the ethical move

Imperfect tools.

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Hello ethical movers!

We believe business can be a force for good in the world. We believe marketing without manipulation can be successful. We believe that businesses can treat their staff, buyers and supply chain really well and still make a profit.

We want The Ethical Move to be an example of such an organisation.

So when The Facebook Papers hit the headlines, we asked ourselves: Can an ethical business use platforms that are at odds with their values?

As always, we talked about this as a team. As always, the divergence of opinions and experiences was a beautiful thing to behold (and a reminder of why diversity in teams is crucial).

And as always, we realised that while we have ideas of how the world should work, we operate in an imperfect world. That means that we have messy choices to make.

We know that while we’d rather not use certain channels, there is no viable current alternative to help us progress this movement.

We need more people to understand that how we sell matters, and to work together to change how we do marketing. To do that, we need our conversations to be as accessible and public as possible, which means we need to go where people are.

Instead, we can choose to engage in our channels more consciously.

For us, that means: Posting when we have something valuable to say rather than on a schedule. Posting for people and not the algorithm. Creating our content in a way that is sustainable for the team members in charge.

We look forward to the day perfect ethical alternatives arrive, but until then we are choosing to move towards our goal with the imperfect tools we have at our disposal.

The ethical move news.

Our new pledge is now live and complete on our site!

We were so grateful to hear from business owners who felt unable to pledge with the previous iteration of our pledge, but now feel ready to embrace it. We’ve had lots of new pledges come through! 🎉🎉🎉

We are also very happy to welcome Jeanne Cartier from Spark & Bloom Studio as our new designer! 🎉

We are still looking for people to help us with:

  • Social media management (planning and execution, mainly on Instagram)
  • Back-end support such as admin tasks and project management
  • Community management (2022)

More details are available on our site.

get involved

Our blog.

To tide you over into the new year (we will not be sending a newsletter in December), we’d like to share a few of events + podcasts our team have been speaking on about ethical marketing and TEM.

Happy listening! 🎧

Karen spoke to Ingrid Fernandez on the podcast All the Business Bits

Alice and Sabine had a conversation on the From Scratch YouTube channel (in German, audio only)

Two masterclasses on ethical marketing with both Karen and Alice were hosted by Frances + Simon at Better, Bolder, Braver. (Links go to Crowdcast events)

Alice had a chat with Tara McMullin on the What Works Podcast about Operating a more ethical business – where you’ll get a look behind the scenes of The Ethical Move!

our medium

Pledgee highlights.

I support dignity and autonomy and am opposed to coercive marketing tactics. I don’t want anyone to buy anything from me they don’t need.
– Annie Frisbie, paperlesslactation.com
I am making the ethical move because I want to do business differently than how I was taught. I want to feel good about my contribution.
– Alyson Stanfield, artbizsuccess.com

Find more pledgee WHYs on our website:

Our pledgees

What we’re reading right now.

We’ve been discussing accessibility when it comes to the channels we use – especially Medium and Facebook (ahem, Meta). Here are a few resources we found along the way.

This is a brilliant video campaign for #WeThe15 – the team agrees, THIS is how disability should be addressed!

The UN Disability-Inclusive Communications Guidelines that we’ll be uploading to our webs.

The Myth of the Normal Brain by Thomas Armstrong, PhD in the AMA Journal of Ethics

*We share resources to broaden our horizons, deepen our knowledge of our industry, and learn how to market ethically. The ethical move team does not agree with every opinion, nor do we claim to have found the best resources on the subject. What support or resources would you like to see from us? Send a reply and tell us!

more resources

What we’re working on.

Q4 is a period of reflection for us, but we are also looking ahead to 2022.

  • We are actively expanding the team and are working on the structures to support that – and exploring how that looks for a volunteer-run global organisation such as ours, particularly for meetings across so many time zones! 🙂
  • We’re beyond excited to be launching The Ethical Move Community in the new year and how that will help us grow as a movement.
  • We are thinking about the content we’re going to create and share with you in the coming months (we’re particularly looking forward to a series on Decolonizing Marketing). That also means choosing different cadences to better support you and us.

Mostly, we are closing out the year by slowing down. You can expect our next newsletter in January 2022!

We are always here for the conversation.

Follow us on LinkedInjoin us on Discord – and check out our Medium Publication!
If you have a great topic to explore in an article, please send us your submission. We need all perspectives to make this work for everyone.

As always, thank you for following our moves!

We are so glad you’re here with us.

Your team at TEM

Follow our moves.

We will only use your email to send you newsletters for The Ethical Move. Read our privacy notice for more information.

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the ethical move