Karma Audit Leads to Support for Saving Orangutans in Borneo

 

The Karma Audit that inaugurated our Year of Great Marketing Karma was a playful way to encourage marketers to get involved in supporting our causes. One of the marketers who came across the campaign was Stuart Ralph, founder of Morally Marketed.

Stuart founded Morally Marketed, a web platform that highlights positive marketing, because of his concern that in pursuing “consumers” most marketing campaigns have no consideration for the human being on the other end of the message.

Stuart was delighted to connect with Pimp My Cause, to put his marketing expertise to the test and use his skills to support one of our causes. Stuart responded to a help wanted advert posted by Health in Harmony requesting a social media mentor to help them expand their social media presence.

Kelsey Hartman, one of a small team running Health in Harmony, was new to handling social media accounts and was looking for advice on how to expand their follower base on Facebook and Twitter. She wanted to know how to make their social media accounts more interactive and engaging in order to raise awareness and funding for their cause.

Health in Harmony believes that environmental health and human health are inextricably linked. They work in rural Borneo where 10% of the world’s remaining wild orangutans live. They work to break the cycle of poverty and environmental degradation by partnering with communities to create sustainable alternatives to logging. In exchange for a commitment to protect the rainforest, they provide requested services like high-quality, low-cost health care and organic farming training.

Health in Harmony’s work supports the community as a whole and they are able to expand their initiatives in accordance with the community’s needs.  For example two of Health in Harmony’s volunteers spent time with the local children and realized that most of them had never been to see the local National Park, Gunung Palung, and the orangutans that reside there, even though many of their parents were learning about the importance of forest protection. In order to educate local children about forest protection and give them the opportunity to visit un-logged rainforest they created a new programme called “ASRI Kids”.

Over a period of several months Stuart worked with Kelsey to give her advice on how to build their social media networks and most importantly to reach the specific people who would be most interested in supporting their cause.

The advice from Stuart included the importance of building friendships with your followers, giving them valuable information and entertaining them with your content and how these principles can be translated into practical steps.

Kelsey said, “Stuart’s advice was very helpful. We learned how to search for conversations relating to our work and how to have meaningful conversations through social media to engage individuals in our programmes.”

“Through Twitter we were able to connect with a professor who is now planning to support our research during his sabbatical.”

So many causes know that they need to have a social media presence, but don’t understand how to get a good return for the time and effort they put into building their social media followings. Stuart’s advice has greatly supported Health in Harmony in teaching them how to reach and communicate with people anywhere in the world who have the potential to become advocates, funders and supporters of their work.

Kelsey shared, “Our Twitter followers have grown from 35 before working with Stuart to over 1,000, and engagement on our Facebook and Twitter has grown by nearly 500% using the tips and resources that Stuart gave us.”

Stuart said, "It was a privilege to assist Kelsey and Health in Harmony with their social media strategy. They are a forward thinking charity who are doing wonders to save the rain forest, and provide better lives for those in Indonesia."

Health in Harmony’s approach to environmental conservation makes it possible for families to pay for high-quality healthcare through conservation-oriented non-cash means; this approach is improving human health, reducing environmental destruction, and creating relationships that support long-term change. It is an exchange that benefits the whole planet.

Together with their local communities Health in Harmony has replanted 26 hectares of devastated forest in the past four years, including restoring a key "orangutan corridor" - a reforested bridge between larger habitat areas - that will once again allow these and other animals free movement and the opportunity to breed.