CLIENT: Lindblad Expeditions

DATES: March 2017 - August 2017

COMPANY
Lindblad Expeditions is National Geographic’s adventure expedition company whose team includes naturalists, photographers, undersea specialists, historians, and cultural specialists to ensure engaging and connected travel.

CHALLENGE
Lindblad’s LEX-NG Artisan Fund supports artisans at the nexus of tourism, handcraft and conservation. The Fund wanted to support indigenous artisans in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest to help them build stronger livelihoods while encouraging conservation. With a local community-based organization, Minga Peru, and a handcraft consultancy, By Hand Consulting, the group determined a radio show aired in specific Amazonian communities would be the best form of program dissemination. The group hired me to create the radio show.

APPROACH
Since Minga Peru, the on-the-ground partner in this alliance, had deep experience with the target Amazonian communities, I started this project having calls with their staff and reading through/listening to past program content they had created for health and wellness programs directed at the same communities.

I interviewed staff members who worked directly with the target population to understand artisans’ needs and challenges. I also engaged with outside experts who had worked with the artisans of these communities in the past on very specific topics such as natural dyes and palm conservation.

The next step in the project was a co-created episode plan with Minga Peru and several entrepreneurial leaders of the Amazonian communities. Topics included product quality control, product design, product costing and pricing, client communication, gender-based leadership and raw materials conservation.

Direct pilot testing was not possible in this particular project, so to test the content and structure of our episode plan, I created scripts (complete with stage directions) for two episodes only. Minga Peru recorded and aired the episodes in one community to collect feedback, gauge understanding, and receive suggestions. Subsequent episodes were created based on initial feedback, pausing every five episodes to collect more feedback from aired shows in order to refine and re-structure content for remaining episodes.

RESULTS
The final deliverable of this project were 32 forty-five minute radio shows each touching on a different facet of artisan development and grounded in cultural context. The economic improvements resulting from this project were difficult to measure due to lack of baseline information, but satisfaction rates among Amazonian artisans and partners were high.

LESSONS LEARNT
Having direct access to the target population for testing is a key component of creating successful projects. In lieu of this however, working via community-based partners can work if they are briefed on and on board with the design process.