Where I work we’re all about driving progressive change through Fairtrade education by amplifying the voices of small scale producers. We’re particularly interested in using new technologies to create fun educational experiences.

My charity was set up by Divine Chocolate, who have a good line in telling producer stories, in their case of the Kuapa Kokoo Faitrade cooperative, including some nice videos now on their website. I like the ambition of the Crop To Cup website, and the use of Google Earth and maps to make the producers even more “concrete”.

Interesting points about presenting better decision making information to ethical consumers weighing up marks and brands. I think there’s a balance here. As you point out you don’t want to be comparing and calculating to the point where you have cognitive overload. I think when people shop, they expect some issues to have been dealt with. Government and retailers are asking a lot of shoppers, delegating them the responsibility of choosing society’s way out of unsustainability. We mustn’t lose sight of the need for legislation for minimum standards and having some simple marks like Fairtrade that we know we can trust.

We agree that making connections between producers and consumers is the key thing. Generally these connections do have to be mediated to be productive, but the 2.0 era definitely offers opportunities for more personal and spontaneous interactions that go far beyond the generic corporate blurb on product packaging.

A new strand of Trading Visions’ education work focuses on using video conferencing to scale up face-to-face contact between consumers in the UK and Fairtrade cocoa farmers and their communities in Ghana to drive Fairtrade education and action. I agree with the other comment that this kind of technology is going to be hard to deploy in Africa, but there are occasionally opportunities. We have satellite broadband in two rural schools in Ghana and are able to run video conferencing sessions with schools and conferences in the UK. Here’s a video news piece by ITV Wales about one of these sessions.

Divine Chocolate also have a youth Fairtrade chocolate bar called Dubble that has an online community of “Dubble Agents” out to change the world “chunk by chunk”! We’ve just introduced more social networking elements to the online community recently – with profiles, avatars and forums – and much of it is about trying to mobilise young people by inspiring them with producer stories from Ghana, using exciting media whenever we can.

Like the idea of producer podcasts!

I’ve been thinking more about the possibilities for storytelling around FT since writing this post..

One thing I’ve not yet found – but would love to – are good audio-stories of fair-trade products. Video is great – but it takes up a lot of attention to interact with – whereas just about every time I go into the kitchen I put the radio on. What if when I bought a FT product for the first time I could listen to a 10 minute podcast about it and hear from the producer whilst I’m cooking it up into something…

In terms of giving people more info I think the main information I would like is on the actual impact that providing that fairer deal is having on the wider community. Its easy to say poor people should be given more money – but what impact is that actually having? Are these people just a little richer but still in the same situations or are they using their increased wealth to somehow support the community around them?

I’m not sure about the social media stuff – neither twitter or web chats would be practical with the groups we’ve worked with in Africa. Cellphone use is high but still relatively expensive and internet access is highly unreliable and mostly at dialup speed and certainly not accessible for those that are poorest.

Overall I think the most successful approach is in the branding but more needs to be done to convince & inform about what impact Fair Trade purchases actually have.