The power of peer-led, tailored, concise, rewarding, and timely content for small businesses
This post is the final 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 first, second, and third posts in this series.
Article by Chelsea Horváth, MEL Consultant at Strive Community
Using data to design content for small businesses in Cambodia is part of Boost Capital’s DNA. Lucinda and Gordon, co-founders of Boost Capital, came to the Strive Community Innovation Fund seeking to answer the question: Can financial education de-risk and expand access to credit for small businesses? Through an iterative process, learning every step of the way, Boost Capital is designing financial education for small businesses that is bite-sized, tailored to their needs and skill levels, interactive, relevant, and measurable. For example, Boost Capital timed and tailored its content to ensure that it was strategically relevant to where the small business owner was on their loan application journey — such as, providing relevant financial education after a loan had been disbursed or if a customer had been rejected for a loan. Boost Capital’s approach to design is aligned with the five best practices Strive Community has learned from our implementing partners when it comes to designing digital content and solutions for small businesses.
- Peer-led: Content and solutions should feature relatable insights from fellow small business owners.
Many Strive Community implementing partners tailored their content to include authentic, inspirational quotes from local small business owners. For example, our partner Bayan Academy shared:
“The post[s] that gathered the most reach […] feature the entrepreneurs. Small business owners or entrepreneurs want to hear the stories of other entrepreneurs, their success stories, and how they were able to become digital.”
Another example comes from Shujaaz Inc, who hired fellow small business owners as the trainers for their upskilling videos on the MESH platform. Videos were shot in the MESHers’ place of business and in their local language. This video, for example, features Eunice Njeri, a retail shop owner in Naivasha, talking about small business loans.
2. Tailored: Content and solutions should be designed around the specific nuances and needs of the target audience (e.g., accounting for gender, age, sector, and regional language).
At a minimum, this involves translating content into local languages and using local examples, as Tumbu Accelerator, Bayan Academy, WISE, and Hoob Marketing have done in Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Latin America, respectively. Similarly, when creating content for Mexican artisans and connecting them with digital tools, FUNDES used peer-focused language to establish trust and make the adoption of digital tools more approachable. Shujaaz Inc. developed “listicles” from its video content–short articles that summarize the best practices mentioned in a video–to meet the internet bandwidth needs of its young entrepreneur audience.
3. Concise: Content and solutions should be short and to the point.
Video content captures an audience’s attention when it gets to the point quickly and delivers the information concisely. Shujaaz Inc, Tumbu Accelerator, WISE, and Bayan Academy have seen higher engagement with shorter videos (up to 3 minutes long), while longer videos have much higher drop-off rates.¹ Tumbu, for example, experimented with removing the prologue from a video on YouTube to test the effects on viewer engagement. So far this technique has been effective — on average the video was watched for 2.45 minutes, compared to 1.2 minutes previously.
4. Rewarding: Content and solutions should use incentives, rewards, or games.
Small business owners are often bombarded with content, products, and services vying for their attention. Research has found that the use of incentives, gamification design elements, and nudging systems can encourage higher engagement rates with content.²
Grab, a Strive Community partner, experimented with using gamified learning (quizzes) and a cash incentive prize draw for completing training modules. In months when incentives were offered, engagement was double the average of other months, both pre- and post-competitions. One Innovation Fund winner, Flourish Fi, is testing gamification with Brazilian fintech Justa to help Brazilian small business owners develop better financial habits.
5. Timely: Messaging and promotion around content and solutions for small businesses should be tailored around events and schedules.
Some Strive Community implementing partners launched promotional campaigns that coincided with political events and festive periods that hampered the momentum of the new content. On the other hand, Boost Capital times their financial education to where small business customers are at in their loan application journey.
In conclusion
With these best practices in mind for our future programs, Strive Community will continue to localize and distribute existing digital content through new implementing and strategic partners. Where relevant, our partners will continue to test reminders, incentives, and gamified elements to increase engagement. Lastly, Strive Community will work with implementing partners to develop implementation strategies that include consideration of timing.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this blog series and encourage you to check back later this year when we’ll share findings from our analysis of the Strive Community Evidence Map, an innovative new tool we’re using to build out our program strategy on what works and what doesn’t in delivering digital products and solutions to small businesses.
____
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 Priscila De Oliveira, “Why Businesses Fail: Underadoption of Improved Practices by Brazilian Micro-Enterprises,” November 26, 2022, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/635b20074f03f76ef970e119/t/6382ad685042fe5ee9c0f1cc/1669508466744/PriscilaDeOliveira_JMP_WhyBusinessesFail.pdf; Gayatr Mehta and Kathleen Yaworsky, The Impact of Digital Transformation on Undeserved Microbusinesses (Accion International, November 2022), https://content.accion.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Accion_Capstone_paper_EN_FINAL_110922.pdf.
