Global Goods Partners
Advancing Fair Trade Practices
New York, NY
November 2009 - February 2010
Nonprofit, Fair Trade
Global Goods Partners creates economic opportunity for women in some of the world’s poorest nations by providing them with access to the US market to sell their fair trade goods. Global Goods Partners needed to determine a strategic direction for their next fiscal year that both created the most impact in the communities they served, and generated revenue to sustain the organization. As the Director of Marketing and Operations, I was tasked with leading the strategic planning initiatives of the organization.
To develop a plan based on key strengths, we first needed to understand how all of our processes were working, where the holes were, how our community partners viewed our impact, what was selling and not selling, and what the general market trajectory looked like. I worked with staff members and interns to collect and analyze all of this internal and external data. Additionally, I interviewed key players in the industry to extract learnings from them and get a baseline benchmark for ourselves.
We used all of these findings and documents to convene a staff retreat in which we brainstormed solutions and decided on a strategic plan for the coming year. The final deliverable was a strategic planning document that I prepared which included objectives and concrete plans to implement solutions for:
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Strengthening partner microenterprise portfolio
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On-boarding new partners based on on-site observations, interviews, survey assessments, product reviews, and their administrative capacity
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Providing a more robust marketplace for microenterprise partner products
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Re-building the e-commerce website to be more user friendly
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Strengthening Global Goods Partners’ web presence via online marketing
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Building wholesale relationships
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Re-formating branding assets
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Streamlining internal operations to make the best use of limited resources
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Creating accounting manuals and procedures
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Solidifying warehouse policies and relationships
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