Marketing a Philanthropic Startup
By: Ritu Ashrafi Riedweg
Tags: Sustainable Travel, Sustainability, Tourism, Marketing Strategies, Sustainable Development

Even though this dates me a little, I have been working in online businesses for 12 years now. I had a very exciting career starting off in advertising and then transitioning into marketing and all these years working in the corporate world, I secretly wished to work in the development sector. That’s why I cherish the opportunity to be a part of Fair Voyage, a company that exists to make people’s lives better through fair treatment and sustainable practices in the travel industry.

Marketing a mission-driven philanthropic startup is in many ways similar to other fast-growing startups but there are a few key differences and unique challenges. Here I share a few of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from working on marketing at Fair Voyage.

Marketing and Sales is a priority with any startup

You might expect me to say this since I am a part of the marketing team at Fair Voyage but I say it because it’s important and it is worth paying extra attention to.

My philosophy from the early days of my career in online ad sales is that marketing exists to support sales and I still stand by this. Without sales and without the flow of money, you’re not truly able to help the people you’re trying to help in low-income countries.

With the right messaging targeted to conscious consumers, we enable more people to find out about the injustices in the travel industry. We help them extend their ethical choices into travel and become conscious and fair travelers.

Our sustainability content plays a big role in helping consumers decide whether ethical and sustainable trips are worth paying a premium for. This means, more tourism workers get fair compensation, more endangered ecosystems are preserved, and more low-income countries make decisions that are sustainable.

Good marketing lives at the edge of your comfort zone

At the beginning of my career, I was a sales planner and my job was to help the sales executives pitch and close large ad campaign deals. I would look up to the sales team in awe because I admired how they would constantly engage in difficult conversations and what I observed was that the best ones always pitched deals that were bigger than their comfort levels.

Just like with good salespeople whose biggest deals and biggest sales conversations are just outside of their comfort zone, good marketing also lives outside of the marketer’s comfort zone.

Take our current video strategy for example. The entire team went on camera to introduce themselves and publicly share why we are a part of this mission-driven company. The goal of this strategy was to increase transparency about our operations and to build a human-to-human connection between us and those we serve.

Going on camera was not very comfortable for many of us but we pushed outside of our comfort zones, did it anyway and the results were worth celebrating. We got an incredible amount of positive feedback from it and thousands of views on Linkedin and Facebook, with one video getting more than 4000 views. Many of us received personal messages from our network saying how nice it was that we were sharing our mission and purpose so openly.

Photo by Anika Huizinga on Unsplash

Sharing our challenges openly

Today’s startup community is open and collaborative in general and there is a culture of knowledge sharing. This is not always true for the travel and tourism sector, which is more competitive and secretive. We wanted to stand out in this area and even though we’re in the travel and tourism sector, we are openly sharing the challenges we face as we try to grow the company openly.

On top of building up a startup, we are trying to bring positive change to an entire industry and a part of that is disrupting the industry.

We are fueled by what we’re building and writing about the process in our Medium Publication has been great for knowledge sharing within the team and also within our extended network of customers, supporters, and the sustainable travel community.

The goal of this publication is to be seen and to be transparent. We want more people who believe what we believe to find us; that ethical and sustainable travel should be the norm and not a nice-to-have. And we want to find them so that we can help each other co-create a better world together.

The Challenges

We know that people around the world are overwhelmingly becoming more conscious consumers but reaching them is not as easy at it seems. Especially as a bootstrapped company that is trying to help the vulnerable workers in tourism with every dollar possible. I’d be lying if I said that there aren’t challenges in our vision coming true but that has only fueled us to keep working harder.

When you have a powerful story, share it

Fair Voyage was founded because of an extremely powerful experience that the founder, Alexandra Pastollnigg had. When she climbed Kilimanjaro, she was talking to her guide and found out that when he worked as a porter, he had to carry weights above regulations, was not given adequate food or gear, and one day, when he got a cold, fainted and fell into the snow, and they just left me there. If other travelers had not found him and helped him, he may have died.

This is a story that deserves to be told because it sheds light on injustices and exploitation of human life in tourism and the more people that know about it, the better.

Since we have such a powerful story, one of our strategies is to prioritize storytelling. We do this through video, through these articles, on dedicated pages on our site, and of course through our personalized email communication and newsletters.

The power of our story can move people. Internally within the team, the power of our story and the mission is why every single person on the marketing team has joined the company and is working so hard.

When we survey our customers we often hear that it was our story and our ethos that made them choose us to book their trips with us.

What’s next?

My wish is to take the approach of running marketing campaigns as experiments. Experiments by definition don’t guarantee success but they do guarantee learning. And the best thing about them is that they generate a lot of data that will help us drive our decisions.

The problem with data and numbers is that there has to be enough of it to be able to draw real conclusions from it. Data is going to be created by increasing the number of campaigns we are running and by doing it systematically using the framework of experiments.

Even though I’ve never been a numbers person, I love seeing the insights that data can reveal.

Another reason for data is that it proves what is scalable and what is not. As a growing startup, scalability is important for us. The great thing about scalable campaigns is that once you’ve done the hard work of drawing up the campaign and setting it up, if it proves to be scalable, you simply turn up the volume on it, sit back, and watch it multiply its results.

I’d love to get your feedback on our story and our plan on telling our story and reaching more people with our mission. Leave a comment below with feedback, advice, or words of wisdom. Looking forward to building a more conscious world with you!

Photo by LUM3N on Unsplash

Cover photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash