Our partners in purpose
Over the course of 2020, we helped more conscious businesses grow. And that’s really what this is all about for us. To be able to play even a small role in helping ethically minded businesses connect their messages, products and services to more Australians gets us out of bed in the morning (if Margie hasn’t already, that is!).
Our no-fish policy
Our approach to work is unique and totally different to conventional agencies in that we want to train, empower and teach our clients so they can actually reduce their scope of work with us.
You know that old proverb that says: “Give a wo(man) a fish, t(he)y’ll eat for a day. Teach them him how to fish, t(he)y’ll eat for a lifetime.”? Well, we apply that philosophy to our work. And while we know that might be considered counterintuitive to traditional ideas of business ‘success’, we know there will always be plenty of organisations out there that need a hand with their fishing technique!
“The team at Harvey is so diverse and capable for such a small team. It really feels like they're a natural extension of our team and communication is A+. Since we started working with them about a year ago, we've been able to action some big changes in our business which have been crucial for adapting to the challenges of 2020.”
- Fergus Sully, Kester Black
What do our clients think?
We conduct a client feedback survey every year, because it’s important to us that we know the impact we’re having on our clients and their work. Here are a few things we learned from our last round of feedback:
- All of our clients would recommend us (or already have), with our NPS (Net Promoter Score) sitting at 69.2 (69.2% promoters, 30.8% neutral, 0% detractors).
- Some of the words our client used to describe us included “diverse skills”, “flexible”, “realistic/workable solutions for every budget”, “empathic”, “understood and listened to us” and “effective/nimble team”.
- 61.9% of our clients told us we were good value, 38.1% said we could charge more, 0% that we charged too much. We love this feedback, and want to maintain this high value-for-money rating as we move into our next year of business.
Learning together
While many agencies focus on clients and projects that are close to home, most of the essential work when it comes to tackling the climate crisis or helping marginalised communities happens on the front line. Not only that, but many of these organisations and individuals lack digital skills to help them grow their impact.
Traditionally, changing one individual's behaviour in the development sector can take 3-4 months and 30-40 hours of staff time. But thanks to the rapid rise of access to internet and use of Facebook through mobile, innovative social enterprise ATEC* Biodigesters used digital and a call centre to drastically reduce that time to a couple of hours across a few days.
So we partnered with ATEC Biodigesters to share our learnings and insights about how digital marketing can be used to impact positive behaviour change in a one-off webinar.
The webinar was attended by almost 100 people from around the world (Myanmar, South Korea, Mozambique, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Australia and more besides!) from a range of organisations and social enterprises. Another of our proudest achievements in 2020 was the launch of the Harvey Academy, through which we ran two cohorts for IDE Cambodia and SNV Kenya.
These organisations do brilliant work in their communities, from maternal education, food/nutrition education, testing clean cooking solutions, helping farmers increase their sustainability and so much more besides.
We’re looking forward to growing the Harvey Academy in 2021 and beyond.
"I learnt a lot from the course. It’s testing the waters for me to set up the Facebook page/ads, as well as refining audiences and seeing how people react to different messaging."
- Chivorn, Harvey Academy Student
The six areas of this report
Let’s take a look back at the year that was (before wrapping up with some of our goals and intention-setting for 2021).
This is a pretty long article, so we've created an executive summary version here, including a summary of each section.
To keep things simple, we’ve broken this report up into six parts, that speak to six areas that were particularly important to us this past year:
