes store and search for Looking Good Naked.

Enjoy!

Post production note:

Also, coming up at the Ottawa Ten Thousand Villages stores:
Saturday, May 17th – tea tasting (Westboro store only)
Saturday, May 24th – Shasta, an artisan from Tara Projects in Delhi, India, will be at both stores demonstrating jewelry and embroidery work with Tara Projects manager, Moon Sharma. (Westboro and Ottawa South stores)

For more info check Alternativetrade.com

Posted in Fair Trade, Theme days | No Comments »

Wow! This one blew me away. West Virginia-based, fair trade coffee company, True Blue Coffee Roasters, is using the micro-blogging program, Twitter, to “keep its customer up to date”. And where did they make this announcement? On their blog, of course (at least that’s where I found it). On their blog True Blue simply says, “We are aware that our customers want more interaction with True Blue and Twitter is a very easy way to stay in contact with our customers.”

Now here are some folks who understand the real power of social media.

Posted in Fair Trade, Microblogging | 1 Comment »

The name of this post is a great title for a great marketing idea care of the Fair Trade Resource Network. On World Fair Trade Day, May 10, the World’s largest fair trade coffee break will give folks the opportunity to do their part to set a new world record for doing what they would do anyway: grabbing a coffee.

Now, this is beautiful marketing for a number of reasons:

1) it’s new

2) it’s easy to do because it’s short and something that people do anyway

3) it’s media friendly for both these reasons

4) if folks want to get more involved, say like hosting an event, the FTRN Website has plenty of info on how to do so

5) it’s the ultimate in social

I’ll be having my coffee at my local Bridgehead!!

Posted in Fair Trade, Global, Theme days | 1 Comment »

One of the biggest challenges in marketing values-based products is, well, marketing the values. Selling a concrete product like soap or shoes is much easier than selling a concept like “fair trade”. Now, one of the things we learned in journalism school was to personalise stories. That’s why good reporters doing a story on, say, taxes find a family through whom to tell the story. Fair trade is no different. Fair trade helps improve real people’s lives in real ways and its those stories that sell the concept.

That’s why I believe that one of the simplest recommendations I have made to the coop I am working with is also one of the most powerful. They have the personal stories of four Dominican farmers on their website – but they are buried and hard to find. I have recommended they put a link on their front page saying something like: “Meet four farmers who you help by buying fair trade.”

The stories are below. See what you think…. (the text and photos below are taken from La Siembra Cooperative’s website. The photos were taken by La Siembra staff.)

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Meet some of the CONACADO producers

Biographies courtesy of the Fairtrade Foundation (www.fairtrade.org.uk)

Ovidia
Ovidia gets up at 5 am and makes breakfast for her husband, Ovispo, and five grandchildren. She looks after the children as their mother, her daughter, is working away from home and can’t take care of them. They have breakfast at 7 am after which Ovispo goes to work in the cocoa farm half an hour’s walk away. At midday Ovidia joins her husband at the farm bringing a picnic lunch for the two of them. Afterwards they work together weeding, pruning and sowing new trees. They harvest about twice a month.

Ovidia and Ovispo sell all of their cocoa to their farmers’ association, a member of the CONACADO farmer’s co-operative. Less than half reaches the Fair Trade market, since there is still insufficient consumer demand. For this part of their crop, the farmers receive a guaranteed minimum price. The remaining cocoa is sold to the conventional market where prices have been very low (below the cost of production) for over two years. They have been earning an average of approximately 2,500 pesos a month, which just about covers their costs and living expenses.

The Fair Trade price has sustained them during long periods of low market prices. Sales to the Fair Trade market have enabled CONACADO to set up a nursery, which supplies low-cost plants to the farmers so that they can grow most of their own food.

Manuel
Manuel’s day starts at six o’clock. For breakfast he has some bananas and possibly a cup of hot chocolate. Two hours later he is at work, clearing weeds and tending the cocoa plants and the surrounding shade-giving fruit trees. Maria prepares his lunch ‘because she loves me’, Manuel says, with a twinkle in his eye. The part of his job he likes best is sowing the cocoa, because the new plants are his security for the future. Manuel and Maria have six children, three of whom have emigrated. One works with Manuel on the farm.

Manuel missed out on school because his father was very poor, so he had to work in the fields from a young age. He inherited his land from his wife’s family. Like many other local farmers, Manuel starting growing cocoa in the 1950s because it offered a more prosperous future. He now belongs to a group of 42 farmers who are part of the CONACADO. Among the benefits of belonging to his group, Manuel singles out the interest-free loans farmers can get to tide them over until harvest time. CONACADO also helps hard-up farmers with fertilizer and new young cocoa plants.

Olga
Olga Lidia de Jesús is 12 years old and goes to school every day in La Taranas in the Dominican Republic. All the farmers in her village of Yanabo are cocoa farmers and many belong to CONACADO. Olga’s father is a cocoa farmer. According to her, life in her family has improved because Fair Trade companies pay her father more money for his cocoa.

His co-op can now afford to teach people new farming skills. They even organized a project to bring electricity to the community. Olga’s father says that he would never sell his cocoa to the big companies because they “never do anything for the community like the Fair Trade companies do”.

Guillermo
It’s a two hour uphill walk from Guillermo’s house to his small plot of land, and he arrives streaming in sweat. He’ll spend the day with a machete in hand, weeding or pruning the plants. A couple of days a week, he works at the headquarters of his farmers’ association, where the beans are fermented and dried.

Guillermo is near the end of a two-year term as president of his local farmer’s association. He’s therefore seen the benefits that Fair Trade has brought to the community. Where he lives, medical workers have been providing free advice and medicines. A nursery, funded by the Fair Trade premium, is providing the farmers with fruit trees at low cost. These trees shade the cocoa plants, and give the farmers an alternative source of nutrition and income. Aqueducts and pathways across ditches make it easier to work in fields which are often far from roads.

His message to Fair Trade shoppers is simple. “We promise to provide you with a good quality of fruit, so long as you promise to keep buying more!’

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So Green & Black’s launched what they call “Michah’s blog” in January. It promised to be a “journal or diary posted on the internet” including “the rantings of an opinionated individual”- that individual being G&B product development manager, Micah Carr-Hill. Well, they would be better to call it “Micah’s news release” for the following reasons:

1) there has been only one post since Jan. 25 – the first post.

2) the blog doesn’t allow comments. If you actually want to interact with Carr-Hill you have to email him.

3) I emailed him asking him to explain how G&B can have only one Fair Trade bar since principles have to be applied to all products or they don’t mean much. (It’s like the Body Shop carrying one line of non-animal tested products). He didn’t answer.

This reminds me of a great line from Collin Douma at Podcamp Toronto. Collin works with the Social Media Group and was presenting on the Group’s work for Ford. While talking about transparency in the social media space he said: “for brands it’s like being naked and if you’re going to be naked you better be buff”.

Since G&B obviously has no intention of getting naked you can draw your own conclusions about their buffness.

Posted in Fair Trade | 1 Comment »