Over the summer, I interned as a community and marketing intern for Birmingham Enterprise Community (BEC), a social enterprise that supports entrepreneurs, emerging startups, and local businesses across the midlands region in the UK. As an incubator startup, BEC was only a year-and-a-half old at the time that I joined them and, like many other startups, was facing disruptions due to COVID-19. Their startup incubator and accelerator programs were all facing low enrollment rates, and the team was forced to mark down program prices by 80 percent to ensure participation. They were also exploring different revenue streams and hoping for marketing efforts to help understand what that new stream would look like. With prior experience in strategy and marketing, I recommended analyzing current streams of revenues’ performance before pivoting strategy and then, created a community engagement and social media strategy to try to increase enrollment into both free and paid programs BEC offered.

After speaking with peers who have extensive marketing experience at Columbia, I ran an A/B test on Facebook’s Business Manager to promote leads and conversions to BEC’s Skills for Tomorrow program, which was in in partnership with Innovate UK and gave free entrepreneurial skills training to young professionals who faced disruption due to COVID-19. The test was very insightful and helped us define our audience and ads strategy. I also learned how to use Facebook’s pixel to monitor a user's journey after clicking through our ads, which helped us optimize pages on our website that were facing high bounce rates. As part of this, I also got feedback from Columbia contacts that have UX/UI experience to help develop new pages for the website and take pixel data to create more easily. Through my internship, I also worked on community engagement through establishing regular outreach to BEC’s entrepreneurs, current cohorts, alumni, and other stakeholders via newsletters, circulating free entrepreneurial tools, creating customer-focused content for social media, and speaking with current BEC participants to showcase their success stories and make BEC work for them, rather than the other way around.

My internship was remote and with a time difference of five hours, as BEC’s team was based in UK while I was in Washington, DC. As such, communication with my team was not always easy. My 8 AM was their lunch time, while by 1 PM, their team was out of the door, and I was on my own. Luckily, I had a warm relationship with my supervisor and together we established a system where I would send my questions and coordination communications at the end of every day so that I could wake up in the morning to answers. Since BEC was a startup, I also faced the challenge of working in a small team where I worked across functions when necessary — taking on marketing, communications, outreach, and even strategy roles within the same day rather than one strict role. Even so, I enjoyed the cross-department communication this forced upon me, while also allowing me to have a more holistic view of the startup, which influenced the quality of my work overall.

Having an NGO background, working with BEC was the first time I had a position in a private, yet socially-focused business, and I found that workflows were quite similar. This could be because BEC is still a developing startup and as a former project manager in the NGO world, I was used to a fast-paced environment with many moving actors and parts. It was also interesting to me that as a social enterprise, BEC was awarded government funding for activities while also having its own activity-based revenue streams.

At BEC, I was able to strengthen my knowledge about the work incubators and accelerators do for their startups, as well as some global tools and resources that many startups use to organize their workflow, finances, legals, communications, etc. I also learned a little about the startup eco-system in the UK, as well as the more technical side of marketing using Facebook’s business manager, tracking pixels, the difference between leads and conversion rates, and CPC, CPA, and CAC.