During my time working on TUI’s sustainability marketing strategy I worked on many fun, engaging and interesting projects. My favourite - by far - was working on the Better World Detectives sustainable tourism education resources.
I inherited the project from an agency and there was so much to do - we needed to get the resources out to as many teachers and students as possible. For the first year I worked with the agency that originally delivered the resources - we created a video, did some email marketing - but we weren’t really hitting the objectives we were aiming for. So during my 2nd year of the project I had the courage to ask my boss if I could move the project management from the agency to one of my friends who I knew would be a great production and project manager.
Maddie Duggan (from Fides Films) and I had worked together during my previous role as Marketing Manager at Holiday Extras, and I knew that working with her we would be able to achieve our objectives. She's a born marketer, fun, caring, intuitive and a joy to work with!
We decided to completely upgrade the sustainable tourism education resources, and recruited KS2 and KS3 groups of teachers to help us build new resources from scratch. We organised workshops in London with teachers, where we were able to harness their ideas about how sustainable tourism could be best taught to pupils.
We launched new competitions, started engaging teachers on social media, connected with experts in geography across the country, and bit by bit we started seeing our programme grow. By the end of the 2nd year our resources had reached 60,000 pupils across the UK, and we had partnered up with Rainforest Alliance to help engage even more teachers and pupils with the programme. We were proud and excited about where the programme was heading next!
Some of my favourite memories of working on this programme involve getting to meet so many incredible teachers and students along the way. I will never forget when Maddie and I travelled to the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, to award a prize to one of the schools that delivered the Better World Detectives ‘Mystery of the Missing Turtle’ programme, and entered our competition showing us how they had created a turtle out of recycled milk bottle tops.
We met the Laxdale Primary School students and rewarded them with an experience day with Marine Conservation Society, who taught them about marine species and how to keep beaches clean. The pupils even built a basking shark sand castle!
So, if you know any primary or secondary school teachers that might want to teach this fun and free sustainable tourism education programme, feel free to send them the link to Better World Detectives, TUI's sustainable tourism education resources: http://betterworlddetectives.tui.co.uk/