Supporting small businesses through the synergy of “tech and touch” approaches
This post is the third in a four-part “Journey to Impact” series sharing lessons from a recent Strive Community evaluation on digital channels and strategies that have been most effective at reaching and engaging small businesses in their journey to growth and greater resilience. Read the first and second posts of the series.
Article by Chelsea Horváth, MEL Consultant at Strive Community
Tumbu Accelerator, an Indonesian small business learning and development organization and a Strive Community partner, has honed and iterated its WhatsApp-based assisted learning model since 2020. In this “tech and touch” approach, group leaders guide participants through a training program in a closed WhatsApp group, providing one-on-one support and mentorship. In 2023, Tumbu brought their experience with assisted learning to Strive Community and received the following feedback from small business owners in Indonesia:
“After watching Tumbu’s video, I immediately opened an account to activate QRIS [a QR code standard in Indonesia to help with cashless payments] to make it easier for customers to make transactions.”
“This is a new experience for me, because this is the first time I got a coaching method with more flexibility [and] lots of rewards. The questions are collected and immediately answered. The video is also entertaining, and the quiz is also interactive.”
This feedback from small business owners illustrates one of Strive Community’s lessons learned from our recent evaluation: Combining “tech and touch” approaches to support small businesses leads to greater adoption of best practices and overall business growth.¹
Amee Parbhoo with Accion was one of the first to coin the phrase “tech and touch,” and it’s now considered an established best practice in digital and data-first programs. These approaches are delivered online or offline and provide small businesses the opportunity for human interaction and individual support. In the case of Tumbu’s WhatsApp-based assisted learning, participants engage in a Q&A with peers and facilitators over a two-week period. They receive customized one-on-one WhatsApp messages encouraging them to watch specific training video content based on their viewing history. Participants submit an assignment at the end of the program — for example, setting up a Facebook page for their business — and Tumbu provides small prizes to participants with the best assignments. So far, Tumbu has supported over 2,000 existing and aspiring small business owners through this approach and plans to support up to 4,000 by the end of 2023.
Webinars are another “touch” opportunity to provide Q&A and individualized support to small business owners. WISE, a Strive Community partner in Vietnam, has experimented with Facebook Livestreams and Zoom webinars in collaboration with its partners Grab, Selly, and So Ban Hang. One live workshop, delivered with Grab, was promoted to Grab Vietnam’s 62,000 Facebook followers and reached over 152,000 after the event (as individuals could access the recording asynchronously). Over 5,000 existing and aspiring small business owners participated in the live Q&A segment of the webinar.
Lastly, “tech and touch” approaches can also include offline support, as Boost Technology, a Strive Community Innovation Fund partner, has done in Nigeria with women-led small businesses. As they shared in their earlier blog post, Boost employs a field team from the same small business communities as their customers to build trust with their digital credit product, “Stock Boosts.” The field team introduces these women small business owners to Boost’s digital product, providing a safe environment to try something new. Once businesses are onboarded, the field team helps with bookkeeping assistance, technology training, order management, deliveries, and business growth. The field team is there to support these women small business owners at every step of the journey. This strategy has resulted in a 96% repayment rate among their women-led small business customers.
With these lessons in mind for our future programs, Strive Community plans to invest in “tech and touch” interventions to offer deeper support to small businesses. Additionally, our partner Bayan Academy will adapt Tumbu’s WhatsApp assisted learning model to support small business owners on Facebook Messenger in the Philippines.
Read the final part of this blog series where we share Strive Community’s best practices for designing content and solutions for small businesses.
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¹ We define support as the number of small businesses that have engaged with interactive features from programs (webinars, offline events, WhatsApp-based mentoring).
