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“Friendship is essentially a partnership.” -Aristotle
Where will we be today if not for friends?
At Design For Good, we are truly thankful to have met so many people who cheered us on along the way. Support comes in many forms, and a new venture is almost always as exciting as it is daunting. It is often tough to get the first steps going, and challenging to actually do the things necessary for dreams to be fulfilled.
With that, you can probably imagine how help and encouragement meant a great deal to us.
To us, our friends are also our ambassadors who have stepped out of their way to offer their time and effort into making this initiative work.
Ever since our inception, we have had an amazing group of university students who started the marketplace by flying over to SMILE Village itself. They recorded the stories of the Krafters and gave their inputs on product development.
Following that, several like-minded individuals also saw the value in what we are doing and shared our story on their own social media platforms. The word-of-mouth also got us many opportunities to share our stories and showcase what our Cambodian artisans have done.
This was also the time where we really discovered how skilled volunteerism can benefit an organisation. We also had a few meetings with students who majored in marketing, and they suggested a few potential approaches to broaden our scope and reach. Another student offered to help us with our content writing as well.
In August last year, we also held a brainstorming session where post-it notes were pasted all over the room, where we sat down with our friends to connect ideas with the right customer experience and storytelling approaches.
We have friends with experience in the marketplace as well, and their advice was essential in helping us to come up with the most fitting pricing strategy and product bundles. We also kept checking our work with designers for feedback.
That helped us greatly, and we were really touched when our young friends took time out to help us with our event booths. Not only did they participate throughout the whole event, they also shared our stories for us with a passion. Seeing such energy makes us believe even stronger in our purpose as well.
Right now, we are having some friends who are helping to execute a digital marketing campaign to increase our outreach and engagement online.
Putting all these together, we are now working to put together a web page to appreciate every single one of our friends who have helped us so far. We can never take these gestures for granted, and we look towards building a community of ambassadors who believe in design, for good.