Water is Life Kenya: E-Commerce
Fall 2023
Fellow: Hannah Madeya
Valery Andrickson, Carly Chmielewski, Ashley Radell, Eva Webb
Community Partner
The mission of Water Is Life Kenya (WILK) is to provide long-standing, fresh-water access to people in need in Kenya. One of the methods they used to raise money is by selling beaded jewelry and accessories made by the people of Maasai. WILK hopes to create growth in person, economic and community development in marginalized communities. Their goal is to help people, especially the women, prosper. By helping, WILK builds economic sustainability to improve their quality of life and deliver access to a basic human right. WILK serves the people in Kenya that need access to clean water. WILK allows the people to make their own money by allowing them to make the jewelry and WILK acts as an organization to spread the word.
Design Question
Throughout our partnership with WILK, there have been two main design questions that have guided our co-collaboration with the organization. Our initial design question was, “how do we translate the in-person buying experience to the online space?” This question targets the key goal that Aaron and team expressed to us, being that they have a strong in-person buying experience when selling at events but have been exploring ways to match that positive experience to the online space. People enjoy the in-person shopping experience as they are able to interact hands-on with the handicrafts and converse with Aaron/other team members to hear the backstory of the jewelry. This question helped us think about ways we can tackle the issue of making online products feel tangible, and how we can replicate the in-person shopping experience in the online space to boost e-commerce sales. From here, we interacted hands-on with the jewelry/handicrafts ourselves to take new pictures and content to post online. As we progressed throughout the semester, we conducted a deep dive of the website rewriting product descriptions and content for the Instagram page. With the end goal of ultimately boosting sales, we also decided to leverage our community at Saint Joe’s and conduct a pop-up shop right on campus. For this project area, our design question was: “how can we organize a pop-up event to spread the word about Water is Life Kenya on campus while also selling the handicrafts?” This question led us to explore options for on-campus engagement, and where/when the best time to host a popup would be. This question prompted us to think about logistics in event planning, and what details go into preparing for a successful event.
Strategic Thinking
When we first started our e-commerce strategic planning, we discussed the importance of online presence. One key aspect to e-commerce is having an easily accessible website that is also visually appealing. Water is Life Kenya, beaded handicrafts already has a well established online shop. Our goal was to go through and provide updates. We made a master document that shared updated descriptions of the different beaded handicrafts, recommendations for updated photos and consistent captions for similar accessories. After gathering all of this information, we shared the master list with our community partner. We also looked into different strategies in terms of social media presence, specifically looking at Instagram. We took the opportunity to talk to other people who have successfully nailed down online commerce through social media, like Aisha Lockridge Ph.D., and Emily McCracken. We also did a comparative media analysis where we looked at other non-profits and analyzed their social media presence to see what works and what does not. As we approached closer to the holiday season, and after lengthy discussions with our community partner, we decided that our next strategic strategy would be to hold “pop-up” events at St. Joseph’s University. This once again gave our team the opportunity to see the products in person as well as see how they set up and sell their products. We advertised for these two pop-ups through personal invitations and using what we have learned about visual design to make flyers.
Co-Creation
The way we collaborated with WILK and Aaron, our direct contact community partner, was by always keeping in touch with them. We had bi-weekly meetings every other Friday to come up with ideas to set our goals. We communicated with each other about ideas that had to be met on certain days. On November 14th, we had a pop up on Campion where we exposed the jewelry to students on campus and raised over $700. The bi-weekly meetings are 30 minutes long and on a regular day, it is just Aaron making sure he shares his insights about the projects we had created for WILK’s Instagram and other socials. We had met with Aaron twice and Joyce once. Back at the beginning of the semester, we had met the founder, Joyce, and then Aaron, who presented to the whole class what the organization was really about and how this organization was founded. Another method of co-creation we used was communicating with Dr. Lockridge about her expertise with creating jewelry and selling them. The point of that was so that we had a better understanding of the creation of jewelry but also the process of selling them. We also met with Emily McCracken who works on e-commerce projects at La Colombe Coffee Roasters, to gain further insight into the workings world of e-commerce.
Results
After working with Aaron, we brainstormed ideas on the best ways to approach the vision of WILK in terms of e-commerce. A few of the items on the website needed clearer display images, so we went back and retook pictures for the respective items. We found that there was a minor issue with their social media presence, so we decided to create various designs using the app Canva to promote the products. We created a flyer for the pop-up that we had on campus during the middle of November. We posted this on the official B-Social Instagram to share more information during the week of our takeover. This pop-up featured various beaded pieces created by people in Kenya that WILK sells, and we saw success with that, raising over $700. Because of the major success that this pop-up had, we decided to hold another event during finals week in the library, as it’s a place with the most foot traffic during finals season, to reach as many students as we can.
