My inspiration
My first marketing role out of university was at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-NZ). I loved being able to put my efforts into helping raise funds to protect New Zealand’s native species. A life changing moment was when I met Steve (the crocodile hunter!) and Terri Irwin in the mid 90’s. They were both so passionate about educating people about our natural world and Steve said that he was buying up lots of native bush in Australia to protect it from ever being exploited. That moment in time and Steve’s words have always stayed with me.
At Ghost, when starting a new project with a client we like to have a framing session which is a super useful technique to dive deep into things like, determining the outcomes you seek from the project and how you would measure that you’ve achieved those.
I started with that approach, and also invested time in thinking through who the audiences would be for this idea, what would motivate them, the costs of buying the land, the carbon credit opportunities etc. I reached out to other people that had similar ideas and were developing their own products e.g. mynativeforest.com and tried to learn as much as possible about their approach and the challenges they were working through.
In the end I realised that there were some pretty serious considerations with investment ideas like this. For example asking people to invest in land, even in a community sense with no expected returns, requires a clear understanding of the regulatory landscape e.g. the Financial Markets Authority (FMA).
At that point I was super happy with the progress I had made, so I paused and reflected on how much I had enjoyed the process and connecting with people.
