- Mastercard launches Strive UK to empower British micro and small enterprises to thrive in the digital economy over the next three years.
- Strive UK will support small businesses to build financial resilience and improve growth prospects.
- Programme comes as new research finds £827 billion growth opportunity for UK’s small businesses.
Today, Mastercard launches Strive UK, an initiative that will empower 650,000 British micro and small enterprises (MSEs) to thrive in the digital economy over the next three years and beyond.
Strive UK is an initiative of the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, which advances equitable and sustainable economic growth and financial inclusion around the world. The programme aims to empower micro and small businesses around the country to succeed in the digital economy through free guidance, helpful tools, and personalised, one-to-one mentoring. For example, this will include a data science powered ‘One Stop Shop’ for entrepreneurs with curated recommendations on support, resources and tools available to help them grow their business, as well as 1:1 support for businesses to identify and adopt the right digital tools for them.
Small businesses play a critical role in the UK economy, accounting for around 36% of turnover in the UK private sector and making up 48% of the labour force. Despite this, they have been hit hard by the pandemic, with nearly two thirds of small businesses seeing revenue decrease.
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Mary and her husband, owners of Hippersons Boatyard, bought the sixty-year-old business on the southern reach of the Norfolk Broads National Park nearly ten years ago. Moving their barge home from London to Suffolk, they decided to occupy one of their own houseboats while the barge was in dry dock for repairs.
She immediately realised that they had bought a tourism business, with boat maintenance taking second place. They would need to attract a different type of customer and manage stays, from booking to check-in, directly rather than going through an agent.
So, they created holiday experiences including overnights in stylish new luxury glamping pods, water-based experiences including canoe tours, paddle boarding and dayboat hire, and packages with bookings at the best local restaurants.
Mary decided to move much of the business online and taught herself to run the customer experience and promotion of their holidays, learning about marketing, the power of Facebook, and setting up a YouTube channel to give customers the information they need before arrival.
It was a fortunate decision. Mary had an advantage when the pandemic brought the first lockdown in March 2020, and her plans accelerated. She realised that if she didn’t go online faster they could lose the business forever.
Taking up free digital courses on offer, Mary upped her digital game, creating and commissioning vlogs, and building her website with more engaging content.
Consequently, when they were allowed to open on 4th July 2020, the business was super-busy. Units and day boats were perfect sizes for the social bubble and visitors enjoyed the experience so much they quickly booked again for 2021.
Mary discovered Digital Boost, who provide free unlimited business mentors as well as workshops and extensive digital training to small organisations, as she sought to improve her skills during lockdown. She connected with Chris from BT for a mentoring session. She was most impressed that he had researched Hippersons beforehand and came to the conversation armed with great ideas.
The focus of the conversation was YouTube, and Chris shared his screen to show Mary how it works, how to get subscribers and how to write a profile that connects to Facebook and other social media for message continuity.
He also showed her how to create ads and promote locally, which inspired her to create a film showcasing their guided canoe tours for local people using her new underwater GoPro camera, aimed to reach the age-group most connected to YouTube.
From analytics, Chris and Mary realised that people liked videos about the engines and what goes on around the yard even more than the marketing-type films. This insight is bringing about a fundamental shift in her marketing approach as she upped her digital game, creating and commissioning vlogs, and building her website with more engaging content.
Mary said: “I’m so excited to move forward with the ideas Chris shared and am impressed that he found out about us before the call, especially as he is a volunteer. Our digital strategy is working, and I’m so pleased we moved online. We are creating employment opportunities locally and I am excited that customers love our new approach.”
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We know that prosperity among the UK’s 1.4 million SME employers will be essential to our economy bouncing back from the impact of Covid-19. Given the right support, they have the potential to deliver as much as £140bn in gross value added (GVA) to the UK economy by 2030 – and to create 3.2m jobs over the same period, according to NatWest’s recent ‘A springboard to recovery’ report. And yet the report also highlighted a continued disparity in the allocation of support and funding by gender, location and ethnicity in the UK.
NatWest is committed to removing barriers to enterprise and helping the economy build back better by providing support to those who traditionally face the highest barriers to entry in business. So, in order to help reset this balance, we have partnered with Digital Boost to provide tailored digital training and advice to SMEs and charities looking for extra support to help grow their business and boost revenues.
Digital Boost was created in response to the pandemic, to help drive inclusive economic growth and improve the livelihoods of millions, with a particular focus on the needs and challenges of charities and small and micro-business owners. It helps businesses get the digital skills they need to grow their revenues and be more productive, by matching those who need to upskill with digital experts for free one-to-one mentoring, workshops, and tailored course and resource recommendations.
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Rachel from Creative Active Lives worked with Digital Boost to help her understand how to reach new customers online who could benefit from her activity kits for adults and children with physical and learning difficulties, to grow her business in new directions.
Rachel is a single mum whose first business started ‘by accident’ when she discovered a talent for hula-hooping and circus tricks and started teaching adults with physical and learning difficulties.
She built her social-enterprise by working with occupational therapists and other experts in dance, art, and crafts, to adapt the skills. She has since taught thousands of people, specialising in care homes and those with dementia.
But the arrival of Covid-19 was devastating for her business.
With home-schooling her priority, Rachel was forced to put things on hold. But she needed to pay the bills and wanted to help. She created activity kits for STEM activities, beading, pottery-making and a sensory fidget box for children with autism and ADHD. She applied for grant-funding to set up a website and was successful.
She wanted to build a new site that others could share, like a marketplace. But how to create something that was a brilliant user experience? That’s when she spotted Digital Boost on her LEP website and got in touch to set up a mentoring session.
Rachel connected with a mentor at Google, a specialist in website development. He helped her navigate her way through the digital tools available, like Audience Finder and Reach Planner. She discovered she could explore potential customers and how to reach them by understanding, for example, their search behaviour for kids’ activities.
Rachel said: “I feel I’m winging it, but I’ve had amazing help. The mentor at Digital Boost helped me short-cut to finding my audience and making my brand visible online. I’m so grateful to Digital Boost and am lining up some more experts to help me explore more ways to grow the business.”
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Amanda, founder of Mann’s Cookies created her first-ever business with the help of her family, baking and delivering fun and delicious cookies nationwide. Digital Boost helped her optimise her social media content and build partnerships with other businesses to help her grow.
Amanda wanted to help her friend who runs a local A&E department with some tasty team treats during their long shifts and ended up starting a cookie business with her fourteen-year-old niece in 2020.
Her children helped build her website and keep her customers engaged with blogs and fun social-media posts. Amanda can’t contain her excitement as she processes orders and heads to the kitchen at 7am each morning.
Her fun-cookie boxes are lovingly created for every occasion and include vegan, gluten-free and even a rude option! Additive-free, they are delivered through letter-boxes nationwide.
However, as a first-time business owner, Amanda needed more serious advice on how to build her online presence, manage customer experience and grow collaborations with businesses selling products as diverse as coffee, umbrellas, and sponges. So, she reached out to Digital Boost when she saw a post on Instagram.
They jumped in to help her with advice on SEO and managing partnerships, so she could handle the success of her growing business and take things to the next level.
Amanda said: “Mine is a COVID-19 business. I couldn’t imagine I would have so much fun and meet such amazing people. But I don’t have business experience so am grateful I found Digital Boost. They were brilliant on their mentoring calls. They are helping me get to grips with the mechanics of things, how to deliver great customer service and keeping up my social media presence.”
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Georgia is an administrative assistant at the Sue Lambert Trust where she has created an online presence for the charity for the first time through self-taught digital marketing and social media activity. She was helped by Digital Boost to understand analytics and is planning to return and build her design skills.
Georgia is an Administrative Assistant at the Sue Lambert Trust, which has supported survivors of domestic abuse in Norfolk for over thirty years.
They offer long-term counselling services, but with high demand due to Covid-19 waiting times are long. With no safe place to go for community support and to seek information, survivors are having to dig deep to find resilience, strength, and healing.
The charity had no online presence at the start of the Pandemic. With resources tight, Georgia took it upon herself to acquire the knowledge to build a social media and digital marketing presence, in addition to her current role. She also took a course in counselling, aware of how triggering certain words can be.
Georgia discovered Digital Boost via a Google Digital Garage learning session, and it was a Google employee who mentored her when she set up her session.
She focused on analytics and how to build a plan for reporting, different types of reporting and what information is important to people. She plans future sessions so she can branch into design and connect the charity’s website with email and social media.
Georgia said: “I don’t have any digital experience but am loving creating the digital content. There are so many skills to absorb – design, storytelling, copywriting, analytics - so I will be back to Digital Boost for more. I want to create posts about the impacts of trauma on people, share the voices of survivors and give them a safe place online until we can open up and do that in person.”
Amarachi is at the forefront of a revolution – to educate consumers on the benefits of ‘Bean to Bar’ chocolate and make it seen as much a connoisseur delight as wine and coffee.
She sources cocoa from the same places in central and South America as the best coffee, where she pays the equivalent of a living wage to farmers who cultivate beans with amazing flavours. She makes her own chocolate, which takes three days of loving labour, avoids the use of refined sugar*, and sells her premium chocolate to high end restaurants, hotels, and stores.
Ama taught herself to make chocolate after a running injury, when she learned about how certain foods work with the body to heal and launched her business from a spare room in 2015. At the same time as working on major projects for UNICEF, she would make her product in the evenings and deliver to a growing customer base before work.
In February 2020 Ama moved to a new factory in Bermondsey and was selling to ACE Hotel, Bluebird restaurants and coffee shops in high footfall places like the British Library, when Covid-19 struck. Overnight, she lost 90% of her business. She panicked, then posted on Instagram that Lucocoa is ‘too small to fail’ and pleaded with people to buy.
They did, and sales are up 300% year on year.
Ama found out about Digital Boost, who provide unlimited business mentorships via partners including Apple, Google, DCMS and BT, from a supplier.
Because her business has necessarily changed from B2B to a B2C focus, she wanted to sense-check her strategy, and chose a mentor from Apple. The conversation left her buzzing with ideas. Her mentor understood her business right away, confirmed she was doing the right things and added some extra layers of ideas. She’s since met with additional mentors in SEO, social media and more.
Ama said: “What the pandemic did for us was make us evaluate who we are and what we do. We decided to take our chocolate revolution direct to the customer and celebrate the quality of ‘Bean to Bar’ through social media. Digital Boost helped me sense-check my strategy and the guy from Apple was brilliant. He said, ‘people are coming to you for the story and staying for the chocolate’, so I need to get my story out there!”
* It’s in her company name: LU (lucuma, a fruit from Peru) CO (coconut sugar) COA (cocoa beans and cocoa butter).
Jess is a Spanish national who moved to London to study. She learned in a language foreign to her, went to job interviews and took on professional roles in sectors as diverse as FMCG, pharma, fashion, and renewable energies over ten years.
So, she knows a thing or two about being a non-native English speaker living in the U.K. When the pandemic hit and she lost her job in 2020, she decided to fulfil a dream to set up a company and help others gain confidence in their own lives.
The idea for the business came from her sister, who was struggling with presenting during webinars at work. So, Jess helped her prepare and build confidence in both her verbal and non-verbal presentation skills.
Public Persona was founded in January 2021. Jess is working through the big challenges of understanding her customers, setting up a website, and getting to grips with legal considerations and financing.
Her mission is to help other non-native English speakers gain confidence and improve their career value and self-worth. As a former actress, Jess has a bank of experience to draw on to help her clients prepare for presentations, job interviews, pitches – whatever they need.
One of the biggest issues Jess faced starting a business alone was the isolation. She found it lonely, and it was a struggle at times to find the motivation to keep going.
So she was pleased to discover Digital Boost, who provide unlimited one-hour mentor sessions as well as workshops and extensive digital training, in her search for business knowledge.
Her first priority was her website, so she selected experts in website development, one a female-founder like her. She was most impressed that they took time to research and came to the conversation with ideas and suggestions.
She found it incredibly valuable that people would give her honest feedback and recommendations which, for the best reasons, wasn’t always forthcoming from family and friends.
More sessions were been set up to explore user research, visual design, and branding. Jess is taking all the advice she can to get her business off to a strong start.
She said: “I’d definitely recommend Digital Boost. I think as women we tend to wait until we know something perfectly and are fully prepared, instead of just jumping in and figuring it out along the way. I would say to people if you had an idea you should just go for it. There are great resources out there like Digital Boost to help.”
Want to get digital experts’ help from Digital Boost?
Digital Boost, a leading digital upskilling platform, has partnered with Visa to support small businesses seeking to digitize and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Through Digital Boost’s platform, Visa’s employees can volunteer time, support and advice to small businesses in need of digital and business mentorship. Digital Boost is a free-of-charge online platform that brings together those who work in small businesses and charities with a community of expert volunteers drawn from larger businesses who have had years of training in digital skills and broader commercial strategy.
There are nearly six million small businesses in the UK (1). According to research, the combined productivity gap caused by low digitisation means a loss of £100 billion+ to GDP in Great Britain (2). Helping small businesses become more digital can help them not only meet changing consumer demand but also thrive, armed with the knowledge and tools they need to compete and grow in a global digital economy.
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