THE CHALLENGE

Digital Boost is a charity-owned learning platform that connects small businesses with volunteer mentors and peers for free, personalised learning and support. This is important because, when you’re struggling with a challenge in your business, talking to someone who’s done it before can make all the difference.

Their goal is to make business mentorship and personalised support easily available to all small businesses and charities. Digital Boost’s partners include an impressive catalogue of large businesses, from NatWest and Mastercard to BT and EY. These partners, alongside individuals that offer support, provide free bespoke mentoring sessions for the small businesses and charities on Digital Boost’s platform.

The team at Digital Boost wanted to create a bank of educational content to support their volunteers, so they can continue to build on their mentoring skills and conduct successful mentoring sessions, every time.

THE PROCESS

Inkwell was asked to develop an educational video course of eight separate videos, along with cheat sheets to support this content.

These videos would be used to build an email course, which would be sent to any new volunteer who signed up to the platform. The course and resources are also available on-demand at any time for all mentors via their personal dashboard.

Our experience of running The Pitch gives us insight into common startup struggles, and what we should focus on in the content.

Discovery calls

To build on our knowledge of supporting small business owners, we conducted discovery calls with mentors and mentees to develop the course structure and content.

From the mentees, we gained insight about their pain points. From the mentors, we learned what they’ve struggled with during mentoring sessions, as well as what startup issues come up regularly.

We’ve discussed the importance of discovery calls for generating content ideas before on our blog. They can be an incredibly powerful tool to sense-check everything you know about your customers, so you don’t spend valuable time and resources creating content that doesn’t resonate.

Creating high-quality, Personable video content

Digital Boost are all about being friendly and accessible, so they wanted us to capture this within the videos.

Our lead writer Kat joined our videographer to film the videos at a venue in London. They spent the day filming with a variety of mentors and mentees to get all the footage we needed. We shared the filming day on LinkedIn, which really resonated with our audience, achieving a 15% engagement rate.

Afterwards, we edited the footage into eight different videos. Each video also included key tips and takeaways, and multiple camera angles to break up the interview format and keep it engaging.

Providing an extra layer of support

As well as the videos, new volunteers are emailed cheat sheets containing extra information on small business pain points, important questions to ask and other things to keep in mind during sessions.

The cheat sheets can be downloaded or printed prior to a mentoring session for the mentor to refer to. This helps them prepare for and structure each of their sessions effectively — and better deal with any unexpected issues that may come their way.

"The team at Inkwell brought a strong understanding of small businesses, which helped them pinpoint the skills and techniques mentors need. The video course and resources we created together are highly practical, easy to use, and engaging – making it easy for our mentors to continually build their skills and confidence."

— Karen Licurse, Managing Director at Digital Boost