27 November 2012
Pam and I are very close to our departure to The Gambia for a week during which we will buy the stock that we need to keep the African Locality Packs authentic . We are making lists and gestimating quantities and are in contact with our ‘product manager’ in The Gambia, Fatou Jallow. She is an enterprising lady, who runs her business through her market stall at Bakau. She also supplies ‘Goodies from Gambia’ with stock, in their case particularly the colourful African material. Fatou deals directly with people in her community and arranges for a host of locals to bring all the stock around to her house to await our arrival. We believe that we exercise good fair trade principles in acquiring these as we use local expertise to negotiate directly with the craftspeople who make our artefacts.
We are setting up meetings with teachers and advisers to help us try to develop a Gambian Reading Scheme initially based on our ‘Fatou First Day’ reader. This has been successful in the Timbooktoo Bookshop in Fajara and it is always popular with the teachers and children we have shared it with.
We are also hoping to research new localities and experiences for the primary teachers who join our CPD courses which include a residential in The Gambia. So although a week in the sunshine sounds like an exotic respite from the dreadful UK weather we will in fact be extremely busy.
As these preparations are continuing we are developing our marketing campaign for the Spring Term. 10,000 new brochures and price lists are being printed to reach schools early in January, These are printed by printing.com and we are pleased by the efforts of Rob Finnie and his team (www.birmingham–printing.com ) and they will be distributed through Meridian Delta. We hope this campaign is successful, but marketing is not our strong point. Indeed we have booked on a personal training day with Dee Blick (www.themarketinggym.org) the well known marketer, but will we be able to sit down, listen and learn with her? watch this space!