Proximity Designs · 2018 – 2019
Digital advisory for farmers on low-bandwidth phones
The challenge
Reaching smallholder farmers across rural Myanmar for a USAID-funded social enterprise running four separate brands — on cheap handsets, expensive data, and with very little patience for marketing.
What I owned
Digital strategy for the main channel plus Yetagon Farm Advisory, Yetagon Irrigation and Proximity Finance, and the content production team behind all four.
Key actions
Sustained 50+ content pieces a month across web, social and print in multiple formats; ran SEO, SEM and Meta advertising; built Messenger chatbot campaigns to deliver farm advice on request.
What I learned
A chatbot beat a beautifully produced post, repeatedly. Farmers could ask in their own words and get an answer immediately, without loading a heavy page on an expensive connection. Designing for the constraint mattered more than designing for the brand. At the time almost nobody in Myanmar was pairing targeted Facebook advertising with a structured chat flow to reach low-literacy rural audiences at national scale — there was no playbook, so we wrote one.
Work sample · the field reporting
The advisory service ran on numbers; the storytelling ran on people. I travelled to Shan State, interviewed the couple behind From Mines to Mangoes, shot the photography and wrote the piece.
Doing both sides of the job — the targeting and the reporting — is why the campaigns sounded like the people they were aimed at.
Work sample · the chat flow
The Messenger flow behind the farm advisory service, built in 2019. Every branch is a question a farmer might ask, answered without loading a page — designed for cheap handsets and expensive data.
Targeted Facebook advertising fed people into the top of it; the flow did the rest. Reaching low-literacy rural audiences this way was close to unheard of in Myanmar at the time.