We are back! We had been having strange issues with our website often becoming inaccessible. Over the weekend we moved it to Amazon Web Services and we believe the problem is sorted out. The website also loads a bit faster now.
So, back to work… Eseential work!
Some weeks ago we invited you to think about the new tagline for www.gorillahighlands.com. You were great and sent in a lot of proposals but even though we got a couple of good suggestions and quality advice on what we already had, no solution awed us.
That’s when we decided it was time to develop our personas. The persona concept comes from marketing and helps you focus your messages. You pretend to be talking to a specific fictional person with certain characteristics instead of addressing “all people”.
We ended up writing 15 personas even though we might not use them all in practice. That’s a lot of text and it is not too common to make such documents publicly available, however, you can download the Draft Gorilla Highlands Personas 2016-9 here. We are doing this because we think our partners (or basically anyone in Rwanda or Uganda working in any business) could find the profiles useful. Everyone trying to be a jack of all trades is one of the region’s bigger problems. More specialisation would help.
We have been trying to make the personas even more real by asking some of our friends to “act” (see the top image). We have 5 volunteers who kindly lent Jack, Peter, Lauren, Geraldine and Mary their faces, and we still need 10… Anybody willing to join the “actors”? It will be for internal use only.
But to summarise all the personas we could think of: the users of www.gorillahighlands.com are not expected to be typical package tourists. If they were, they wouldn’t be researching some remote areas of two countries in the middle of Africa. They would end up on global travel websites or, if they are older, at a tour agent’s physical office.
They are on www.gorillahighlands.com because they want something different, they want more control over their itineraries and expect to get more for their money because they are dealing with us directly.
This doesn’t mean that the website couldn’t be useful for other people. It can inspire, it can convince tourists to demand more time in our region, it can help tour operators improve on their offers. But that is secondary, a byproduct. Our website – and here we heave to emphasise that we are talking about the website and not the whole Gorilla Highlands initiative – should be focused on its main value proposition.
And that is:
create your own adventure in Uganda and Rwanda
Here we have it, a serious tagline candidate! It’s still not as short as it could be (maybe we can throw “own” out?) and perhaps you will suggest better wording – but it feels superior to anything proposed before. It would work for each and every persona we have created.
Under the surface, away from the main menu items, we have been building new pages. Have a look at the one for Lake Bunyonyi and please direct your attention to the booking section… It has activities, accommodation and transport; one will be able combine them into a tour and pay online.
Paying doesn’t work yet and it’s all pretty much a draft, so this is not yet the time to spread the news. This is a sneak peek for you, do tell us what you think or leave a comment on our Facebook page.