Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sanjana Satagopan. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Sanjana thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

Naming EcoLearning Together (EcoLearners) was admittedly a lot harder than I thought it would be, and honestly, its named EcoLearning Together because we didn’t get the organization name for just regular Ecolearners. Instead, if we were to call ourselves that, it had to be an abbreviation, but we changed it up with the L being capitalized.

When we first thought of the name of our nonprofit, we wanted something that had the youth fun aspect of it, but also the environmental aspect of it. We wanted people to see the name and think youth environmental nonprofit, which I think is sort of applicable with our name.

Our first name for that reason was EcoFluent. It was sort of the knowledge idea and environmentalism combined. We just mashed together two words hoping it would sounds good. However, it went through a lot of changes – next it went to DandiCrowns and then even Trees and Bees (which my sister told me sounded like a marijuana shop).

It takes cycling through so many ideas to find one that sticks, and EcoLearning Together was pretty far down on the list, and didn’t come up until we filed to be a real nonprofit. It was a randon idea, and I think its the one that really fit our nonprofit the most!

Sanjana, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

EcoLearning Together is a environmental nonprofit working with the United Nations Decade on Restoration that aims to get youth involved in environmental restoration and learn about environmentalism! We have chapters throughout the world, and especially work with schools for a greener, healthier earth for all.

How’d you meet your business partner?

Since I was still a student when EcoLearners was founded, finding people with a similar passion to create a potential thing was really difficult. I actually ended up creating EcoLearners with a few of my friends from middle/high school. It was so weird to think that it could have lasted so long. Now that I think of it, I really do recommend trying to create something with anyone you know. You don’t have to be like super close to them – me and my cofounders were good friends but not super close. We became closer over time and ended up complementing one another.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

This is something I think EcoLearners still has a lot to learn from, but we have definitely grown in the last couple of years. Getting the first few hundred followers was definitely the hardest. The first thing we did was reach out and consistently ask people we knew to just follow us, and like/comment/save every single post. This sort of made insta think that oh, these posts are getting lots of types of engagement, not just likes. When we added more content, we continued to then create a discord server where people of our community could be, and we notified them every time we posted!

I would say for advice (and this is something that even we don’t really stick to, but we want to), is to just keep posting, and to use a mix of hashtags. Use some that are like really broad, and some that are really specific only to you! We also have been experimenting with doing insta takeovers with other organizations or collaborations, and I would recommend that too.

The next thing I would recommend is if something is not like comical or like funny (or resonating with your audience), have some sort of call to action or hook! Something with a catchy headline, or like something where the user feels like there’s a reason to take action – that leads to a lot of bookmarking of the post. That’s also why baking recipes that have measurements and all the information in the video also makes it more engaging.

I’m not sure how helpful this is, because honestly, social media marketing is sort of a science. Like there’s no right way to do it, and there’s no proven method – even if people say there is. These things did help us get more followers and try to reach more people.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ecolearners.org
• Instagram: @eco.learners on insta, mine is @sanjanaxms