Brand Activation Case Study | Postcard Travel Club
In Spring of 2023, I took a course with the Transformational Travel Council (TTC) focused on “Experience Design” as I started to imagine whether I would want to design my own retreats, sabbaticals, or immersive voluntourism experiences as part of my coaching offerings.
Through my involvement with the TTC and the course, I met a number of inspiring leaders who had visions to make travel a force for good. In listening to their challenges, I realized my passion was most alive around playing a role in raising consumer awareness about the offerings this community was creating, which facilitated positive impact for both the traveler and the destinations they visited.
So then meeting fellow TTC member Amit Jaipuria, who was running an organization called The Postcard Travel Club, focused on showcasing leaders in the responsible travel movement through storytelling in the form of digital postcards, it felt like the perfect opportunity to honor this emerging vision.
The concept had a spirit of play, disruption, and empathy in it’s desire to build a global community of conscious travelers and connect them more seemlessly with responsible travel opportunities. So, I agreed to join the team as the “Director of Partnerships” to build out their community of suppliers, inclusive of properties, tour operators, and retreat hosts in July of 2023.
Discover: When I joined the Postcard Travel Club project, it was determined that we needed to focus on communicating product-market fit for responsible tourism providers to ensure they could easily see the value in joining the platform, and also reduce the friction for them to join our community and be featured. To customize our solution to their needs, we realized we needed to hone in on the key challenges that travel suppliers faced with regards to marketing and sales. So I suggested we conduct interviews with 12 travel industry representatives during the “discovery” phase to gain valuable input on how we might move forward with customizing our “partner pitch.” During this phase of the project I also visited responsible tourism-focused properties in US and Rwanda to gain a more “first-hand” understanding the "key offerings” available focused on conservation and community-development and the challenges they face getting in front of their desired customer. I also attended a Business of Conservation Conference in Africa to drive brand awareness among nature-based tourism providers.
Design: From here we developed a pitch deck which clearly outlined the themes around the challenges we heard prospective partners faced, including the expense of search engines, the challenges creating content and getting ROI from social media, and the unfavorable commission structures from intermediaries, such as Online Travel Agencies (OTAs). This allowed us to define our Unique Selling Point around enhancing brand awareness, increasing direct bookings, and facilitating direct connections with values-aligned customers. We discovered that many of these prospective partners had challenges generating their own content for their social media channels and blogs, and that to provide a higher level of service and reduce friction, we needed to build an internal “storytelling team” who could help write the digital postcards and newsletter features on behalf of our partners. We also decided to start with a “freemium” option to onboard partners through an “invite-only” offer to establish a strong foundation for our partner community. Lastly, this stage allowed us to get clear on the profile for our initial partner onboarding: luxury, experience-focused, boutique or independent operators (or boutique chains), and a responsible tourism commitment.
Deliver: We then moved forward with “testing” this pitch with 12 prospective and existing partners, where we were able to validate our messaging, and move forward with streamlining our process for outreach and onboarding. We leveraged a number of outreach channels including e-mail, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and found that we were able to reach a 26% percent conversion rate after three months. In order to also increase our efficiency with onboarding partners, we also sought to deepen our relationships with two affiliate partners who already had collections of responsible tourism operators, as well as a strong reputation in the industry.
Debrief: Based upon our efforts, we increased our partners featured through Postcard Travel Club from 18 in August 2023 to 68 as of December 2023, which was a 270% increase. Our success was directly tied to building credibility and relationships in person through event attendance, using multiple channels to connect with new partners, and establishing deeper alignment and trust with key affiliate partners.
Partner Testamonial:
"The Long Run is a global community of change makers committed to building businesses and travel experiences that have a positive impact on people and the planet, and so we're delighted to partner with a community of storytellers setting out to do the same! Together we're excited to inspire and drive awareness of what travel as a force for good really looks like."
-Holly Tuppen, Communications & Project Manager, The Long Run
