As a marketing intern at the social enterprise Hearty Tails, my job was to establish the digital marketing channels and to set up the direct marketing strategy from setting SMART objectives to optimize the production process, while closely working together with the executives.

I also visited a plant and learned the production of their dog treats. Their production process was very simple and efficient. However, with the amount they currently sell, they only needed about three workers at a time, which means they could not hire many people with developmental disabilities while their mission as a social enterprise is to generate a stable employment opportunity for people with diverse abilities. So there should be more customers to be interested in their dog treats to make a bigger sales, and it comes back to the problem of the low brand awareness.

Hearty Tails is a social enterprise under OCAPDD (Ottawa-Carleton Association for Persons with Developmental Disabilities) which produces and sells all natural dog treats and hires persons with developmental disabilities in its production process. I got an internship opportunity there. My role was to grow the awareness of Hearty Tails in the local community. When I started the internship, the first thing I realized was problematic structure of a social enterprise and the limits that they face. At Hearty Tails, the main problem was limited human resource. Basically there were only two employers in charge for the whole business at the organization, and they were running Hearty Tails while having other main positions at OCAPDD. Therefore, they did not have time to solely focus on Hearty Tails' projects. Thus, it was very hard for me to capture a big picture of what was going on at Hearty Tails. As a result, my first job was to gather information and to draw a blueprint of their marketing plans.

As I gathered information by talking to executives and by visiting their office and a plant, I started to understand the current size of  their business and what kind of objectives we had to aim at in our marketing strategy. Hearty Tails itself was only one year old, and the sales were not stable throughout a year as I see their financial records. The reason for that was the low brand awareness in the local market. They sold well as a part of a subscription service by other retail provider called Bowzer Box which the subscribers get a box of dog products every month, but not a lot through other channels. The huge problem was that the Bowzer Box service itself was closing its business in coming February, which meant one month away from when I started Internship in January. As Hearty Tails was losing its strongest marketing channel, we had to build other strong channels immediately. Firstly, I established marketing objectives to generate and to strengthen the brand awareness in Ottawa-Gatineau region. Below are the screenshot of a part of my final marketing report.

Since the Bowzer Box subscription service ended, Hearty Tails had to develop a new sales channel immidiately. The first option the team thought of was going on Amazon, the world biggest online market platform. However, the planning procecss went hard because of the so many uncertainties of going on Amazon. The cost structure for the seller account was not clearly explained on Amazon's website, and one of the executives at Hearty Tails was not convinced of the value of expanding into Internet environment including going on Amazon. Therefore, I did the cost analysis and cost comparison of different channels and presented on a complete report, which I cannot show here since it contains  cost information that should be kept inside Hearty Tails. Analyzing the cost was not a easy task, and I also had to consult to an Amazon prduct marketing specialist, which helped me a lot to understand the cost structure of selling on Amazon

Although the report helped the executives' decision making, Hearty Tails did not go onto Amazon within my internship period.

- Social Media Marketing

Hearty Tails did not have any Social Media account. I showed the market research result to tell how effective the Social Media marketing is, and suggested to start Facebook and Instagram. However, the executives were worried of the risk of starting online interaction with customers and also not sure if they could keep the accounts running, given the limited human resource at the organization. As a result, we could not start Social Media marketing within my internship period. Yet, the executives have not totally given up on Social Media marketing and they were thinking to outsource that part to a professional team at the Algonquin collage.

- Email marketing

Since Hearty Tails was hesitant to start Social Media marketing, I thought Email marketing would be a solution. I built the template Email newsletter on MailChimp so that they could make some minor changes and send out right away.

- Flyer Design

After I was done with the internship, I was asked to design a two-sided flyer to hand out at the event for local social enterprises.

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-The internship at Hearty Tails gave me insights of how a social enterprise works. There were many difficulties that are different from a for-profit organization and also those they have in common. I hope I could stay there longer to help them solve those marketing problems. I still keep in touch with them so I wish I get another opportunity to work for them even as a volunteer, because I support their value and mission.

If you are interested in reading the complete marketing report, please contact me through the form below or through my LinkedIn :)