A new milestone for Strive Community: We’ve reached 5 million small businesses

June 27th marks Micro-, Small, and Medium-sized Enterprises Day, a global day that recognizes the critical role that small businesses play in inclusive growth around the world. When we launched Strive Community almost two years ago, our goal was to support the resilience and growth of five million micro- and small enterprises around the world with innovative digital solutions. To achieve this, we’ve been working alongside our partners to support small businesses to digitalize operations, make greater use of financial services, and more effectively participate in digital markets.

Today, we are happy to share that we’ve surpassed our original goal! Our programs have already reached 5.3 million unique micro-and small businesses with digital solutions and content that are supporting them to build resilient, growth-oriented businesses. We couldn’t have hit this milestone without the innovative work of our partners — like MESH, who have shared their own growth milestone for their online community for informal entrepreneurs.

How we, as a community, achieved this

Through our programs, we’ve learned a few key insights and lessons on what digital channels and strategies are most effective in reaching¹ small businesses with Strive Community content and solutions. We’ll explore this in more depth in an upcoming blog series, but overall, we did this by:

• Embedding content within active, engaged small business communities on social media: Social media can be an effective channel for driving reach at scale, but only when campaigns are delivered to active and engaged groups of small businesses. Across social media in general, our promotion-to-reach conversion rate was 4.5%, however this rose to up to 76% when content was embedded within active communities of small businesses, such as Facebook groups dedicated to providing mentoring and support to small businesses. For example, 65% of MESH’s reach came from leveraging its sister brand Shujaaz Inc’s huge social media following of young entrepreneurs.
• Working with influencers with active small business audiences: Collaborating with social media influencers who are mission-aligned with an active following — even if that following is smaller than other online personalities — can be effective. While most of our partners have worked with influencers, one influencer, with almost 13,000 followers, self-shot a video promoting a gig opportunity on the MESH app, which led to 4,500 new young people signing up for MESH.
• Leveraging partnerships and their trusted brands: When Strive Community content is embedded within partner apps — as we did in our partner Grab’s driver and merchant apps across three countries in South East Asia — small business owners are more likely to engage deeply with the training content. Similarly, using a partner’s network and brand name to reach out to small businesses, as was done with Jaza Duka, helped our programs unlock new audiences they would not have otherwise reached.

Stay tuned for our upcoming blog series that dives deeper into what we’re learning through our partners about reaching, engaging, and driving impact with micro- and small businesses with digital solutions to build their resilience and grow. We’ll take a closer look at the digital journey that leads to small business engagement with content and solutions. We’ll explore channels and strategies that work, share our design best practices for delivering content to small businesses, and look closer at the role of a ‘touch’-based approach that offers interactive support to small businesses. All these lessons are being incorporated into our continued work to support small businesses around the world, including via our recently closed Innovation Fund.

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¹We count reach as the number of small businesses that viewed content or were introduced to solutions with impact potential through our programs.