Illuminate Social Enterprise - The First West Midlands, Marketing Grants Programme

The West Midlands Social Enterprise Network (WMSEN) called me earlier this week and wanted FFC to shout from the BT tower about the Marketing grants fund launched this week, which is aimed at helping raise awareness of Social Enterprise Sector (SES) within the West Midlands region. Approximately 20-25 Small grants are intended to be made, each in the region of £3,000-£5,000 and applications are welcomed from partnerships, networks and consortia.:

The fund has been established with support from Advantage West Midlands the regions development agency, it is hoped that the offer of grant support will help to target a large variety of groups and assist in unlocking further support for the regions SES.

Ranjit Bansal the information & Marketing Officer for WMSEN said "Illuminate is an exciting opportunity to encourage innovative and creative projects...
...We hope to support a wide variety of activities including events, the development of promotional materials, websites, awareness raising tools and multimedia resources that will help us exploit the great potential we know exists for social enterprise in the region.’’:

Applications are invited from 1 August 2007 until 31 January 2008
For an application pack, contact Sandra Crowder, Network Administrator on 024 7663 3911 ext 113 or email s.crowder@cwcda.co.uk

Honest Interest, in people, in business - Challanges for growing a businesses and a sustainable sector

Below is an abridged version of an FFC press release posted to all the regional media a few months previously, we think that their is still value in the piece. In brief it contains some links to independent research carried out on behalf of Panasonic and also describes the necessary collaborations that can assist in closing the finance gaps which are a result of market failure, to help the regional sector grow supplying a third tier of business investment:

'FFC implemented an awareness drive at the beginning of 2006 with funding support provided by Advantage West Midlands, Barclays and European Funding (ERDF)...

...The majority of members can lend from 10K up to £50K with finance designed to help new and established small businesses who wish to grow; diversify or remain competitive...

George Keenan Head of Development for the FFC said “A recently published YouGov poll (SMEs in the UK: Seizing the Growth Challenge, Panasonic) of 800 small businesses found the key challenges to business growth is lack of money for investment. To progress the regions prosperity, we are now urging the regional finance community such as Banks, Accountants, Finance Brokers and Business Consultants, to signpost their small business clients to a FFC member when mainstream loan finance becomes unobtainable.”

Steve Williams Chief Executive of Impetus an active member of FFC highlighted the need to raise the profile; Steve said “In the last 18 months Impetus has lent over £400,000 to enterprise in Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire much of this financial assistance being packaged alongside other mainstream suppliers.”

Their were several regional variations comments from the our Birmingham member...

...Steve Walker Chief Executive of Aston Reinvestment Trust (ART) an active member of FFC highlighted the need to raise the profile; Steve said “ART has now lent over £5 million to enterprise in Birmingham and North Solihull much of this financial assistance being packaged alongside other mainstream suppliers.”

Including The Black Country...

Paul Kalinauckas, Chief Executive, Black Country Reinvestment Society and chairman of the FFC added “BCRS is able to help when the banks have done all they can by providing risk finance to SME’s across the Black Country and Southern Staffordshire region”

Does continuous engagement with the professional sector hold answer to the future success and sustained growth of the CDFI sector? and will engaging directly with the network of movers and shakers have an immediate and profound impact on the deal flow that is crucial to FFC development.

Many of our loans have been dispersed by working with banking partners members are keen to expand this type of cost efficient relationship, let hope our event can double our outputs, which includes our brand and PR profile. We meet again early August to agree on our agenda, we shall keep you posted.

Is blogging the marketing solution for 'Not for Profit' financial institutions?

June was, for the best part a complete nightmare, my lovely wife took seriously ill and for a normally very healthy individual it was a great shock. The majority of the awareness plans for June were shelved, thankfully home life is now returning to reasonable levels of normality. A massive thanks goes out to my employees, consortium members and funder's for the genuine support they all provided. Oh and the wife is out of hospital, back home and feeling much better.

During July we have been revising the look and feel of the Blog we do of course use a Blogger template which I think are great, we've also been testing out promoting the Blog via site targeted marketing through Google. During the first week we have received a large number of visitors for a very small investment in comparison to the cost of ads running on Search engine pages. OK maybe not all are all potential clients, or are targeted as accurately as the search engine campaigns, but that said site targeted ads are great awareness tool. Linking to other relevant blogs is the next stage of the plan.

I was also reading the BAD New Network yesterday and came across the Let’s Talk Starting in Business seminars to be delivered on a national scale in the UK and Wales By Barclays Bank and National Federation of Enterprise Agencies (NFEA). The West Midlands will get its fair share of FREE seminars they are designed for people looking to start a business. FFC really want to get involved especially call the free phone numbers to book your place.

I am in the process of evaluating our quarter one direct marketing campaign I am interested to see the level of interest that was raised from the campaign, I also have plans for a second email broadcast this time it will be region wide and the development team will be selecting the market segments. While I am on the subject have you looked into email broadcasting really cost effective way of getting your message across it certainly raised some initial interest, for very little spend indeed were talking £20 to £25 per 1,000 emails.

Now in the process of seeking approval for the FFC networking event, I have written the agenda, verbally invited the proposed speakers, selected the location , roughed out some dates , just need to lobby for some sponsorship and then draft the proposal. I am really keen to shape this, I am still keen to web cast sector and the event. Of course waiting for the members to approve all the above then off we go, If you are visiting this blog and work in professional capacity preferably at decision maker level drop an email across to info@fair-finance.net and we can reserve you a place for October.

Finally missed the CDFA conference due to the home emergency I was disappointed not to be able to attend, maybe next year I am sure I will be able to make it now they (AWM) have extended our teams contract until December 2008, excellent.

Welcome World- Who Are We?

Having tracked a fair number of new visitors to our blog we thought that it would help if people knew who we are, and what we do right away. Fair Finance Consortium is a collaboration of 11 CDFIs located in the West Midlands (Part of the UK). The members are small business (Not for Profit) who offer loan to either businesses or individuals who are or would be unable to gain financial support from their bank or other traditional financial organisation. For business, our products are designed to appeal to Startup, Micro Businesses and SMEs, loans range from (£1,000 up to £50,000). As a final note CDFIs are also designed to regenerate parts of the region where opportunity and investment is more difficult to obtain and to assist specific types of businesses in particular the social enterprise. The individual element of their lending is the provision of small personal loans at fair and reasonable interest rates for people who are unable to access affordable finance from their bank or who may borrow money from door step lenders or unlicensed credit brokers.

There is a lot more skills our members supply to the regional business communities these include professional business support, while working with long term banking partners. The individual organisations are operated by professional with high levels of financial management experience who’s voluntary Board members range from Corporate Lawyers, Barristers, Directors of Banking institutions and CEO of International Insurance Groups, Senior IT and Accountancy professionals.

We all strive to provide the best possible service to our potential clients, awareness and promotion is paramount to the growth of our unique sector, so regardless of where you reside it is highly likely that there is a similar type of organisation in your part of the world if not then you should be asking your local government rep "Can we have one of these CDFI thingy ma jigs down our street"

Spread the Word, Thanks.

Conference Season – Just a thought!

Question, are conferences value for money? last year (2006) our team was (kindly) inundated with invitations from all over Europe, as we are newly formed Consortium it was only right and proper that we attended as many (UK events) as possible, to find the ideal platform for exhibiting our organisation in 2007.

While the venues (Always very posh) speakers and supporting materials are always extremely well organised the challenge from our perspective was finding the top ten from the delegate list in between sessions. Could we locate our needles in the 400 strong haystack? Or read the name on the delegate badges without the aid of a jeweller’s monocle or hidden camera equipment? Not half as often as we had wished.

However that said we have introduced ourselves to some great people doing great stuff but they themselves described feeling unattached from the main objective of the event and were often seen throughout the day on the fringes of the tea and coffee buzz.

Perhaps the irony is that in order to control your sectors message and gain support for your activity with organisations that may not be, but need to be aware of your capabilities to add value, then the answer may lie in arranging your own smaller, concise and more intimately focused event. It could progress your objectives ten fold and may also quickly identify the true needs and future strategies of your hand picked guests. You also have the added luxury of deploying your existing advocates to ensure everyone is introduced to the right people during the break outs.

Please share with us your thoughts and experiences on the best possible shape of a personalised event. I am very positive about the future of our message and the plans that lie ahead in getting our own event of the ground, we’ll keep you posted. Have a great day.

Happy Birthday to Us, Happy Birthday to Us etc...

Yes its our birthday, www.fair-finance.net is now one year old and in this time our visitors have came from all over the world, and the good news is that we have received over 20,000 to our site with 2,000 browsing our members pages and over 500 enquiries for help. over the next 12 months we anticipate that this will increase again, possibly by another 50%, we shall see.

The Devheadz team has also been tweaking the online advertising so we can make as many people aware about us for the least amount of cost. We must have attended 20 to 30 events to raise our profile in the West Midlands. Of course we understand that not everyone has or chooses to use the internet to find information so we are sending out our message direct to existing businesses and many of our members are seeing some real results from their own Direct Marketing campaigns. We are also plugging our service on as many free information sites as we can. If you have any suggestion that could help then drop us a post.

The Agency (AWM) who assist in funding the work of the Devheadz and have agreed to continue to support our activity for the next 18 months, this is great news as building a name that people recognize takes time and effort and of course money.

One other element of our project helping people get the finance that they need to launch or expand their business is by working with the Private sector, you know we exist because of what is often referred to as market failure. Bank refusals are part of our lending criteria so we understand that working closely to gain support and a good healthy flow of referrals is going to help expand our operations, this is a lot harder and more complex than writing ads or plugging we sites, however real plans are shaping up to make this a reality so we shall keep you posted on these developments.

In fact the next 12 months a large majority of our work will be about Business Development and networking with the banking and other companies who have strong links with regional business as well as a major PR drive, A very helpful associate has also recommended that we also take a look at the Social Networking Phenomenon that is sweeping the business world on the US and probably set to do the same over here, we'll also let you have an insight into how this works once we've figured out what to do to get the best from the recommended sites.

Bye for now, we're off to enjoy some well earned B'day cake.

Happy New Year

From the members of the FFC members, the good new is that 2007 will see some big changes in the way in which business advice and support is administered, the Business Links service will be changing, the new design will aim to help even more people find the type of support they need more quickly and accurately. To find out more contact your local Business Link office. The West Midlands Access to Finance has also changed and it is now easier to find what you are looking for so give this a click too.

We have been working extra hard to reach more people if it is your first time then our members are helping more people than ever before who are looking for the investment to start small businesses or those of you located in the more rural areas of our region. What we are working on next is to improve the awareness of what our members offer to existing and the larger businesses our campaign starts in the next few, all said we have had over 10,000 visitors to our site over the last 8 months. If you have a friend or relative that is in need of some alternative investment pass on our web address. Word of Mouth is a really great way for us to promote our unique service.

We are still waiting for our new members to sign up to the service, however we have had some interest from organisations located on the outskirts of the West Midlands, the need for these type of products are very much in demand al over the world.

We would love to hear your experiences so please don’t be shy you can send us anything about your experiences these are all taken on board and help us to improve our site or products so tell us what you think that what the blog is for. All the best until next time Best regards from the Devheadz.