Engaging small businesses by harnessing learning platforms and trusted communities
This post is the second in a four-part “Journey to Impact” series sharing lessons from a recent Strive Community evaluation on the 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 previous post here.
Article by Chelsea Horváth, MEL Consultant at Strive Community
It’s Saturday morning at a busy market in Mexico City, and our colleagues from FUNDES are speaking with artisans and craft merchants about how and where they go to learn new skills to support the growth and resilience of their businesses. Through these conversations, FUNDES identified three main realities:
- Artisans, like many small business owners, lack the time to develop their business knowledge and skills.
- Artisans were comfortable and familiar with YouTube and WhatsApp.
- Using online and offline approaches (a “tech and touch” approach) would maximize the adoption of any solution that FUNDES built.
To better address these realities and offer support tailored to the needs of Mexican artisans, FUNDES developed short videos with practical “how to” content, sharing them on YouTube and their platform, Pymental. Once on Pymental, artisans are linked to relevant digital tools and platforms that could benefit their businesses. The positive response to these videos has spread beyond the artisan sector, with more than 600,000 views on various channels and almost 400 micro-entrepreneurs adopting an average of 3 digital tools. FUNDES’s experience illustrates one of Strive Community’s lessons learned from our recent evaluation: One of the most successful ways to engage small businesses with digital content or solutions is placing content on platforms where small businesses go to learn (like a learning management system or YouTube) and in trusted small businesses communities.¹
As we shared in an earlier blog post, social media is effective at reaching large numbers of small businesses, but it’s not always the best at taking it a step further and engaging them.² Why? In our experience, less than 1% of small businesses owners will stop scrolling through the vast amount of information and content to engage with a post on social media.
On the other hand, we found that small business owners were much more likely to engage with content they saw on YouTube, standalone learning platforms, and in trusted small business communities. Why? We believe it’s because small business owners seek out these channels and trusted communities, expecting to learn new skills or engage with their peers. In comparison with the 1% conversion rate with social media, dedicated learning channels have significantly higher reach to engagement rates (20–50%). Based on these insights, we are leveraging the promotional power of social media to drive small business owners to our learning management system for deeper engagement through our new program in Latin America with Hoob Marketing.
Another strategy that has proved effective for Strive Community is working with strategic partners. For Strive, strategic partners are organizations with large customer bases of small businesses, such as super platforms, fintechs, NGOs, or government entities. Partnerships are a bedrock of the Strive Community and help us achieve more scale and impact. While partnerships can take different forms and models, leading with a trusted brand is an effective way to engage small business owners.
For example, our partners ITI, WISE, and Bayan Academy have embedded Strive Community content on Grab Academy, a dedicated learning environment for Grab’s drivers and merchants across Southeast Asia. The Grab partnership model has a conversion rate of about 55% — significantly higher than many other generic channels. We believe that this success stems from the relationship that partners have with their small business communities. Partners have an existing relationship and reputation that eases the way for us to capture the attention of their small business audience. With these lessons in mind for our future programs, Strive Community plans to continue working with partners, particularly with mission-aligned companies and organizations with trusted brands.
Read part three of this blog series where we share more about how Strive Community is providing interactive support to small businesses on their learning journey.³
____
¹ We define engagement as the number of small businesses that tried out or participated in content or solutions with impact potential through our programs.
² We define reach as the number of small businesses that viewed content or were introduced to solutions with impact potential through our programs.
³ We define support as the number of small businesses that have engaged with interactive features from programs (webinars, offline events, WhatsApp-based mentoring).
