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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