Indigenous Tourism BC

The Objective

Jelly Academy has worked with Indigenous Tourism BC (ITBC) since 2024 to deliver custom training to support Indigenous-owned tourism businesses across BC. The team leading the ITBC learning hub training and resources has a direct, yet challenging goal: develop training and resources that help member businesses thrive and grow. A key need identified was accessible and practical training in digital marketing.

The Solution

After polling ITBC members to gauge their most pressing needs, as it relates to marketing, Jelly Academy developed a phased approach to support members with varying needs and skillsets. 

Awareness

We built and delivered a training series titled ‘When and How to Hire for Digital Marketing’ for 2 cohorts across 2024 and 2025. In this interactive series, we helped businesses assess their needs for different digital marketing channels, including digital advertising, SEO, PR, website development and content marketing. 

Each lesson focused on a practical needs assessment, providing participants with an exercise to evaluate if each tactic made sense for them based on business objectives, monetary and time investment. By the end of the training, businesses had the understanding, resources and roadmap to determine the next steps for their digital marketing strategy. 

Practical Application

Member feedback indicated 2 key areas as needs for improvement in their marketing efforts: Email Marketing and Automation, and Website Development. We again launched 2 training series to address the needs for 4 total cohorts between 2024 and 2026. 
The Email training was titled ‘Setting Up Your Email Newsletter and First Automation’. Each lesson put participants through the workflow of creating their email audiences, drafting the newsletter, understanding how to perform testing and track metrics for success, and building an automated drip series campaign. ITBC members had built something to directly support the growth of their business by the end of the program.

Website Development

For the website development training, we zeroed in on one platform, Squarespace, with ‘Build Your First Tourism Website with Squarespace’. Similar to the email training, each lesson had participants take steps towards completing the build of a website for their business. From asset collection to design, content creation and search engine optimization, this course was a practical ‘how to’. Jelly Academy also hosted open workshop hours to address any roadblocks as participants worked through their website builds. With brand-aligned, tourism-centred websites launched, each of these participants built something that would help their businesses be more successful.

The Results:

In addition to custom training solutions, we have also run multiple cohorts of our Digital Marketing Bootcamp for ITBC members.