In this month’s Client Spotlight we spoke with Tanya Vora from Earthfest. Learn about their work while seeing the success of our collaboration in building their website.
Tell Us About Your Organisation and What It Strives For?
Earthfest is an event, however I think just calling it an event doesn’t do it justice to the whole vision behind it. It’s kind of an event and a movement merged into one, that we started through the non-profit that I work for which is called London Clean Air. To give you a little bit of background, London Clean Air does community-level projects to raise awareness of air pollution and its negative health effects. Through our engagement with local communities, we try to campaign for better air quality in London. London Clean Air was initially founded as Camden Clean Air, working mainly in the borough of Camden where we did a lot of work and had a good impact. We wanted to start expanding our work to other boroughs and part of that came the idea to put together an event that would happen annually, to help us raise funds for the non-profit, which is now known as Earthfest. Earthfest has grown to be very much its own entity and brand,
Since we launched in 2024, Earthfest has grown into a movement and a community of people that are trying to breathe a new life into sustainability, which can often be a really challenging frustrating topic, not just for businesses but also for individuals like you and me. One of our main goals with Earthfest is to make the topic accessible and fun, and bring people into these conversations that are either disengaged or often left out of the conversation.
What Is Your Role at Your Organisation and What do You Enjoy Most About It?
I am the marketing manager for Earthfest, so I do all the marketing and communications. I think my favourite thing about my role is something that is common in both marketing roles and small non-profit team. that you get to do a bit of everything. It isn’t always the easiest, but it does mean that you get to learn a lot of new skills, and I’m someone who very much likes to learn by doing and diving in headfirst. I think a marketing role is great for that, because have to get your hands dirty and just do it. People generally see marketing as ‘oh you just do social media’ but that’s not the case, it’s a role that is very involved in every possible way. I hope we get to a point where the world realises you can’t have it all with a one-person marketing team, but we do very much live in a world of one-person marketing teams, and it’s certainly a very fun and chaotic lifestyle! You have to be a straight up person to do it, to embrace it and thrive in it.
My role really changes every day, but one thing I try and do every day, is keep up with what’s going on in terms of climate change and environmental news specifically and air quality for the non-profit as well. I do this because all my marketing kind of depends on the zeitgeist, so I do usually start my day by reading through some news sites that I know I can trust when it comes to environmental news, along with checking social media to see if there is any community engagement I need to do. After doing that, it usually just dissolves into chaos! It really depends on what I am working on at the time. Usually, If I am doing work for London Clean Air, it could involve running to a local school or a business that we’re doing a volunteer project with and making content, which is really fun! For Earthfest it’s usually something more strategic, like what is our the overarching marketing communication strategy going to look like? I think EarthFest is going to grow much larger than any of us anticipated, so I often find it’s more of a strategic approach to marketing, whereas in the non-profit it’s a bit more fun and social media focused, which is great. It’s good to have a mixture of both!
What Challenge Did You Face and Want Framework Digital to Help You With?
We have always done our own websites for previous things using WordPress and it has gotten us pretty far. We bought a WordPress template last year and basically built the whole website around it, but I think as a team we kind of realised, we had such a detailed and robust vision for what we wanted Earthfest to look like, that working from an existing template wasn’t enough. We also realised the reality is that your website is your first touch point for 99% of people that may come across your organisation. We did have a decent website, it functioned and looked cool, and we had a lot of fun playing around with the design as much as we could. I do think one of the main issues we faced with this is that the site didn’t perform well. As much as Georgina (co-founder of London Clean Air) and I are quite creative and can make the website look nice, we had no idea how to tackle the technical side behind it.
The old site didn’t work well on mobile and the site structure was a bit chaotic as we were adding to the template as we discovered more and more needs. I think we realised we needed to put a lot more time and care into our website, as it is this first touch point for many people. If your website isn’t designed nicely and doesn’t function well then no one will really listen to the message you want to get across.
Can You Tell us Something That Happened During The Project You Weren’t Expecting?
I think it was the way that the working relationship developed over time, that was such a pleasant surprise for both sides. It was a collaborative, communicative, and it felt like we created an open space to be able to share concerns and share ideas. There was a lot of back and forth where it felt like all ideas were welcome, and then it would be a case of, let’s break down why something might work and why something might not work. I think having that kind of relationship is rare, especially when you’re working with people externally as you have a limited amount of time to work together. For us and Framework building that relationship quickly and just getting on and adapting to each other’s work styles, worked really well.
If You Were to Recommend Framework Digital to Someone, What Would You Say?
I would say Framework have a great balance of creativity and technical knowledge. You can pitch them your wildest dreams and they will help you make them a reality. You are really just a lovely group of people, every single person I have spoken to at Framework are super sweet and lovely which really makes the experience even better when working together.
We spent a lot of time looking at different agencies that we thought we could go to, and I think for us choosing Framework felt right in part because you have a big focus on accessibility, which is so important. Especially with what we are trying to do, which is bring as many people who feel left out of conversations regarding sustainability, into them. Also, having the facilities to be able to run the website sustainably through your sustainable hosting is great, as surprisingly not every developer or agency are really thinking about this.
It really felt like the right fit and it was great to get help and think about the best way to communicate all of the various things we are doing at Earthfest into one gorgeous hub of information. Framework really smashed it out of the park!
Thank you to Tanya for participating in our Client Spotlight! If you would like to get involved in our Client Spotlight next month, email amy@frameworkdigital.com
