Business experience, definitely an asset for a Development Practitioner

By Alejandro Dominguez-Suberbie, 2nd year MDP student

One of many of the activities that we MDP students (Alejandro Dominguez-Suberbie, Susan Maxson, and Ian Toal) did during our placement in Mexico was organizing with RITA a field visit to the state of Hidalgo, where one of the members of RITA, the Red Hñahñu is located. The main objective of the field trip was to get to know this member of the network and their tourism projects. Also, we wanted to conduct an assessment and provide feedback on the organizational and marketing capacity of  Red Hñahñu. This would be beneficial to both the organization and to the Indigenous Tourism directors at RITA.

After the field visit, the three of us designed and implemented a working session with members of the Red Hñahñu. The members requested that the meeting would focus on marketing.

Overall, we saw that the products and services needed more development and testing in order to find the proper market for them. Signage, was a very important topic. A comment underlined the importance of signage, was one that Susan Maxson made “you will never know about the potential customers who have gotten lost on the way to your business." 

We also talked about product development and testing, marketing strategies, and the target market.

At the end of the meeting we passed out a questionnaire related to the communication project we were working on simultaneously regarding RITA’s monthly newsletter. This questionnaire include three questions:

What information do you want to receive from RITA?

What information do you want to receive from other members?

What information do you want to share in the newsletter?

We presented these results to RITA’s board and the project was approved.