In November last year, I came across the ethical move and reached out to the team to see if there was a way for us to work together. I received a very warm welcome by every member of the team and in December 2020 I joined them with two main goals in mind: handle a website migration and optimization and tackle the research needed to build our ethical marketing standard like those of fair trade and organic.
Come March it was the time during my degree when I needed to find an internship or Industrial Placement Course as it is called in my university. I was to spend the better part of two months working full time with an organization in the industry and the obvious choice in my mind was to take this opportunity to deep dive with the ethical move.
It has been an interesting few weeks and a lot of learning opportunities and, a couple of days ago, I got to share the goals and results of this deep dive with my professors and classmates. And now I’m sharing it here with all of you. Please pardon the wonky sound. It was an online zoom call.
Video Transcript & Description:
The video starts with the ethical move branded slogan “how we sell matters” in black text highlighted in yellow, overlapping the badge with the ethical move logo and values: transparency + integrity + equality + honesty + responsibility + trust. There is no audio other than my voice over the slides.
Maria: How we sell matters. For the past two months, I’ve been working full time with the ethical move as part of my IPC. Let me start by telling you who we are and what we do.
1. About us
Text on the screen quoting theethicalmove.org reads: “It’s high time we, as sellers of goods and services, take responsibility for the part we play in the cycle of consumerism. Our marketing relies on scare tactics and psychological manipulation. We have the power to change that. We are the ones to break this cycle, to level the playing field.
The ethical move is setting out to empower conscious consumers and business owners by creating a new marketing standard based on transparency, trust, and honesty. We are the movement for ethical marketing.”
Maria: We are an organization looking to bring attention to the shady marketing practices that are so commonplace these days. We believe that marketing can be done better, and that we have the responsibility to work towards changing the way our industry behaves.
2. The team
Black and white photos of all past and present members of the ethical move I worked with since I joined. Alice, Sabine, Karen, Anyo, Dimitra, Lauren, Caroline and myself.
Maria: A killer, diverse team of women from very different backgrounds and in different parts of the world made for an amazing collaboration and discussion.
3. The pledge.
Quoting the ethical move pledgees, the text reads, “I’m making the ethical move because I value honesty, transparency, and consent. I want prospective clients to feel respected and supported- not manipulated or condescended to.” and two of the ethical move badges for pledgees below it.
Maria: At the center of our mission is our pledge, the way we invite business owners, marketers and consumers to join the conversation and vow to do better.
4. The projects.
Tech optimization and support:
- Laying out and designing pages
- Speed optimizations
- Privacy optimizations
- Webhooks + APIs
- Automations
- Email list management
Maria: The first project I was involved with while working full time with the ethical move was tech optimization and support. These have been my functions since I joined them in December 2020 and will carry on in the future after my IPC.
A mobile phone displaying the links page for the ethical move social media channels that I designed and built during this time. Next to it, a computer screen shows a screenshot of our slack channel, where the pledges posted on our site come in instantly thanks to webhooks.
Accessibility:
- Learning & replicating
- Accessibility testing
- Reporting and project management
- Content creation
Maria: The second project I took on when I started full time was to analyze all our touchpoints in terms of accessibility. It involved gathering a lot of technical knowledge and lived experience and sharing it with the team, doing all the accessibility testing and wrapping it up with some guidelines and a Medium post on the subject.
Two computer screens side by side, one displaying the notion project where all the accessibility testing was annotated and reported and the other displaying my Medium article for the ethical move publication.
Two computer screens side by side, one displaying the hand coded html convertkit template that allowed us to keep visual hierarchy and semantic markup in our communications. The second one displaying the internal web style guide where we keep all of our accessible design patterns.
Research:
- Research design
- Literature review
- Data collection
- Standard
Maria: The last project I went into was the research we needed to do towards creating our ethical marketing standard. Collecting data, doing a literature review and designing potential research that could quantify the impact of taking the ethical move pledge. This task led us to interesting conclusions which the team will share with everyone when the time comes.
Two mobile phones side-by-side showing the example of other organizations’ research pages and the (very long) list of literature reviewed for this project.
5. The takeaways
Lessons learned
- Communication: KISS
- Collaboration: Two heads are better than one
- Consistency: Walk the walk
- Consequence: Put your money where your mouth is
- Continuity: The way is the goal
Maria: having the chance to work so closely with a whole team taught me some valuable lessons about communicating and how to find the balance between sharing too many techy details and not enough, how collaboration is the source of great ideas, how important it is to not only talk about our mission but also act on it and investing ourselves into our growth, and how this is all just a first step on a lifelong journey.
The video ends with the line from theethicalmove.org “Thank you for being here” in black letters and yellow highlighter followed by the ethical move black badge.