The UK has a comparatively low level of female entrepreneurship with the rest of the world, with men twice as likely to start a business as women. Why don’t more women feel inclined to start their own business?

The London Business School found that a third of the UK female population would start a business if it wasn’t for the fear of failure. This reduced confidence has been linked to a lack of female role models not only in the business sector, but specifically with start-ups. Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are the go-to faces.

Studies have found that seeing other female business owners is by far the most inspirational figure for women deciding to start a business, and having access to women specific support was both important and significantly increased participation of women in business.

That said, female-focussed business support, and mere visibility, was limited.

(Sources: http://startups.co.uk/female-entrepreneurs-the-facts/

http://www.prowess.org.uk/facts)

To make our idea compelling to businesswomen, we created an online film to explain the idea and distributed it to related business websites. Once, the space was sold, we produced posters for over 80 individual businesses, each designed to communicate their own unique selling point.

Once the posters were live, the hashtag #SeeAPosterHelpABusiness was created. The participating businesses formed a supportive community, tweeting pictures of the posters they spotted and asking others to reciprocate. The campaign’s reach within the female business community continued to increase as people discussed the campaign on their individual websites and blogs, extending the audience beyond the original poster sites and into the personal channels of our core audience.

Overall, over 80 pieces of work were designed, produced and distributed to 2 very distinct target audiences: the business owners who needed to buy a poster, and the commuters who would see the final campaign.

We sold all 200 posters to a total of 82 businesses in the first week! This raised £20,000 before the posters even went live. The average loan is just £72, so we were able to give a hand-up to nearly 300 African businesswomen and with each loan helping a further 5 dependents, we were able to help 1,500 people in our women’s families.

Only 10 of the 82 UK donor businesses had been involved with MicroLoan previously, meaning 88% of our donors were new to the brand. They not only became aware of our tiny charity, but were also able to experience MicroLoan’s mission of helping women build businesses first hand.

Our Women4Women campaign offered a fresh perspective on how to portray women, both in Africa and the UK – not as victims of circumstance, but as empowered individuals with ambition and drive.

The UK Giving Report stated that 75% of charity donors give because of ‘a particular belief in a specific cause’. So, rather than generating mass awareness, we micro-targeted the people who would care the most – other businesswomen.

Instead of running an ad about Microloan, our ‘Women 4 Women’ campaign sold free media as advertising space to UK businesswomen, with all donations going to businesswomen in Africa.

For just £100 our audience were able to expose their brands to millions of commuters every. Though worlds apart, we unlocked our audience’s empathy through a like-minded ambition. By building their businesses in burgers or physiotherapy, our audience could help women like them build a fishing fleet or dried goat network.

Donors experienced first-hand MicroLoan’s mission of helping women build businesses. We changed their perception of us being a charity about African poverty, to being a charity FOR businesswomen.

MicroLoan Foundation is a tiny UK-based charity that gives small business loans to women in Africa to help alleviate poverty. Why only women?

In both Malawi and Zambia, women are more likely to be poor and at risk of hunger because of the discrimination they consistently face in education, health care, employment and control of assets. Women also face much higher levels of financial exclusion than men, so often struggle to access capital to invest or facilities to save. All of these issues keep many women in poverty, and contribute to the fact that 60% of the world’s poorest people are women and girls. Evidence has shown that when a woman generates her own income, she is likely to re-invest 90% of it into her family and community. That’s why MicroLoan supports women.

In 2015, the charity was given free poster media in the London Underground – great media for awareness, yet we made fundraising our objective. In 2013, when offered the same media opportunity, the text-to-donate poster only managed to raise just over £50. As a tiny charity, with little awareness, we knew this would be a tough challenge.