Programs

Teaching the Sustainable Lifestyle

ECHOteach is another CSR program that shares enterprise development directions with communities while bringing the ECHOstore spokespersons closer to our customers to ensure that they are reminded of their role as conscious consumers to further support ECHOstore’s sales, and help marginalized groups.

Invitations for talks come from schools, universities and companies for the ECHOtrio to talk about the green, sustainable lifestyle and topics on social enterprise development. The ECHOtrio volunteered time, talent, and expertise to teach and attend as many talks as possible.

The Key Messages

Everything that the brand of ECHOstore stands for, sells, teaches and shares is a lifestyle and consciousness change that is core to the sustainability of the business. ECHOstore’s messages, philosophy and brand value resonated with the public’s aspiration for the clean, green, compassionate, sustainable lifestyle. The ECHOtrio endeavors to share the philosophy of helping nurture the Self, the Community and the Planet, where Planet and People were just as important as Profit to create this loop or circle of sustainability.

ECHOteach is a strategic way of educating more people towards everything that ECHOstore is. It is the way the retail store reaches out to its stakeholders who are: the Employees in the effort to make them realize that they were the first touch points of the ECHOstore brand experience; the Media in the effort to make them realize the power they had to help educate and disseminate good news stories and further help educate people on a sustainable lifestyle; the marginalized Communities in the effort to make them realize the need for enterprise development with a heart, development of livelihood, markets and sustainability; the Consumers in the effort to make them more conscious consumers and key to the value chain of ECHOstore’s retail sustainability; the Funding Groups in making them see that ECHOstore answered the last part of the value chain with regards issues of product readiness and market access that the communities grappled with.

With the strong and sudden impact of global warming everywhere, ECHOstore’s call for a sustainable lifestyle made even more sense. The consumers were ready to begin shifting practices and paradigms towards green sustainable living and were looking for models to follow. ECHOstore suddenly found itself as a thought leader and first mover for the green and sustainable lifestyle, ethical values for supporting fair trade and environmental practices and consumption. ECHOstore is the “go to” for anything regarding green living, fair trade support and sustainability.

ECHOteach topics include everything that supports the sales of any or all ECHOstore products, which have communities or causes, embedded with them. They include general topics on how to live a green and sustainable lifestyle, wellness and health, the need to love and support Filipino products and local communities, locavorism, women’s empowerment (as ECHOstore is a woman’s led business with 75% of its supplier base women, and close to 85% of consumer base being women); and more specialized topics such as design and packaging, branding, marketing-communications, green retailing and social entrepreneurship.

The ECHOteach Program is intrinsic to the company’s philosophy and directions. Stakeholders touched from 2010-mid 2011 included:

• Employees. Internal education for ECHOstore employees during Town Hall Meetings to educate them on products, communities, causes and issues related to green retailing. Second was about green retail practices, which included re-cycling, and reducing waste. Now, ECHOstore employees themselves have become knowledgeable with stories about the community groups, suppliers, and products. ECHOstore employees initiative their own recycling specific for ECHOstore’s packaging and now speak about green tips and practices they do in the store.
  
  
• Youth. Ngee Ann University from Singapore (50 pax) Schools, Miss Earth in 2010 (40) in 2011 (40)
  
  
• Media. ECHOstore was present in all print media (daily publications and magazines) for the whole year. Online bloggers constantly post the informational materials we send out. Featured stories always highlight educational information related to a clean and healthy lifestyle due to natural and organic food, the compassionate fair trade support all consumers need to give to the marginalized community groups and ways of living green to help the environment.
  
  The ECHOteach Program has tried to manage ECHOstore’s network of friends and suppliers who themselves could share something to the general public by bringing in small groups of media friends to meet them so topics can be shared, written by media, and shared to a much bigger public through print publications. Examples of this include topics on challenges of organic farming and green businesses.
  
  
• Community Groups. Educational topics for our community groups include everything from design direction, market trends and understanding, and branding.
  
  
• Companies. Companies invite the ECHOtrio as speakers for talks under their Human Resource programs, or specifically for Women’s Day Events focused on women empowerment, Earth Day focusing on environmental concerns, Wellness and health.
  
  
• International Communities and Groups

Formats

Educational-informational Formats used include Talks and Lectures, Workshops, Media Fora, Radio and TV interviews, online information dissemination through social networking initiatives in Facebook and Twitter which offer tips on the general topic of sustainability; a special Electronic Direct Mailer (EDM) with articles on how to live a sustainable lifestyle. Under this program would also be the personal initiatives and weekly columns of two of the ECHOtrio personalities who write for broadsheets. Alignment with companies through information campaigns as EDMs are released through their intranet systems for employees. Carefully crafted educational information sheets are given to Media as partners who help disseminate the ECHOstore values and information. ECHOstore’s Shelf-Talkers, Community Booklets, marketing tags are also used as educational tools to talk about health or fair trade, while the Website is loaded with information which the general publics and especially students who study social entrepreneurship access. ECHOteach is also present in small discussion groups, which the ECHOtrio have with young students who wish to learn about sustainability and social entrepreneurship.

Defining Metrics

Some metrics we use to study the continuing success of ECHOteach are the increase in the number of invitations for talks from universities, school, companies and organizations that the ECHOtrio received; the growth in sales of people purchasing ECHOstore products, the requests for franchising or licensing opportunities as they believe in ECHOstore’s causes after learning about them; the consistent media request for good news stories about ECHOstore communities or activities.