Stuck in a content rut? We've got you covered with our top content ideas for April 💪

April Awareness Days

Awareness Days are an amazing way to engage with trending content and a great way to build your brand 🎉

Try adding some of the awareness days to your content in April! 👇

• IBS Awareness Month
• Stress Awareness Month
• Bowel Cancer Awareness Month
• National Pet Month
• April Fool's Day - April 1st
• National Siblings Day - April 10th
• Earth Day - April 22nd

These are just a handful of the days coming up in April, so make sure you check out the full lineup here and choose a couple of days relevant to you and your brand 🎉

Reintroduction Posts

The start of a new month is also a great time to do a mini introduction to your audience!

Whether you send out a monthly email or do a series of Instagram stories reminding your audience how you can help them, never underestimate the power of reintroduction.

Not sure where to start? Why not try an 'Ask Me Anything' series on Instagram? You can use the Q&A feature on stories to invite your audience to get to know you and organically remind them about any services you offer 💪

Share Success Stories

Had an amazing testimonial from a customer? Why not celebrate it on socials?!

Sharing testimonials from happy customers is an especially great way to showcase the products and services you offer AND a fabulous way to build trust with potential customers on your channels 👏

Need some help knowing where to start? Check out one of our Digital Boost Success Stories here!

Still feeling stuck?

Creating content isn't easy, but luckily we've got expert mentors on hand to help!

A woman on a mission to reduce plastic waste and make periods fun for women around the world 💚

Having had a hugely successful career in the wine industry that saw Nicola working around the world, when she returned with her family to the UK, she knew she was ready for a new challenge but wasn’t sure what that business would look like.

After taking part in a number of local beach cleanups during the Covid-19 lockdowns, Nicola Buswell saw first-hand the huge amounts of plastic waste menstrual products cause. After learning about the 200,000 tonnes of plastic period waste that ends up in landfill each year, Nicola knew she’d found her cause, and set about researching everything she could about sustainable menstrual options. 

Coming from a career in the wine industry, Nicola had a good amount of business knowledge but was looking for some extra support to build her business from the ground up and get some accountability whilst doing it. 

Joining Digital Boost

Having joined the Digital Boost family through our partnership with Meta, Nicola credits Diigtal Boost and the programme with bringing her business into the digital market.  She said Digital Boost “pushed me nicely out of my comfort zone into where I needed to be”. 

Having only started Power of Pants in 2020, Nicola says through the help of Digital Boost mentors she feels less overwhelmed and has a clear vision of what her business is and who her target audience is! Having the accountability of our mentors and an exclusive Mentoring Day with Visa’s European team has helped Nicola to reconnect with her “why” and she’s ready to keep pushing her business forward and bringing her fabulous sustainable period pants to the world! 💚

You can find Power of Pants here or over on Instagram. 

Hear from Nicola

Here's Nicola talking about how the programme and Digital Boost mentoring gave her the accountability and digital skills she needed to take her business to the next level:

P.S. For every 10 pairs sold, Nicola donates one to charity to help fight period poverty. Read more here.

Can we help you with your business challenges? We've got thousands of business mentors ready to help!

After suffering a life-altering injury aged just 19, Amelia realised how uncomfortable and basic the walking aids available to her were.  As she began her recovery journey, she started to dream up her own walking aids that would be comfortable, functional AND stylish.  

CoolCrutches was born and with the help of her mother, Amelia has been able to grow CoolCrutches from a personal project into a thriving business that’s supporting people around the world to express themselves and look cool with their crutches 💖

Having run Cool Crutches as a successful side hustle alongside her full-time PR job, Amelia took the leap and gave herself 6 months to make Cool Crutches her full-time job.  She threw everything she had at it, and after seeing Amanda Holden suffer a broken leg in 2019, reached out to see if she could help with customised crutches to make her Heart FM show a little bit easier to navigate.  Amanda’s team were delighted with the idea and after Amanda was pictured with Amelia’s custom-made crutches, Cool Crutches truly skyrocketed.

Although Amelia had huge amounts of experience in the corporate world, stepping into a full-time founder role had it’s challenges and she knew she needed a helping hand to guide her on this new journey.  

Amelia joined the Digital Boost family after completing a #SheMeansBusiness programme and for her, having the programme was amazing for networking, but the mentoring was where she found the true value. 

We were able to connect Amelia with Nick, one of our amazing NatWest mentors, and he was able to lay out her business ideas with her and formulate a plan that worked for Amelia and her family. When you’re a founder, there’s so much pressure to make your business work at any cost, but Nick was able to remove that pressure for Amelia and help her to see how she could grow her business more holistically in a way that wouldn’t come at a cost to her and her health! 

Amelia now describes Digital Boost as her own personal shopping list of everything she needs to succeed! She said, “[Digital Boost] have a shopping list of what scaling involves, essentially, before you even know you need it!” 

With our help, Amelia has been able to get the clarity she needs to keep growing and plan HUGE expansion for Cool Crutches! We’re so excited to have been able to support Amelia on her journey and look forward to continuing to do so with our expert mentoring 💖

Here's Amelia talking about the value speaking to a mentor adds to her business:

Can business mentoring help your business? Our services are entirely free and we have thousands of mentors ready to help!

Here at Digital Boost, we love female founders! 

So we were delighted to see the great progress made by female founders highlighted in The Rose Review Progress Report 2022!

Report Findings

• In 2022, women in the UK launched 151,603 companies, up from 145,271 in 2021 and more than twice the level in 2018.
• The number of female-led companies grew despite challenging economic conditions and represented a fifth of all businesses in the UK in 2022, up from 16 per cent in 2018.
• All-female-led companies represented 20% of all businesses in the UK in 2022, up from 16% in 2018.
• The biggest leap was amongst 16-25 year old female founders, which rose by almost a quarter.

However, the report also made it clear there is still so much to be done. For example, 50% of female business leaders and entrepreneurs reported finding access to funding and investment hard in the past 12 months, vs. 40 of their male equivalents. Additionally, 40% of female founders expect finding funding to get even harder.

This International Women’s Day, we were pleased to attend an event hosted by The Rose Review and our partners NatWest Group and Mastercard’s Strive Learning Network to explore these challenges and potential solutions in more depth. The event brought more than 100 business leaders, female entrepreneurs, MPs, and policymakers together in London. There was so much energy in the room!

Panel Discussion

Digital Boost’s Managing Director Karen Licurse chaired a spirited debate with four brilliant entrepreneurs. The session explored what support will make the biggest difference for them. We heard from:

Rupal Patel, CEO, executive coach and author

Sabrina Del Prete, Founder and CEO, Kore Labs

Joanna Jensen, Founder, Childs Farm Ltd

Mildred Talabi, Networks development manager, Be the Business

Each female founder shared their own inspiring personal journey and shared some key challenges and opportunities: 

• Funding continues to be the number one obstacle for female founders. Only 5% of venture capital funding goes to female-led businesses.
• The SEIS/EIS schemes have been crucial to many female-founded businesses and we need to ensure that they are more well-known and remain available.
• Similarly, we need greater awareness of the support already out there, including mentoring, training, and access to expertise. 
• We need more visibility for all female founders to ensure that they are included in the networks that will help them thrive.
• The public and private sectors need to work together to find real solutions to core issues that female founders grapple with, including childcare options and costs, and maternity and caregiver leave for female entrepreneurs.

This is just the start of the conversation. At Digital Boost we are committed to seeing real change happen - and will be with female founders every step of the way. We designed our free business mentoring and support service to make it highly flexible and open to all. We want to ensure female founders and other underrepresented groups feel supported and aren’t left behind. 

Get in touch if you want to collaborate together to empower and enable female founders. If you’re a female founder, let us know what support you need most and join our thriving community for support, guidance and peer networking. 

We’re a small but mighty team and today we wanted to introduce some of the women behind Digital Boost! 

From product testers and developers to marketers, the women in Digital Boost keep the wheels turning to deliver all our amazing services 🎉

Come meet them here 👇

Karen

Meet Karen, the Managing Director of Digital Boost 👋

She leads our team and makes sure we’re delivering an amazing service whilst constantly encouraging us to dream big and reach for the stars with DB 💫

Q: What’s your comfort TV?

The Food Network 

Q: What’s your favourite thing about our platform?

Personalised Recommendations - we take the guesswork (and googling!) out of finding a mentor, event or learning resources - and recommend the best ones just for each business.

Masuma

Say hi to Masuma, our Partnerships & Marketing manager and all-round superstar! Masuma never shies away from a project and has singlehandedly project-managed the move to our new site (which we’re pretty proud of!) - get to know Masuma here 👇

Q: What’s your comfort TV?

Has to be Gossip Girl - I could watch it on repeat constantly!

Q: What do you love most about working at Digital Boost? 

I love our team so much! Everyone is so genuinely lovely and helpful and we all have the same mission - to help small businesses get support for free. It feels amazing to work for an organisation and a team that all have the same goal and just want to do something good.

Q: What’s your favourite thing about our platform?

Oooh I think it's got to be Community Requests - I like that mentors who have some capacity can jump in and help someone.

Palak

Introducing Palak! Our superstar product tester and all-round website queen. Palak single-handly tests everything before it hits our platform, she’s got the best eye for detail and always has the best ideas of how we can improve our platform for our community! Get to know Palak here 👇

Q: What do you love most about working at Digital Boost?

Amazing team with great social impact

Q: What’s your favourite thing about our platform?

Community Requests!

Alice

I'm Alice, and I'm the Community Manager at Digital Boost so I'm the lucky team member who gets to speak to our lovely community and help you get the support you need 🥰 You'll also see me on socials and our Masterclasses! Here's a little bit about me so you can get to know me more 👇

‍Q: What do you love most about working at Digital Boost?

Hands down, the team! This is the BEST team in the world 🌎 Everyone is so unbelievably supportive, kind and collaborative. 

Q: What’s your favourite thing about our platform?

Ooo for me it’s the new shareable mentor profiles! We wanted our mentors to be able to shout even louder about the volunteering they do and it’s so cool that mentors can now share their profiles with their networks and showcase how and when they can mentor 💪

Diana

Meet Diana, she’s one of the fabulous developers bringing our platform to life.  Diana handles all of our front-end design and she makes coding look easy! She’s super talented and we love how much care and attention to detail she brings to the team - she’s always coming up with new fixes to make the experience even better for our community 💪 Get to know Diana here 👇

Q: What do you love most about working at Digital Boost?

Friendly environment and product with purpose

Q: What’s your favourite thing about our platform?

Community requests!

Digital Boost’s Mentoring Platform is now available for white labeling

If you’re still running your mentoring programme with spreadsheets and emails, or you want to get the best content to small businesses in the moment they need it, our mentoring platform can help.

We built a powerful mentoring platform to fuel our volunteer-led small business support programme. It’s enabled thousands of mentoring and coaching connections to date, saving countless hours and manual intervention. Now we want to save others the effort!

We’re pleased to announce that a customisable version of the Digital Boost platform is now available to help you easily connect your community and enable knowledge sharing - while saving time and manual effort.

Mentor matching and reporting made easy

Our easy-to-use mentoring platform uses automation and smart matching to connect people at scale - while measuring performance and impact in real time.

Here are just a few of the features it brings:

• Self serve for users - no need for a middle man to arrange everything - save time and money.
• Smart matching - Matches are based on preferences users control.
• Automated scheduling - Send invitations, reminders, video call links, reschedule requests, and more.
• Secure messaging and data protection – no need for mentees and mentors to share emails or phone numbers.
• Content and event recommendations - feature the right content for the user in their moment of need.
• Robust tracking and measurement - users can track their activity; admins can monitor progress and quality in real-time.
• Customisation to fit the needs of your programme - branding, matching and more.

Let’s collaborate

Digital Boost is proud to work with leading partners and thousands of expert volunteers to run mentoring programmes and help people learn and grow. We’d love to partner with you. Get in touch today to discuss how we can help more small businesses together.

Krishna, founder of Mistry Lighting was creating innovative lighting design for restaurants when she lost her job due to Covid-19. She turned her passion for lighting and sustainability into a business, helping people create beautiful schemes for their homes. A Digital Boost mentor from BT helped Krishna create an Instagram following and get her business off the ground.

Krishna, an architectural lighting designer, wanted to pursue a career in theatre set design when she graduated ten years ago, but due to the recession jobs were hard to come by. Her sister encouraged her to try lighting design and within three months she landed a job at a lighting manufacturer, who taught her everything she needed to know about the fundamentals of design and how lighting works.

She moved on to work on major projects like Tottenham Stadium in London, a metro station in Riyadh and she has created atmospheric schemes for over 25 Nando’s restaurants, embracing their ethos on sustainability.

But restaurants aren’t opening due to Covid-19 and Krishna was made redundant last September. So, she took a chance and created a business of her own, Mistry Lighting, with a focus on domestic projects - because people are renovating. Competing with thousands of interior design and lighting companies, she has drawn heavily on her network and ethical ethos, seeking help to grow sales and attract a social media following.  

A family friend sent her a link to Digital Boost, who provide unlimited mentorships via partners including Google, DCMS and BT. She had four mentoring calls, becoming more focused on an area of need as she went along.  

Her connection with a mentor from BT was especially helpful. She guided Krishna on how to make Instagram work, the best use of hashtags, creating quality content, and analytics. Mistry Lighting now has over a thousand followers, including influencers, and a website is in development.    

Krishna is the kind of person who can’t enter a room without looking up. She works with daylight to understand how much artificial light is needed. She is passionate about effects of light on mood, productivity, health, and well-being, especially in office and school spaces when we return. She is always learning and pushing technical and design boundaries, working with local artisans who create light out of recycled materials.

She said:

“Digital Boost has been brilliant. No-one around me has experience of building a business but now I want to help others to do it too.

I will be back to learn about branding and product development. If I become very successful, perhaps one day I can also be a mentor for Digital Boost!”

Want to get digital experts' help from Digital Boost?

Every home is different and what you choose to put on your walls can give an intimate insight into your life and personality. 

But if you choose to decorate your home with original art, the buying process can be intimidating. The art market is mysterious and unregulated. According to Liezel and Kitty, it’s the only industry where you can be made to feel like an idiot just for asking the price! 

Founded in 2011 by Liezel with her husband Jon, the business is on a mission to democratise art, making it fair and available to everyone. She met Kitty in 2014 when they were both new mums living in the same apartment block in London. Truly the power of an accidental connection.

The two now co-curate an international and highly personal art collective featuring hand-picked artists. Both believe in the power of honest and transparent communication, whether it is with their artists, their clients, or each other. 

Turning traditional male-dominated representation on its head, 70% of the artists supported are female. Clients are predominantly female too, and Kitty advises them to shop with their heart, their head, and their eyes, not purely for investment. Make an emotional connection and then imagine where the piece would sit in their homes. “Our dream clients”, she says, “are people who simply love art. We are bringing together artists and clients who wouldn’t otherwise connect.”

Liezel and Kitty had found a voice on Instagram, standing up for fair play for artists, but art is an irregular and highly considered purchase. So, they focused on attracting more people to the website, to browse and return when the time is right to buy. To increase their reach, Liezel and Kitty decide to invest in making the website more intuitive and self-sustaining through search engine optimisation (SEO). They needed insights they could use, having learned from experience that as a small business you couldn’t afford to make too many mistakes. That’s why they came to Digital Boost.

Digital Boost, who provide free business mentoring plus workshops and personalised resources for SMEs, were advertised in the weekly newsletter of Somerset House, where Subject Matter Art have their workspace. They connected with a mentor from Apple, clearly an art-lover, who gave them an invaluable lowdown on SEO strategy, with suggestions that were followed up by email. Another from Visa worked through very practical action points on the same topic. Between the two, they had a very clear direction, and a solid starting point. Kitty and Liezel then hired a specialist freelancer to make it work. Thanks to the Digital Boost mentors, they had shortcut a whole host of confusing online blogs, had confidence in their approach, and understood how to read success or failure in their SEO strategy. 

Their immediate focus is to get SEO working to attract more website views, newsletter signups and Instagram followers. They already have plans to return to Digital Boost, to further improve their SEO expertise and then tackle the user journey, planning to connect with a UX expert. 

Kitty reflects: “I have already recommended Digital Boost to a business group I mentor. My advice would be to be clear on exactly what you need to know and check that the mentor you connect with can help with that.”

Want to get digital experts' help from Digital Boost?

Our volunteers are amazing and we wanted to recognise their hard work and dedication to our community this year. Our mentees voted and we're so excited to introduce you to our mentors of 2022! Come celebrate them here with us.

‍‍Sebastien G.

Alejandro A.

‍Allexia G.

‍Nick H.

‍James V.

‍If you'd like to join our community of volunteers helping small businesses, click here.

Sarah set up Leeni's, an online store that stocks a curated collection of premium kidswear brands, in April 2021 after she had her daughter. 'I realised how hard it is to find good quality kids' clothes with unique and quirky designs and made from organic materials so I started to search until I found a number of great independent brands that tick all the right boxes but they were mostly overseas. And that's when the idea sparked in my head to bring those beautiful brands closer to families here in the UK.'

Leeni's is an online store that stocks a curated collection of premium kidswear brands. 'We encourage comfort, colours, fun prints and unisex designs to avoid labelling kids and to encourage them to express themselves freely. All the brands we work with only use organic natural materials and ensure sustainability and ethical practices.'

She said her proudest moment was actually turning the idea she had into reality! She also is continuing to learn and grow every day, something that she said Digital Boost has helped with: 'Digital Boost has been a lifesaver, especially in the early days when everything was still new and I wasn't sure if I was doing the right things! Marketing was, and still is, one of my obstacles and every time I feel stuck, I look for a mentor in Digital Boost to answer my questions. Digital Boost made it easy for me to find mentors with the experience or topics I wanted and it was very simple to book a session with them.' We're so happy we've been able to help, Sarah!

Want to get digital experts' help from Digital Boost?