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Stop. Writing. Like. This.

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:34:04 GMT

In defence of the art of prose

The safari industry sells emotion, atmosphere and the promise of transformation, so why is it writing like a PowerPoint deck? It's driving me mad because something has gone wrong with the way we write, not suddenly (genuinely damaging things rarely happen that way) but gradually and so incrementally that by the time you notice the damage, it's already structural.

By Sharon Gilbert-Rivett

Open almost any safari lodge website, any tour operator newsletter, any destination marketing blog published in the last three years and you'll find the same thing: short sentences, punchy fragments, line breaks where paragraphs used to be, and ideas that arrive, gesture vaguely at meaning and disappear before they've done any real work. It reads like a telegram sent by someone in a hurry and sells like one, too.

There's a particular tic that's become so prevalent in marketing content that I've started thinking of it as a syndrome. It goes like this: short sentence for impact. Another one. Then a third, just to really land the point. Each one sits on its own line, breathes on its own and hits harder, the writer presumably believes, for its isolation. The thing is, it doesn't... What it actually does is fragment thought into pieces too small to carry meaning, train the reader's eye to skim rather than read, and produce the peculiar sensation of being communicated at rather than with. It's the prose equivalent of someone repeatedly jabbing you in the shoulder to make sure you're paying attention. After the third jab, you stop listening entirely.

I've been writing for 45 years and have written for The Sunday Times, Africa Geographic, the Mail & Guardian, Travel Africa and publications and digital platforms across three continents. I've interviewed guides whose knowledge took three decades to accumulate and owners who gave up everything to build something extraordinary in the wilderness. I've covered pioneering conservation stories and have conducted critical, investigative processes that took years of research before a word was written. I've got a couple of awards gathering dust on my office shelves. In all of that time, I have never once thought: this story would be better if I broke it into shorter pieces and removed all the connective tissue.

What a paragraph is actually for

A paragraph is a journey that establishes where you are, develops where you're going and resolves, or deliberately leaves unresolved, where you've arrived. It carries the reader forward on the logic of its own momentum, and when it's working properly the reader doesn't notice the paragraph at all. They just find themselves further into the piece than they expected to be, and are grateful for it. The architecture of good prose is function, with precision and structure creating a clarity that fragmentation utterly destroys. A well-constructed sentence that does several things simultaneously is not harder to read than three short ones that each do one thing badly. It's considerably easier, because the relationships between ideas are built into the syntax rather than left for the reader to infer.

This approach is not nostalgia for long-windedness. Brevity is a genuine virtue, especially when you're trying to get a point across, but there's a world of difference between a sentence that's short because it's precise and a sentence that's short because no one thought hard enough to make it longer in the right way.

The AI problem hiding in plain sight

A November 2025 survey found that 75% of content professionals said AI had increased the volume they produce. The important word in that sentence is "volume" because that's the metric, not quality, not resonance and certainly not the ability to make a prospective guest stop scrolling and actually feel something.

The content flood this has produced is, in the most literal sense, drowning the industry. High levels of detectable AI content, limited fact-checking and shifting quality standards are creating new trust and visibility risks across marketing more broadly, and the travel industry, which runs on trust and emotional resonance more than almost any other sector, is particularly exposed.

The short sentence epidemic and the AI content explosion are not unrelated phenomena. AI-generated prose defaults to fragmentation because fragmentation is easy to produce, easy to scan and easy to mistake for clarity. It produces the appearance of communication without the substance of it, and because it's everywhere now, on every website, in every newsletter, across every social feed, it's become the wallpaper against which genuinely good writing stands out with startling force. Which is, if you choose to look at it this way, an opportunity worth seizing.

Writing that sells versus writing that merely informs

Safari is an emotional decision of considerable magnitude, expensive, often once in a lifetime, laden with expectation and the particular vulnerability of someone who has dreamed about something for years and is finally considering whether to make it real.

That decision is not made on bullet points, and it's certainly not made on fragmented copy that tells someone a lodge has exceptional guiding, world-class cuisine and unforgettable sunsets. It's made when a piece of writing reaches through the screen and puts the reader on a canvas chair at the edge of the Luangwa valley at dusk, with the smell of woodsmoke and the sound of hippos in the river below and makes them feel that magic before they've even thought about making an enquiry.

That's what prose is for and that's what prose can do that no algorithm, no content volume strategy and no short sentence approach will ever replicate. Writing that sells doesn't merely inform, it transports. It does emotional work that the reader doesn't consciously register but absolutely feels, in the quality of attention it demands, the images it builds and the specific, irreplaceable details that tell you this writer was actually there and actually paid attention.

Holding the line

I'm aware that what I'm describing sounds, in 2026, almost quaintly countercultural. The algorithms reward brevity, the platforms reward skimmability, the content agencies reward volume. Yet engagement metrics tell a different story, with users who do reach travel content proving less likely to leave immediately, which suggests that readers who find genuinely good writing recognise it, stay for it and return for it. The race to the bottom is not inevitable. It's a choice made by individuals, agencies and brands who've decided that the algorithm's preferences matter more than the reader's experience. Some of us have decided otherwise.

At The Safari Collective, the tagline is "content with conscience," and that conscience extends to language itself, to the belief that the people we write for deserve prose that respects their intelligence, their imagination and their capacity to be moved by something authentic. It means treating writing as the craft it is rather than the commodity it's increasingly mistaken for. Africa's finest safari properties have extraordinary stories and they deserve to be told in sentences that go somewhere.

Sharon Gilbert-Rivett is founder and Head Honcho of The Safari Collective.

Mobile last, all the time

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 22:00:01 GMT

Let's stop the confusion over small screen indexing

By Sharon Gilbert-Rivett

When Google designer and product director Luke Wroblewski coined the concept of "Mobile First" in a 2009 blog post and subsequently a 2011 book, he backed website designers and developers into a corner without so much as a "by your leave". The result? A travesty for anyone with a single iota of understanding for the processes involved in creating an eye-catching, engaging website and a phrase that's laid waste to common sense. Here's why...

Wroblewski's original argument was strategic rather than design-based. Mobile internet usage was growing exponentially and designers were consistently treating mobile as an afterthought, bolting it on at the end of the desktop design process and producing stripped-down, inferior mobile experiences as a result. His point was essentially this: if mobile is where your audience is, design for that constraint first and let the desktop version be the expanded, enhanced version rather than the other way around.

It was a prioritisation argument rather than a workflow prescription, and for a while, in theory at least, it made a degree of sense. Then Google got involved and everything went sideways.

How a sensible idea became an industry-wide headache

In 2019, Google switched to mobile-first indexing, meaning it began using the mobile version of a site as the primary version for ranking and search purposes rather than the desktop version. The reason was straightforward: by that point the majority of global web traffic was coming from mobile devices. Google was simply reflecting reality.

But here's where the confusion took root and refused to leave because the SEO industry picked up the phrase "mobile-first indexing" and conflated it entirely with "mobile-first design". Two entirely different things, fused together into a single piece of received wisdom that has been repeated so many times and so confidently that most people have stopped questioning it.

Suddenly every agency, every platform, and every blog post was declaring that you must design for mobile first, because Google had changed its indexing behaviour and someone, somewhere, decided that meant the design process had to change too. It doesn't and it never did.

The practical reality of designing desktop first

Complex layouts, navigation structures, typography hierarchies, and visual relationships are infinitely easier to establish on a large canvas and then adapt for smaller screens than to build on a small canvas and try to expand upward.

Any designer or developer who has worked both ways knows this instinctively. A desktop canvas gives you space to think, to establish hierarchy, to build the visual relationships that make a site feel coherent and purposeful. You can see the whole picture and you can make decisions about proportion, balance, and flow that simply aren't possible when you're starting with 390 pixels of width and trying to imagine how it scales up.

Designing mobile first means you're constantly trying to expand something inherently constrained into something expansive. It's harder, it takes longer, and the desktop version almost always suffers for it. Designing desktop first and optimising downward is the logical direction of travel because you're simplifying and adapting a complete vision rather than trying to extrapolate an incomplete one.

The tools reflect this. Duda, one of the most sophisticated website development platforms available and the platform we build on exclusively, is structured around exactly this workflow. You design the desktop version and then use the responsive editor to adjust layouts, typography, and content for tablet and mobile breakpoints intelligently and specifically with full control over exactly how each element behaves at each screen size. It's designing intelligently for every screen, starting where the design has room to breathe.

What Google actually requires

Here is what Google's mobile-first indexing actually means in practice, stripped of the confusion that has accumulated around it. Google requires that the mobile version of your site is complete, functional, fast, and contains the same content as the desktop version. It requires that the mobile experience is not a stripped-down afterthought. It requires good Core Web Vitals scores on mobile, which means fast loading, visual stability, and responsive interactivity.

None of that requires you to design on mobile first but rather asks you to optimise for mobile thoroughly, to test on mobile rigorously, and to make sure the mobile version of your site is every bit as good as the desktop version. These are technical and quality requirements that have nothing to do with which screen size you open your design software on in the morning.

A desktop-first design process that produces a properly optimised, fully responsive, fast-loading mobile experience satisfies every one of Google's requirements completely. A mobile-first design process that produces a mediocre desktop experience does not.

The conflation that cost the industry its common sense

The damage done by conflating mobile-first indexing with mobile-first design is real and ongoing. Designers and developers who know better are second-guessing their workflow because clients have been told by the internet that mobile-first is non-negotiable. Agencies are adding unnecessary complexity to their processes and an enormous amount of energy is being spent defending a methodology that was never actually mandated.

What was mandated was mobile excellence, which is an entirely reasonable requirement and one that any competent developer takes seriously. The route to mobile excellence is not prescribed. Desktop-first design followed by thorough mobile optimisation gets you there just as reliably as any other approach, and for most designers and developers, considerably more efficiently.

What actually matters

The questions worth asking about any website are not which screen size was designed first, they are whether the mobile experience is fast, whether it's visually coherent, whether the content is complete and accessible, and whether it works flawlessly on the devices your audience is actually using.

If the answer to all of those questions is yes, Google is satisfied, your audience is satisfied and the methodology that got you there is your own business. Design desktop first if that's where your process works best and optimise for mobile with the thoroughness and care it deserves. Test on every screen size before anything goes live and stop letting a misread of Google's indexing behaviour dictate your creative process.

Safari is not beige

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 22:00:00 GMT

Poor content kills brands. Here's why.

By Sharon Gilbert-Rivett

Beige. Boring. Bland. Three things that describe countless thousands of safari websites across the world, thanks to one thing: average content. Churned out, often by AI these days and sometimes by people who have zero clue what a safari is or how it feels, it may meet SEO, AEO and GEO needs but does absolutely nothing for the brands it's supposed to be selling. It's flat, it's dull, and it's immediately forgettable.

The reality is that the African wilderness is none of those things. It's filled with life-changing experiences, packed with drama, excitement and genuinely mind-blowing moments as well as the jaw-dropping, quiet, introspective and reverential ones that stick with you for the rest of your life. I don't need to explain these things to you here, but they do need bringing to life in your website content, and, indeed ANY content that appears under your brand banner.

These deep, visceral moments are the ones people spend years saving for and the ones they'll describe badly to friends who weren't there, knowing the words will fall short... The moments that bring them back, again and again, to a continent that gets under the skin in ways that nowhere else quite manages.

Now open almost any safari website and try to find those moments. You won't. What you'll find instead is a carefully curated collection of interchangeable sentences about breathtaking landscapes, the Big Five, world-class service, and unforgettable experiences. Spectacular sunsets described as spectacular. Luxury defined as luxurious. Passion mentioned so many times it has lost all meaning, and authentic used so freely it has become the least authentic word in the safari lexicon.

Beige. Everywhere.

The bush is anything but

The African wilderness is the most sensorially intense environment on earth. It's specific, textured and alive with detail that no stock photograph and no generic paragraph can capture. And yet the content that's supposed to communicate all of this to the traveller who has never been there, who is trying to decide, from behind a desk in London or New York or Frankfurt whether to spend precious leave and hard-earned money on a safari, reads as though it was written by someone who has never been there. Which is most often the case.

Investing in good safari content requires investing in people who understand safari, who have gotten up way before the morning chorus to pull on 15 layers of warm clothes and jumped on an open safari vehicle when the sun isn't even up in the dead of winter, knowing their face is going to feel like it's being flash frozen for the next hour or so until sunlight warms the surrounding wilderness. You wouldn't book a safari with someone who hasn't been on one so why would you populate your website with words from them?

The tragedy is that this brand approach isn't usually laziness. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what content is supposed to do.

Content is not filler

Somewhere along the way, the safari industry absorbed the idea that content is what you put on a website to make it look complete... Words to fill the space between the photographs... Copy to satisfy the SEO checklist... Paragraphs that say enough without saying anything that might be wrong...

The result is a relentless sameness that has made it almost impossible for a genuinely exceptional brand to stand out from a merely adequate one. When every lodge, camp and operator promises the same breathtaking experience with the same passionate team in the same spectacular setting, the only differentiator left is price. And competing on price in the premium safari market is a game that nobody wins.

Great content isn't filler. It's the thing that makes a traveller stop scrolling. It's the thing that makes them feel, before they've booked a single flight, that they already understand what makes this particular place unlike anywhere else on earth. It's the thing that does the selling long before the sales team or res manager picks up the phone or answers an email.

Specificity is everything

The differences between beige content and content that works are almost always storytelling and specificity, not better adjectives or longer paragraphs, and certainly not a bigger photography or video budget (though that never hurts!)

The safari industry sells something invisible at the point of purchase. The traveller is buying an experience that doesn't exist yet, in a place they've never been, guided by people they've never met. Storytelling is the bridge across that gap, making the intangible tangible, the unfamiliar familiar, and the distant feel within reach.

The subject matter is endless... The backstory of the guide who has been tracking lions in a particular concession for 17 years and can read the bush the way most people read a book... The particular bend in a river where hippos congregate at dusk and the light does something extraordinary to the water... The way a chef sources ingredients from a community garden a few kilometres from camp and what that means for the people who tend it... The conservation project that has brought painted wolves back to a reserve where they haven't been seen in a generation...

These are the stories that make a brand. These are the details that a traveller carries home and repeats to everyone they know. These are the specifics that no competitor can replicate, because they belong to this place and this place alone. Generic content says you offer a safari experience. Specific content says you offer this experience, in this place, with these people, and there is nowhere else on earth quite like it.

Only one of those statements is worth reading. Only one of them is worth paying for.

The brand cost of beige

Poor content doesn't just fail to sell. It actively damages brands. When a lodge that has spent 20 years building something genuinely extraordinary describes itself in the same terms as a property that opened 18 months ago and is still finding its feet, it signals to the discerning traveller that it either doesn't know what makes it special, or doesn't believe the traveller is sophisticated enough to appreciate it. Neither is a flattering impression.

When you bury your most compelling stories beneath layers of nothingness, or, worse still, don't tell them at all, you miss the very things that set you apart and make you stand out. It's like a family-run camp with generations of bush knowledge describing its guiding as "expert" and its experience as "authentic" without ever telling you what any of that actually means in practice. Why would you take your brand's greatest assets and make them invisible? Beige? In a world of beige content, beige doesn't just blend in. It erases.

What the industry deserves

The African safari industry is one of the most important conservation and economic forces on the continent. At its best, it protects land that would otherwise be lost, supports communities that depend on the wilderness for their livelihoods, and connects people from across the world to an experience that changes how they understand the planet they live on. It deserves marketing that reflects that significance, that's honest about what the industry is, specific about what each brand offers, and written by people who understand the difference between a landscape that is merely beautiful and one that is alive with a complexity that takes years to begin to understand.

Safari is extraordinary and the content that represents it should be too. The beige has to go.

Sustainability - safari's Holy Grail

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:43:36 GMT

Why we should stop chasing impossible goals and start celebrating exceptional ones

By Sharon Gilbert-Rivett

I've spent 40 years championing sustainability in the African safari industry, and I'm going to say something that might surprise you: 100% sustainability in this sector is a Holy Grail. Impossible to achieve. Here's why I feel this way and what I think we should be pursuing instead...

Over the last four decades I have visited more lodges and camps across sub-Saharan Africa than I care to remember. I have written about conservation, championed responsible tourism, won awards for that writing and served as Marketing Manager for Fair Trade Tourism - an organisation I have been involved with for almost as long as it has been in existence. I believe, with every fibre of my being, in the obligation of this industry to protect the wilderness areas and the communities on which its entire business model depends, but I am here to tell you that sustainability in the African safari industry is something of a carrot on an infinitely long stick - tantalising, motivating, but impossible to reach.

There, I said it. However, before you close this tab, hear me out, because this is not an argument against sustainability, it's an argument for honesty and for a more intelligent, more compassionate, and ultimately more effective approach to what sustainability in the safari context actually means and what we should all aspire to.

The inconvenient truth about safari sustainability

The safari industry exists in one of the most logistically challenging environments on earth. Remote, vast and unforgiving, the wilderness areas that make African safari so extraordinary are, by their very nature, places where human infrastructure is minimal and the challenges of daily operation are considerable. Everything your guests need - food, linen, fuel, equipment, toiletries, spare parts - has to get there somehow. Usually by truck, often by air and nearly always at an environmental cost.

Then there are the guests themselves. They fly, long-haul, mostly, from Europe, North America, Asia... all over the world. The carbon footprint of a single safari holiday, honestly accounted for, is significant. This is the foundational paradox of safari tourism: the very act of experiencing wild Africa leaves a mark on it. No certification programme changes that. No offset scheme erases it and any sustainability framework that pretends otherwise is not being straight with you.

What real sustainability looks like in the bush

Here's what I've observed across almost 40 years of watching this industry evolve: the operations that are genuinely, meaningfully sustainable are rarely the ones with the most certificates on the wall. They are the ones that have made sustainability a philosophy rather than a checklist — an ethos that runs through every decision, every relationship, every bit of money spent.

Real sustainability in the safari context begins not with solar panels or composting toilets, but with people. It begins with paying every member of your team a market-related wage. With respecting the cultures and communities that surround your operation and becoming part of them, not separate to them. With creating micro-economies in local villages and encouraging local entrepreneurship rather than importing everything from the city. With training people for careers — not just job positions — and with actively empowering women in a sector that remains, despite progress, stubbornly patriarchal.

It begins, in other words, with the three pillars that have always underpinned genuine sustainable development: environmental responsibility, social equity, and economic sustainability, with all three pursued with integrity as the foundation of the business model itself. This is not the safari equivalent of raw veganism. It does not require hair shirts or the abandonment of comfort but rather something harder and more valuable than either: consistent and unglamourous ethical business practice applied every single day.

The certification paradox

I have enormous respect for the intent behind sustainability certification programmes and it's a respect that has been built from the inside working with Fair Trade Tourism. The frameworks they provide, the standards they set, the conversations they start — these matter. But I have a problem with the way many of them operate in practice, and I think the industry deserves an honest conversation about it.

Most certification criteria are developed with no understanding of the operational realities of running a safari lodge in the middle of nowhere. They are designed by people who understand sustainability frameworks but who have, in many cases, limited personal experience of what it actually means to manage waste in a remote wilderness area where the nearest municipal facility is four hours away. Or to source fresh produce ethically when your nearest town has one small market and an unreliable road. Or to reduce single-use plastic when your supply chain gives you limited alternatives and your guests who are paying significant sums for a luxury experience and have expectations that do not always align with radical austerity.

The criteria, once set, are frequently non-negotiable. Adapt or fail. Which means that genuinely committed operators — people who are doing extraordinary things within the real constraints of their environment — sometimes find themselves unable to achieve certification not because they lack commitment, but because the framework lacks flexibility. Meanwhile, better-resourced operations in more accessible locations tick the boxes and collect the badges. This is not sustainability but rather compliance theatre.

The luxury problem

Nowhere is the contradiction more visible than at the luxury end of the market. I have seen it with my own eyes, across more properties than I care to count: strings of tented suites, each with its own private swimming pool, in regions where water scarcity is a daily reality for local communities. Lodge designs that prioritise the aesthetic of white cotton linen over the practical question of where the water to launder it comes from and what impact the chemicals needed to keep it white have. Facilities-first thinking that asks what the guest expects before it asks what the environment can bear.

I have seen artificial water sources installed to keep keystone wildlife species reliably visible and reliably close, because sightings drive bookings and bookings drive revenue. The logic is understandable but the consequences are not always so with seasonal movement patterns disrupted, behavioural changes accumulated over years and the subtle, slow reshaping of an ecosystem around the commercial need for a spectacular game drive. Take the current discourse over elephant impact on large trees in the Greater Kruger as a case in point.

None of this is done with malice. Most of it is done by people who genuinely love the wilderness they operate in, but the competitive pressure to deliver an exceptional product in a market where the guest paying $2,000 a night has options and opinions can quietly erode the very principles that responsible operators hold most dear. This tension is real. It deserves to be named rather than papered over with sustainability reports and offset calculations.

The goal worth pursuing

So what is the answer? Not perfection. Not the Holy Grail. Not a certificate that declares you sustainable in an industry that, by its nature, cannot be. The answer is exceptional relative performance, pursued with transparency and genuine commitment. It's asking, every day and in every decision: are we doing as much as we honestly, practically can? Are we better than we were last year? Are we honest with our guests, our staff, our communities, and ourselves about where we fall short and why?

Business models need to be built on the three pillars as a genuine operating philosophy rather than a marketing exercise, paying fair wages, respecting culture, investing in community, training for careers and empowering the people, and particularly the women, who make your operation possible.

It's about protecting the wilderness areas on which your business depends, not because a certification programme requires it, but because without them, you have nothing. The elephant that walks past your guest's tent at dawn, the leopard that crosses your headlights on a night drive, the billion stars that fill the sky above your fire are not amenities... These things are the entire point and they will outlast us only if we earn that outcome.

You need to be honest about the carbon cost of what you do, and find ways to offset it that are genuine rather than cosmetic and resist the commercial, competitive, and sometimes well-intentioned pressure to perform sustainability rather than practise it.

The supply chain blind spot

Another problem area is the persistent and damaging misconception in safari sustainability discourse that sustainability is primarily, even exclusively, the responsibility of the product owner, be it the lodge, the camp or the operator on the ground whose solar panels and waste management systems are visible, measurable, and certifiable.

This misconception ignores the reality of how the safari industry actually works. Between the traveller who books a safari and the wilderness experience they ultimately have, there is an elaborate and often invisible supply chain. Outbound tour operators in Europe, North America, and beyond who package and sell the product. Inbound operators and destination management companies who handle the logistics on the ground. Travel agents who advise, recommend, and influence which properties get booked and which do not. Each of these businesses makes decisions — every day, at every level — that have profound sustainability implications.

The outbound operator who selects which lodges to feature in their portfolio based purely on commission rates rather than sustainability credentials is making a sustainability decision. The DMC that books the cheapest available ground transport without considering fuel efficiency or local ownership is making a sustainability decision. The travel agent who steers a client toward a property because of a familiarisation trip incentive rather than genuine ethical alignment is making a sustainability decision. The online booking platform that surfaces results by price alone, with no sustainability weighting, is making a sustainability decision.

None of these decisions happen at the lodge. None of them show up in a lodge's certification audit. And yet all of them shape the commercial landscape within which sustainable lodges either thrive or struggle to compete.

True sustainability in the safari industry requires every participant in the value chain to examine their own practices, their own incentives, and their own purchasing decisions with the same rigour that is applied to product owners. It requires outbound operators to ask hard questions about the properties they sell, not just whether they have a certificate, but whether their wages are fair, their community relationships genuine, and their environmental practices honest.

It requires DMCs and inbound operators to prioritise local suppliers, local employment, and local economic participation rather than defaulting to the most convenient or the most profitable option. It requires agents to educate rather than simply sell, to help clients understand that the cheapest safari is rarely the most responsible one, and that the gap between the two is often measured in the livelihoods of the people who make that safari possible.

It requires, in short, the entire industry — from the booking platform in London to the ranger briefing guests at the airstrip in the Okavango — to understand that sustainability is not a property of a place. It is a property of a system. And a system is only as sustainable as its least committed participant.

The fundamental flaw

There is one dimension of sustainability that is rarely addressed with honesty in mainstream discourse because it is uncomfortable, politically sensitive, and cuts to the very heart of the human condition. Sustainability, in every form and on every pillar, is ultimately constrained by a single variable that dwarfs all others in its implications: human population growth.

The United Nations projects that the global human population that currently exceeds 8-billion will reach approximately 10-billion by 2050 and potentially 11-billion or more by the end of this century. Every additional human being requires food, water, shelter, energy, and economic opportunity. Every additional billion people places additional pressure on the finite natural systems — the soils, the water tables, the forests, the fisheries, the atmospheric carbon capacity — that all life on earth depends on.

No amount of solar panels, recycling programmes, carbon offsets, or sustainability certifications changes this arithmetic. We can improve the efficiency with which humanity uses natural resources. We can reduce waste, increase renewable energy, protect biodiversity corridors, and build more equitable economic systems. All of these things matter enormously and are worth pursuing with vigour, but if the number of people making demands on those resources continues to grow without limit, the gains made through sustainability initiatives will be perpetually outpaced by the expanding scale of human need and human consumption.

We are, in the most literal sense, running to stand still. In the African context this tension is acutely felt. The continent has the fastest-growing human population on earth. The same wilderness areas that safari tourism depends on and that sustainability frameworks seek to protect are under increasing pressure from expanding agricultural frontiers, growing settlements, and the entirely legitimate aspirations of communities seeking economic development and improved living standards.

Conservation, in this context, is not simply a matter of protecting nature from industry. It is a matter of navigating the profoundly complex intersection of human need, human rights, and ecological limits.

Until the global community is willing to have an honest, compassionate, and non-coercive conversation about human population, about education, about women's empowerment and reproductive rights, about the demographic transition that historically accompanies development and opportunity, sustainability will remain, at its deepest level, an incomplete project. A set of tools applied to symptoms rather than causes.

This is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of honesty. The tools of sustainability — the three pillars, the frameworks, the certifications, the commitments — are necessary and valuable. But they are most valuable when pursued with clear eyes about the scale of the challenge they are part of addressing. Not the whole answer but a vital, urgent, and imperfect part of a much larger one.

The real measure of success

After four decades in this industry, here is what I believe: the most sustainable safari operations I have encountered are not always the most certified ones. They're the ones where the staff have been with the business for 15 years because they are paid fairly, treated with dignity, and given a future. They're the ones where the local community genuinely benefits, not through a token community fund, but through real employment, real training, and real economic participation. They're the ones where the owners are engaged not because it makes good content, but because they cannot imagine being anywhere else. They are, in other words, the ones where sustainability is not a goal to be achieved and certified. It is simply the way things are done.

That is the standard worth pursuing rather than an elusive Holy Grail, it's something rarer and more valuable - a way of doing business in wild Africa that is honest about its limitations, exceptional within its constraints, and genuinely, durably committed to the people, the communities, and the landscapes it depends on.

That, I would argue, is sustainability worth celebrating.

The story behind The Safari Collective

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:42:47 GMT

It's been the journey of a lifetime...

Africa found Sharon Gilbert-Rivett before she had the words to describe it.

She arrived in South Africa as a small child in 1969, wide-eyed and newly transplanted from England into a world of big skies and red dust roads. A year later, her family moved to Nairobi — another year, another Africa, another set of impressions burned into a child's memory with the particular permanence of first things. When her parents separated and her mother brought her back to England, she carried Africa home inside her like a compass that would spend the next few years pointing south.

It pointed her back in 1969 when, aged seven, she emigrated to South Africa — another year on the continent, another set of impressions layered over the first, Africa deepening its claim on a child who had no idea yet how permanent that claim would prove to be.

Then England again. School. The ordinary architecture of a British childhood, lived at a considerable distance from the place she loved most and understood, even then, as home in a way that England never quite managed to be.

But Africa never fully receded. When her parents divorced and both remarried, there was — unusually, and by the grace of two people who chose not to make their separation a war — no animosity, no fracture, no cutting of threads. Her father stayed in Africa, moving between South Africa and Zimbabwe, and Sharon moved with him in the ways that children of amicable separations can: holidays, extended stays, the long journeys back to red dust and big skies that punctuated her English years like breaths of air. Africa was always there. Always close enough to remind her of what she was missing.

Africa would wait. It was good at that.

Then, aged 17, she met a rock star.

It was the kind of love that shapes a person — first love, fierce and formative. He went on tour. She wrote him letters. Long, detailed, vivid letters full of everything she was thinking and feeling and noticing about the world. He told her she should write professionally. She listened.

Her first job in journalism came at 19 writing rock reviews for heavy metal magazines. From there she moved into music technology publications, learning the craft of writing and production simultaneously, understanding from the very beginning that words and design were not separate disciplines but two halves of the same conversation. By her mid-twenties she had moved into daily newspapers in Cambridge, with the odd freelance shift on Fleet Street, one of the great schools of journalistic discipline, where you learned quickly or you didn't last.

In February 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison and Sharon watched from England, feeling the pull of the continent she had never stopped loving. In 1991, just shy of her twenty-ninth birthday, she came home. Not to England. To South Africa, the place that had first received her as a child and that would now, finally, keep her.

She joined The Pretoria News as a senior sub-editor, spending almost eleven years in daily journalism, refining her layout and design skills in the era when newspapers were migrating to desktop publishing, working on the original iMacs and G3s, helping to design the first South African newspaper to make that transition. She was, as she has been at every technological turning point in her career, at the front of the room when the future arrived.

When she went freelance, she brought everything with her. She became supplements editor and travel editor at the Mail & Guardian, where she launched the Escape travel section - and where she began her journey as a bona fide travel writer, writing about sustainable tourism, safari and conservation, subjects that would define much of the work to come.

She started writing and editing the Fair Trade Tourism annual supplement from its very first edition in 2001. She launched a golf tour operation called Tee-Off Travel, which introduced her to the business side of tourism, drew her into SATSA as a stakeholder, and eventually saw her elected Chair of the SATSA Gauteng Chapter and representative on the EXCO. The golf operation didn't survive (the tourism business is unforgiving) but what it gave her was invaluable: an understanding of how the industry actually works from the inside, not just the press gallery.

In 2006, frustrated by what she saw as a poverty of genuine storytelling in natural history media, she founded Painted Earth Productions, a media production company built on the conviction that Africa's wildlife and wild places deserved better than the formulaic documentaries that dominated the genre. She partnered with an established cameraman and director, and they moved quickly, working with National Geographic and Animal Planet. When Animal Planet was absorbed into Discovery Europe and funding for their first documentary evaporated, she and her partner finished it with their own money. It sold globally. It still does.

Filmmaking, she discovered, was a long game financially. She kept writing. She kept consulting. She kept building - the kind of slow, unglamorous accumulation of expertise and relationships and hard-won knowledge that doesn't look like much from the outside but becomes, in time, irreplaceable. She edited luxury magazines, even spent two years as a rugby writer for legendary flyhalf Naas Botha's digital magazine, and gathered more skills than could be counted.

In 2015 she was asked to become Marketing Manager for Fair Trade Tourism, a role that felt less like a new direction than a homecoming. She had been writing about responsible tourism for 15 years. Now she was at the centre of it, shaping how one of the continent's most important sustainability organisations told its story to the world. She stayed for two years, and then looked at her options. Freelancing, by then, wasn't paying the bills the way it once had. The journalism industry had changed irrevocably. The skills she had spent decades building were needed somewhere else.

The Safari Collective was the answer.

Not a pivot. An evolution. Everything she had ever learned - about writing and design, about Africa and its wildlife, about sustainable tourism and community development, about the business of safari and the craft of storytelling, about technology and how to use it without being used by it - converged into a single, coherent purpose: helping the safari brands she loved to tell their stories as well as they deserved to be told.

She is, at her core, a wordsmith. Not someone who writes — someone who is a writer, in the way that some people are musicians or painters: constitutively, irreversibly, from the inside out. The letters to a rock star became rock reviews became newspaper features became travel writing became documentary scripts became brand strategy. The thread running through all of it is the same: the belief that a story told well can change the way someone sees the world.

Africa, for Sharon, has never been a subject. It has been a relationship — the longest, most sustaining, most demanding relationship of her life. She could not leave it if she tried. She has never tried.

The Safari Collective is what that relationship looks like when it goes to work.

Client blog: Baobab Ridge

sharon@safaricollective.co.za (Sharon Gilbert-Rivett) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 08:55:21 GMT

Meet Devine - a "heavenly" guide!

This is a blog we created for Baobab Ridge - a luxury safari lodge in South Africa's Klaserie Private Game Reserve, part of the Greater Kruger National Park. It's what we call a "legacy story" - focusing on a key member of staff and sharing their life's journey. Enjoy the read!

Like many safari guides before him, Devine Ngomane's initial career plan did not feature the African bush! The 38-year-old father of five originally wanted to be a doctor, but life had different plans for him.

Born and raised in the nearby village of Welverdiend, which is still his home, young Devine's original dream was to be a doctor, but when he left school after matriculation there was not enough money for university. His father was a ranger in the Kruger National Park and when he visited him at work, he got the idea that working in the safari industry might answer the question of what he was going to do with his career.

He decided to take the plunge into tourism but didn't know which direction to take in terms of whether to be a ranger, tracker or guide, so he started out in 2007 studying to be a field ranger at the Southern African Wildlife College near Welverdiend. After qualifying he worked for a year before deciding that a ranger's life was not for him.

Devine ploughed on, doing a tracker's course in 2008 and starting out as a tracker at a lodge in the Manyeleti Game Reserve where he worked for the next two years. The guide he was tracking for then moved to Madikwe Game Reserve in North West Province and asked Devine to come with him, so in 2009 he left Mpumalanga and moved across country to take up a tracker's job in Madikwe.

After a few months working as a tracker in Madikwe, Devine decided he really wanted to be a guide and did his Level 1 guide's training, qualifying in 2010. He was working as a safari guide in Madikwe until he moved to Baobab Ridge in November 2022, completing his Level 2 and Trails qualifications along the way.

"It was so far from home, and after 2020 with COVID19 and all of the challenges that presented, I decided that I would like to move back closer to my family at the first opportunity. I began to freelance at lodges in the area and when I heard that Baobab Ridge was looking for a guide I jumped at the chance, and here I am!"

"After almost a year at Baobab Ridge I must say I am very happy here. This is like a big family, and I have received a lot of support from the team here and from the owners, Nini and Brandon. I fitted in quickly and love the Klaserie. It's a pleasure to get out there every day and take guests on adventures!"

Devine comes from a big family, with an older and younger brother and two younger sisters. He has five children himself with his first-born - a son - now 16 and looking likely to follow in his father's footsteps when he leaves school.

"My grandfather had two wives and so we have a huge family with a lot of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren! Over holidays and at special events like weddings we all get together and sometimes it's hard to keep track of who's who," he laughs. His oldest brother is also a safari guide, working in Madikwe as well.

Devine's favourite part of being a safari guide is walking. It's his passion. "If I had to choose between driving and walking, I would choose walking all the time. I absolutely love walking with guests," he says. "It's a completely different experience and connects you directly to the wilderness around you. The landscapes around Baobab Ridge are wonderful for walking safaris."

He hopes to become a mentor for future guides and eventually be a guiding assessor.

"A lot of people at home don't have the access I had to the safari industry, so I want to work at that and help to improve awareness of the tourism industry and what opportunities it offers to young people coming out of school. At the moment they don't know much about it or where to start," he says.

"Giving people the right information is essential, so they know what they have to do if they want to become a tracker or a guide. Tourism has a lot to offer our local communities in terms of careers so if I can help people enter the industry and do well in it, I will be very happy."

At home Devine teaches his family and community about conservation and the importance of helping protect the wilderness areas in the Greater Kruger National Park. He takes local schoolchildren into the Kruger National Park in his free time to introduce them to what's on their doorstep and is very involved in local outreach programmes.

Client blog: Nimali

sharon@safaricollective.co.za (Sharon Gilbert-Rivett) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 08:48:03 GMT

Let's hear it for Tanzania!

This is a blog we created for Nimali - a collection of three luxury lodges in Tanzania's Tarangire National Park and the Serengeti offering guests "Safaris for the Senses". Enjoy the read!

It's famous around the world for the Great Wildebeest Migration that takes place every year in the Serengeti, but there's an awful lot more to Tanzania's northern circuit than just wildebeest and zebra battling to cross rivers filled with crocodiles! In this blog we look at some of the hotspots and places you can easily combine with your Nimali safari...

From the incredible birdlife of Tarangire to the dramatic Ngorongoro Crater and the glistening waters of Lake Manyara, Tanzania's legendary northern circuit is every traveller's dream come true.

The Mara-Serengeti ecosystem

With its endless horizons and vast expanses, the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem is one of the most important and biodiverse in Africa. It's made up of Kenya's Maasai Mara National Reserve and our own Serengeti National Park - home of Nimali Serengeti and Nimali Mara. There are no fences between these two iconic reserves allowing for the free movement of millions of wildebeest and zebra on their cyclical journey that follows the rains in search of fresh grazing.

The Serengeti is located in northern Tanzania and has been partially protected since 1921. It became the country's first national park in 1951 and represents the largest portion of the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem, stretching across 14,750 square kilometres. Named after the Maasai word siringet, which means "endless plains", the Serengeti is actually topographically more diverse than the flat and treeless grasslands that dominate its southern region.

The north of the park is where you'll find riverine forests and dense woodlands as well as dramatic granite outcrops or kopjes and the western corridor is marked by the Serengeti's primary river - the Grumeti - with the Mara River in the northern region close to the border with Kenya.

The Serengeti is home to a veritable cornucopia of life, with large numbers of predators like lion and leopard, as well as cheetah, hyena and jackal. You'll see huge herds of elephant and buffalo, and rhino if you are really lucky, along with a wide variety of plains game like zebra and wildebeest as well as endangered Maasai giraffe, eland and other antelope, as well as more than 540 bird species.

Tantalising Tarangire

Tarangire National Park is located just south of Lake Manyara, a few hours drive south from Arusha and within easy driving distance of both Lake Manyara National Park and the Ngorongoro Crater. Nimali Tarangire is located on the eastern boundary of the national park on its own reserve, with direct access to the park.

It's a renowned birding destination with more than 550 species recorded across the park's diverse range of habitats which range from the perennially green Silale Swamps to rolling hills dotted with giant baobab trees and verdant savannahs that attract huge herds of elephant, buffalo, antelope and other plains game.

During the green season between November and April each year, you can see a huge range of summer migrant bird species in Tarangire, attracted by the abundance of insect life. The dry season is best for game viewing, especially around the Tarangire River which is the only source of water at this time of year, as the swamplands dry out and become lush grasslands filled with much-needed grazing.

Magical Manyara and the Ngorongoro Crater

At just 325 square kilometres in size, Lake Manyara National Park may be small compared to its more famous neighbours - Tarangire and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area - but great things come in small packages!

With 11 different ecosystems and an incredible concentration of wildlife, the stars of Lake Manyara's show are its curious tree-climbing lions who escape the heat of the day and the biting insects by selecting perches high in the branches of tall trees - something lions are not really renowned for due to their less than stellar climbing abilities and clumsy, heavy bodies.

Add in the spectacle of thousands of pink flamingos on the reserve's eponymous soda lake and you begin to understand why a visit to Lake Manyara really is a must.

Wedged between Lake Manyara and the Serengeti, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area is home to one of Tanzania's most sought-after destinations - the Ngorongoro Crater. This is the world's largest intact volcanic caldera and one of its most recognised natural phenomena.

With steeply sloping sides the crater is a natural amphitheatre that's also home to an incredible array of wildlife from elephants, rhino, buffalo, lion and leopard to cheetah and painted wolves (African wild dogs).

Nimali offers day trips to both Lake Manyara and the Ngorongoro Crater to guests staying at Nimali Tarangire.

Get in touch to find out more and we hope to welcome you to Nimali very soon!

Client blog: Zafaris

sharon@safaricollective.co.za (Sharon Gilbert-Rivett) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 07:02:14 GMT

A non-listicle guide to Africa's great safari destinations

Every so often we like to share some of the work we do for our clients and the stories we create for their blog pages. This is a blog we created for Zafaris - a Cape Town-based inbound tour operator specialising in customised safari itineraries for international travellers... Enjoy!

We don't do listicles - you know, those "Five ways to lose your mind" and "Top 10 ways to fry an egg blindfolded" countdowns that inevitably end in an anti-climax. We've had enough of those "what did I read this for, again?" moments and are pretty sure you've been bored slowly to death by their ilk. We say: "to hell with you, Google" and prefer to package our recommendations in more prose-like fashion. So, when we're asked what we think the 10 best safari destinations in Africa are, we scratch our heads feverishly, drink some wine, channel our inner bard and hit the keyboard...

The result is this. Our guide to the places we think really hit the mark when it comes to offering superlative, downright sexy safari experiences on the African sub-continent. Let's start with defining "Africa" for a moment. When we say Africa, we mean everywhere south of the Sahara.

Yes, we know, geography teachers would be having fainting fits because north of said legendary desert is also, technically, Africa. But it isn't, really. Not in safari terms at least. The classic notion of wildlife-rich landscapes kicks in at around the 25 degree mark where latitude is concerned. Check the map if you don't believe us. Once you hit the 10 degree line, "safari Africa" is in full swing all the way to the continent's southern-most tip.

So, here then are 10 absolutely awesome, mind-blowingly fabulous destinations according to our definition of the chunk of rock on this big blue marble we call home... In no particular order. Take that, listicles!

The Okavango Delta is a safari no-brainer really. Botswana's best-loved and most-filmed destination is safari heaven, dripping with wildlife, jaw-dropping landscapes and more biodiversity than you can shake a stick at. It's also home to some of the finest camps and lodges on the continent.

A bit to the left and down a bit, if you're looking at a map of Africa, Namibia's Etosha National Park is right up there in our humble opinion. Vast, eerily surreal and filled with a cacophony of life it's just breathtaking, especially wherever there's water. And it's here that normally grey elephants turn white, thanks to bathing in the pale, salty dust of the Etosha pans.

Virtually on the equator, Tanzania's Tarangire National Park and its neighbour, the Serengeti, epitomise the vision of the classic safari - one of vast plains filled with wall-to-wall wildlife. Tarangire's giant baobabs really do it for us and, of course, the Serengeti has all of those wildebeesties to bargain with so has to be seen to be believed.

South Africa's gorgeous Timbavati - and the Greater Kruger National Park that surrounds it - is truly splendid and deserving of a spot in this tome. From open plains to thick riparian forests and gently undulating hills, the game viewing is off the charts and there are some truly world-class lodges and camps to choose from.

Zambia's Lower Zambezi Valley is perhaps one of our top spots if we're honest. This place is truly special. It's just achingly beautiful and offers some of the best game viewing in Southern Africa along the banks of the mighty Zambezi River. There's something magical about the Zambezi - something that speaks to the restless soul in every wanderlust-filled traveller - a truly spiritual safari destination.

So too is Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park , once the hunting ground of African kings and now its country's flagship conservation success story. This is home to huge herds of elephant and buffalo, biodiversity for, well, Africa, stunning scenery, and trademark big skies.

Exploring Hwange is a new adventure every day. Just like Zambia's South Luangwa National Park , the home of the walking safari. So, if getting out and discovering the African wilderness on foot appeals to you, this is the place to go. The South Luangwa is also renowned for its gob-smacking landscapes, rich variety of biomes and plentiful wildlife.

For something completely different, Rwanda has to claim a spot here. The Volcanoes National Park is renowned the world over for its mountain gorillas, but we love it, and this country in general, for its salivating scenery, wonderful people, and incredible African spirit.

Finally, we're winding up with Zafaris's hometown, Cape Town . The jewel of the south positioned close to the very bottom of Africa where the continent's tip stretches out towards Antarctica. A melting pot of culture and history, it's also blessed with natural beauty in abundance and wine. Lots and lots of wine.

Which is where we end this guide, glass in hand, toasting another damn fine blog.

Introducing Content with Conscience

sharon@safaricollective.co.za (Sharon Gilbert-Rivett) — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 10:46:11 GMT

Telling your stories the way they should be told...

We're driving home our commitment to sustainable tourism and the pillars it's built upon. We call it "content with conscience" and it highlights the importance of sharing the passion that underpins your brand and the stories that really make a difference.

By far the majority of marketing agencies and consultancies will focus on the mundane - how many rooms you have, the destinations you offer, exciting places you send people to, seeing the Big Five, scrumptious food, luxury décor... We prefer to dig deeper, looking at more than just your product or the services you offer, examining what drives you, telling the stories of your people and why they do what they do and the journeys they took to where they are now. We look at the reason you are in business, the motivation behind the brand and essence of who you are.

We want to share what makes you special, what makes your brand stand out and to tell the stories no one else is telling. We are interested in the "why" as much as the "how", because it's the why that people really engage with. Why did you build a lodge in the wilderness? Why did you start a tour operation selling safaris to Africa? Why do you love the African bush? Why does tourism matter? Why is a safari so important? Why should we protect wild fauna and flora? Why are people as important as wildlife? It's the why that really says who you are as a brand. The reason you do what you do.

We love telling the stories of the people who work for you, spending time with them getting to understand what motivates them, what led to them being where they are and doing what they do. It's an important part of building a brand's legacy, showing how a business has positively impacted people's lives and given them pride in their achievements. It also shows just how important the impact of a safari is, how it helps to drive economic change in the most far-flung and remote regions of our fabulous continent. How it changes people's lives for the better.

There's an art to this kind of storytelling. When it comes to people stories, it requires relaxed interviewing techniques that build trust while asking the right questions, of understanding the way our industry works and what the key drivers are for those working in it. As for stories about places - the destinations that make this continent so incredible to visit - it's important to know the questions prospective guests are likely to ask before they ask them and provide the answers effortlessly, establishing trust in your brand and the level of expertise you offer.

It's also important to understand the challenges facing the safari industry right now, the often overwhelming hurdles that operators and lodge owners face on a daily basis just to keep the lights on... The never-ending battle to conserve and protect wilderness areas and the wildlife that lives in them; the constant pressure of providing first-class guest experiences in often remote and sometimes inhospitable surroundings; the need to find solutions to reducing the impact on fragile and sensitive eco-systems without negatively impacting the standard of services you offer...

All of these things inform our storytelling because we have what's known as "skin in the game". We've worked in lodges and camps, run tour operations, been stakeholders in the African tourism industry, have first-hand experience with the issues around conservation and the protection of iconic wildlife species. It sets us apart because we can speak your language, and translate it into content that makes a difference to your brand.

So chat to us about creating content for you, and let's look at how we can share your stories with the travelling world...

Is your website doing its job?

sharon@safaricollective.co.za (Sharon Gilbert-Rivett) — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 17:59:17 GMT

Easy ways to improve your website's performance...

It's a simple question - is your website doing what it should be doing? There's so much more to websites than looking good and sassy design, so here are some helpful tips to help you answer this hot question and give you ideas as to where you could improve your website performance...

1. Make it pretty and keep up the interest

Having a visually appealing website that's not dominated by slabs of heavy or over elaborate editorial content is extremely important. Your Home page needs to grab attention. Give it gorgeous images, evocative content that makes people want to explore some more, and tell people who you are, what you do and why you do it quickly, easily and in clear, understandable language. Keep it simple. Grab attention and keep it. Retain those eyes by directing them easily and quickly to all the information they need to figure out that a) you know what you are doing and are an expert, b) are professional and have outstanding bona fides and c) are approachable and there to help them. Less is more - a Home page that's too busy and confusing is going to lose the engagement.

2. Check your SEO

What's SEO? It's search engine optimisation - a system that works with search engines to help improve your ranking in search results, improving traffic to your website in the process. It uses keywords - words and combinations of words that searchers enter into search engines that in terms of SEO are used to help improve where you rank on a search engine (the goal is to be at the top of search engine results!) So you need to check whether your SEO is doing its job. This can be done through an SEO audit that will examine how your website is optimised and whether your keywords are doing their jobs. You can also get an idea of SEO efficacy by looking at the analytics for your website.

3. Optimise and refresh your content

Your content needs to speak to your SEO (and vice versa) to help with your rankings. It also needs to be refreshed and updated regularly to help reach that all-important high ranking where search engine results and traffic are concerned. In fact, content is equally if not more important than SEO. Without it, your website is just a lifeless husk with zero personality and "soul". Getting your content right is of critical importance, from the Home page to the Contact Us page and everything in between. Done right, and in keeping with your brand voice, your website content is a key driver of your conversion rate - how many sales you get from website engagement. Generally speaking, less is more when it comes to website content (unless it's blogs, see below!) Keep it simple, keep it straightforward but don't be afraid to add lots of zest and personality, if that's what your brand dictates!

4. Blog it

There are lots of ways to refresh content, and the easiest is to have a blog page where regular, fresh and (this is important) original content is posted. Why original? Because cut and paste doesn't go down well with search engines and can actually hamper your ranking. Don't just throw blogs together - think about them, and if you can't write them, find someone who can because great, well-written blogs will do wonders for your website, especially when they speak directly to your SEO and keywords. Ideally, blogs need to be longer rather than shorter. Yes, that's absolutely NOT a pork pie. The longer the better. Current trends show anything over 500 words is good for improving ranking. Over 1000 words is even better! So don't be afraid of what we call "long form" content - it's an absolute winner when it comes to getting your brand where you need it to be.

5. Cross pollinate

Spread the love across all of your content platforms and get everything to point back to your website. Now take that to the next level and develop a digital marketing strategy that helps you connect your website, social media, content marketing, email marketing, newsletters and every bit of content you can muster to drive your conversion rate ever upwards through clever conversion funnels. Make your content work hard for you. You won't regret any investment you make into good content. Ever.

If you've got any questions or need advice, feel free to get in touch!

Getting to grips with English

sharon@safaricollective.co.za (Sharon Gilbert-Rivett) — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 17:45:49 GMT

Hot tips for when words really don't come easy...

Don't forget that the rules for creating content apply to internal and external communications too! Writing for more formal purposes often tends to get overlooked, so the next time you have to email a client or pull together a proposal for an important stakeholder or potential partner, take the following kernels of wisdom into account...

The overarching principle in all communications should be "less is more". Strive to use "plain" English which does not make it hard to understand messages.

Be concise. Wordy, dense construction is one of the most common problems in written communication.

Long, complex sentences containing multiple phrases and clauses are confusing. Use simple language and short paragraphs to retain clarity of thought and purpose. A good starting point to rectify this problem is to watch out for "of", "to", "on" and other prepositions. They often mark phrases you can reduce to one or two words. The overuse of conjunctions is also likely to signal the stringing together of too many words, ie: "and", "but", "or", "nor", "for", "yet", "so"...

Some examples follow:

Don’t say: Say:

a number of several, a few, many

a sufficient number of enough

at this point in time now

is able to can

on a monthly basis monthly

on the grounds that because

an amount of work work

be responsible for must

in order to to

Redundant words

Don’t say: The Department of Tourism and the National Department of Public Works worked together on a joint project to improve access...

Say: The tourism and public works departments worked on a project to improve access...

In this statement, you don’t need "joint" or "together". Saying that tourism and public works worked on a project says it all. "Joint" and "together" are both redundant.

Similarly, we often use excess modifiers, such as "absolutely", "actually", "really", "quite" and "very". But on review you will often find that they are not necessary.

Don’t say: It is particularly difficult to reconcile the somewhat differing views expressed by the management team. Total disclosure of all facts is very important to make sure we draw up a total and completely accurate picture of the organisation's financial position.

Say: It is difficult to reconcile the differing views expressed by the management team. Disclosing all facts is important to creating an accurate picture of the organisation’s financial position.

Leaving out excess words can cut documents significantly. Be diligent in challenging every word you write, and you will quickly learn to write clearly and concisely.

English contains many words that are commonly misused. Alternative spellings and associated meanings can result in mistakes being included in documents.

The following are some examples of confusing or commonly misused words - and explanations of their proper use.

Remember to check spelling in all communications before sending them out or publishing them.

Advisor

The most common form of spelling is advisor with the "or" ending, not "er".

Affect - effect

Affect - influence, move (emotionally), impress: The new regulations will affect our industry

Effect - to bring about, accomplish, result: The new regulations have had a tremendous effect on our industry

Assure, ensure, insure

Assure - to convince or declare something positively: The plumber assured me the fault had been corrected

Ensure - to make certain: I had the fault checked to ensure it had been fixed

Insure - to guarantee financially against possible loss or damage: We should insure the equipment against damage

Compliment - complement

Compliment - praise: The company was paid a compliment for its work on the project

Complement - what is needed to complete something or make it perfect: The project team contained an experienced complement of tourism service providers.

Note: Both these terms can also be used as a verb; the same distinction applies.

Continual - continuous

Continual - recurrent, usually at short intervals: Continual interruptions made it impossible to finish the work on time

Continuous - describes an uninterrupted sequence: Continuous power was supplied to the site for the duration of the project

Curriculum vitae - curricula vitae

Curriculum vitae - singular

Curricula vitae - plural

Note: Curriculum/curricula vitae is not capitalised,

unless it is used at the start of a sentence.

Dependent - dependant

Dependent - relying on someone or something for assistance or support: The community is dependent on the water supply

Dependant - a person who is supported (usually in a financial way) by another: Kasey is a single parent with three dependants

Formula - formulae

Formula — singular

Formulae — plural

Index - indices

Index – singular

Indices – plural

Its - it’s

Its - possessive pronoun: Limpopo and its people.

It’s = it is (contraction): It’s a great outcome for everyone

Metre - meter

Metre - measurement equal to 100 centimetres, shortened "m"

Meter - an instrument used for measuring, eg: water or electricity usage

Practical - practicable

Practical - related to practice or action (as opposed to theory): It's not practical to invest that much time in it

Practicable - capable of being done or used: This route is practicable in dry weather only

Principal - principle

Principal - first, highest or foremost in importance, rank, worth or degree; chief; capital sum

Principle - a basic truth, law or assumption; a rule or standard, especially of good behaviour

Stationery - stationary

Stationery - paper products

Stationary - not moving

Loose - lose

Lose - to misplace something

Loose - something that does not fit properly or has become separated from its fitting

Comprise, consists, compose

Comprise means "composed of". Therefore, you can't say "The hotel comprises of 36 en-suite rooms". You must say "The hotel comprises 36 en-suite rooms". It's actually easier to avoid comprise altogether and use "consists of" or "is composed of" in its place.

English can be confusing, we know, so if you have any queries or need advice with any form of content creation, feel free to chat!

Update, update, update

sharon@safaricollective.co.za (Sharon Gilbert-Rivett) — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 17:35:18 GMT

How to keep your website in tip-top condition

It's absolutely essential to keep updating your website, not just for SEO purposes (which should always be a priority) but to engage with your clients and stakeholders about how your business is doing and what you are doing. Now is not the time to go dark. Far from it, you need to be a guiding light now if you want to continue doing business in the future.

Don't let your website become static. Think of it as a constant work in progress and give it as much attention as your social media pages and make it work for you. There is no point putting everything you have into social media if you are not going to have your website speaking the same language and sharing the same messaging. Social media needs to lead back to your website because your website is where business takes place.

People do business with other people they like, know and trust. All of those things depend on you being proactive and providing the people you do business with the kind of information and reassurances they need to feel safe enough and sure enough to continue that relationship. Your website is where you create that sense of security and safety.

Your clients need to know that you are thinking of them, and empathising with them. It's not about what you are going through right now, but what they are going through. They love travelling but most don't want to leave their homes for anything other than essential reasons. They're scared. And confused. And unsure.

They see signs that things may be moving in the right direction but have no idea if, when or how they are going to be able to travel again. The prime questions they are asking are: will it be safe to fly? Will it be safe where I want to go? What will my hotel/lodge/camp be doing to make me feel safe? What are the risks? Is it going to be worth those risks? Should I rather wait and see?

If you want to stay ahead of the curve (pardon the pun) then how about reworking your Home page on your website to both welcome your clients and put them at ease by answering some of these questions and telling them what your business is doing to help shape the future travel landscape? Share your thoughts and feelings in a short COVID-19 statement, put them at ease, show them you are working on solutions.

Now is also the time to be blogging. Share your knowledge through storytelling - tell them about the destinations you offer, the people they will meet and the places they will stay. Show them who you are and why you do what you do. And how much you care. If you have "star" team members that your clients and guests will meet, tell their stories as this helps your clients to "connect".

An important tip about blogs is that you need to blog regularly. One a month is fine, but use it as a minimum. And remember, blogs are different to news. Blogs go into more detail and tell stories, where news is important information that dates quite quickly.

Where news is concerned, creating a "News" page or section on your website will ONLY work if you are committed to ensuring that it stays current. Nothing turns visitors to a website off more than going to a news page to find that the last post was more than a year ago. The same goes for blogs. Either blog or don't blog.

Doing it half-heartedly could do more harm than good. Also remember, if something important happens, send out a "news release" to your client base telling them about it, and make sure you post this under your News section as well.

Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to find out more or need personalised help and advice!

Share your stories. Tell your truths.

sharon@safaricollective.co.za (Sharon Gilbert-Rivett) — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 17:30:25 GMT

Understand your brand and build on it...

It's important when marketing to tell your stories, sharing how the natural world inspires you, motivates you and teaches you humanity. Dig through your image archives and find photos that capture wild Africa and her incredible spirit, share them on social media, tell people why you are sharing them and what they mean to you...

Write down what it is that makes the African bush so special and how you feel when you share it with guests from all over the world...

Tell people what motivates you and your brand, what makes your brand tick, what defines it...

Most importantly, take the time to regularly reflect on what your brand actually is, what it stands for, where it's strengths and weaknesses lie and how you can strengthen it. If you don't have a vision and mission statement, now's the time to prepare one. Likewise with a vision and value statement...

What are these? Allow us to explain:

Mission Statement: This is what a company actually does. It should be short and easy to remember. Your mission statement should also be specific enough that people understand what you do and how it may differ from your competitors.

Vision Statement: This is what your company aspires to be; which can be much different than what a company is (mission statement). When done right, your vision statement can and should help drive decisions and goals in your company.

Value Statement: A value statement conveys the values and priorities of a company. This lets your customers and staff know what’s important to your business and the kind of culture it has. It can be used internally and externally and is guideline for operations and a way of marketing to your core audience.

So what makes a good story? Well, let's look at why you are in this industry, for a start. What got you into tourism? Why do you do what you do? What do you love about what you do? Passion is a great driver of awesome content, so let it shine. Coupled with good writing and fabulous images, your love for tourism should underpin everything you sent out to the public space.

If you don't tap into what it is that drives you and your business, and the spark that makes you get out of bed in the morning, then you are never going to convince scared and wary travellers to put their faith in you and your product/service. We have to focus and re-commit ourselves to rebuilding and re-defining what we do on a regular basis. It's what keeps our businesses fresh.

Let your stories and your content focus on your clients, too. Get them excited at the prospect of travelling to Africa. Let them see who you are and what you stand for through content that builds trust and authority.

Don't be afraid of emotion. It's good to show humanity. Slick and corporate is yesterday. Authentic is the way forward. Find warmth and realness and allow your content to connect with people. People do business with other people - people they like, know and trust, and brands that aren't people-centric inevitably suffer for it as a result.

Your content IS your brand. It's the biggest touchpoint you have, whether on social media, your website or in your regular newsletters. Don't scrimp on it. Give it the respect it deserves. Whether it's a three line Facebook post or a 1000-word blog makes no difference. Make every word count. Always.

Need advice? We're always happy to chat and specialise in helping small tourism businesses improve their existing content and create fresh, engaging marketing content going forward. So get in touch and let's see how we can help!