Hi all 👋 👋🏻 👋🏼 👋🏽 👋🏾 👋🏿
I’m super excited to send you More Diverse Voices‘ first-ever quarterly business update, I can’t believe it’s been almost 4 months since we officially incorporated!
The purpose of this update is:
- Firstly to say a MASSIVE THANK YOU to all you wonderful people
- Secondly to let ya’ll know what we’ve been getting up to
- And thirdly as a way for us to measure and monitor our impact and progress
If you have any questions or just want to chat about More Diverse Voices please drop me an email at emily@morediversevoices.com or drop a meeting in my diary.
Crowdbacker thank you 🙏🏻 and what you donations have supported so far:
On September 30th 2021 I stood in front of a (virtual) crowd of hundreds of people and delivered a 5-minute pitch outlining the vision for More Diverse Voices.
I had practised my script over and over again and although nervous I was ready to share my business idea with the world.
I was honestly overwhelmed by your generosity and words of encouragement. The pitch raised over £4500 to help set up More Diverse Voices.
So far that money has been spent on essential business tools and services (the crucial lifeblood of any startup), including:
💻 Getting our website up and running on Squarespace
💰 Onboarding our lovely accountants at Addition
💼 Paying for a year of business insurance with Axa
💻 Reimbursing myself for a second hand MacBook Air, after my ancient Mac decided it didn’t want to turn on anymore
🙏🏻 Thank you so so so much for playing such an important part of our journey. This contribution has already enabled us to deliver several communication projects for four different clients, all seeking to help make the world a more diverse and inclusive place. Below are a couple of highlights and two testimonials (both of which use the word “dream” in the first sentence, which I promise are COMPLETELY unprompted!) ❤️
Case studies and testimonials
🐝 PensionBee: the female-founded fintech combining all your old pensions into one online plan
Women in the UK have smaller pension pots than men at every stage of their careers. As a result, many are less financially resilient in older age and often have higher levels of vulnerability compared to their male counterparts.
PensionBee wants to change this and over the past 3 months, it has been an honour to help this inspiring company on its journey to do so. I actually interviewed the firm’s founder Romi back in 2019 about PensionBee’s company culture, so I’ve been a fan for a while!
As part of this project, More Diverse Voices helped to deliver two workshops, a strategy document, a survey and a report of the key finding exploring the barriers that women face when saving for retirement and the possible solutions. The full report will be out soon, but in the meantime here’s a lovely review from PensionBee’s VP of Brand and Communication Rachael Oku:
“More Diverse Voices are a dream to work with. They take the time to really understand what it is you want to achieve and work collaboratively with you to reach your goals. In our case, this involved running two communication workshops, and producing a strategy doc and report of the findings. The workshops were a great success and saw us receive excellent feedback from the participants, while the quality of the written materials was second to none. I have no doubt this piece of work will continue to inform our thinking for many months to come.” Rachael Oku, VP Brand and Communications, PensionBee
⚒️ Pivot: empowering people experiencing homelessness to Pivot their lives through making and enterprise
In the run-up to Christmas, the social enterprise Pivot wanted to make a splash in the press to help boost its profile and drive sales. Pivot was keen to highlight its new DIY Christmas Bauble, workshops and jewellery range, across well-read gift guides.
More Diverse Voices helped by sharing the inspirational stories of its inspiring team and showcasing its stunning product range with the media. As result, MDV helped Pivot secure 34 media mentions over the Christmas period, including British GQ’s perfect gift for mum gift guide, That’s Not My Age’s Christmas gift’s that give back, London The Inside Heroes campaign, The Big Issue eco-friendly gift guide, Prima’s best charity gift guide and the Ethical Unicorn’s 2021 sustainable & ethical gift selection.
“Working with Emily and More Diverse Voices has been a dream. With little experience of PR within Pivot, Emily has held our hand through the entire process, with clear aims and exceptional delivery. She’s achieved an incredible amount of press coverage leading to more sales, traction and ultimately helping us grow our brand.” Alice Moxley, founder, Pivot
What’s we’ve got in the pipeline:
🚎 We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve just started to work with the wonderful Transport for All, to help develop their external communications strategy and approach to storytelling.
💜 In February we’ll be helping curate an accessible “PR & Communication” course for Bua’s inclusive learning platform that aims to help disabled and neurodiverse talent to find meaningful opportunities in the creative sector.
🧠 We are supporting innovation foundation Nesta’s communication team with a number of projects linked to delivering their D&I commitments across the organisation. More on this soon, but in the meantime you can read about their D&I commitment here.
Our voice: blog posts, press and speaking engagements
🟦 I started a LinkedIn newsletter focusing on sharing my expertises on getting your voice heard. The first post was on 🤓 8 learnings from posting on LinkedIn every week for 13 weeks ✍️ and the second was on communications planning through a diversity and inclusion lens.
🖋 I shared my thoughts with the lovely Ettie Bailey-King on how to write a inclusive job ads for Charity Digital and did a profile interview for ND positive exploring my experience of dyslexia and the power of neurodiversity. I also had a lovely chat with our accountants Addition as part of their “When It All Adds Up” interview series.
🎓 On February 3rd I’ll be taking part in a panel for Cambridge Careers Service panel for Cambridge students who are interested in the world of freelancing and alternative career paths.
🏋🏼 In April I’ll be delivering a session for the Warrior Women Network on inclusive language. More details to be available very soon soon!