Primary Research Findings
Introduction
Today, women are not only an active participant in the workplace, but it is becoming increasingly common for women to own their own businesses. 12.3 million businesses are owned by women in the United States. (Gonzalez, 2018) The ability to leverage social media to accomplish their business goals is an essential skill for these entrepreneurs. The CWL has a follower base of 2,666 followers. The Creative Women’s League looks to fulfill a need for these women by providing classes for them to gain the necessary know how when it comes to social media for their business. By creating new content on previously unutilized platforms, The Creative Women’s League hopes to increase its follower count and in turn increase the number of paid conversions.
“Social media provides targeting capability, as well as reach and scale, at a lower cost than almost all other marketing channels," said Abdul Muhammad, chief digital officer, partner at rbb Communications. (Driver, 2018) As it is the most accessible form of marketing, learning how to optimize your brand’s profile to be found on social media should be of the utmost importance to any business owner. As of January of 2018, there were over 4 billion active internet users in the world (Shaw, 2018) with an estimated 81 million Americans on social media (Sreenivasan, n.d.). To make your business attractive to as many people as you can, you need to know how to reach them where they are.
Many Americans say they would like to see more women in top leadership positions not only in politics, but also in the corporate world. (Horowitz, Ingelnik, and Parker, 2018) Seeing women take these roles in business can help increase representation in all arenas. The New York State senate is looking for ways to improve representation in government (Associated Press, 2018) One way of elevating more women to these positions is with women mentoring women (Dillon, 2018). Another is through legislation; a California law would require a company to appoint at least one woman to its board of directors by 2019 and for boards of more than five to include at least two women by 2021 (Ghaffary and Molla, 2018). Melinda Gates was quoted with "I know we need to do something to accelerate women in business." (Taylor, 2018). However, with biases in the way it can be a difficult obstacle to overcome (Rosenberg, 2018). Prejudices like what types of work women are able to do, for example run rampant in some areas (Gold, 2018) The Creative Women’s League looks to stifle these and provide a valuable service for women business leaders.
Method
25 followers of The Creative Women’s League signed up for a free “Uplevel Your Instagram” course. People who signed up for this course were selected as trial participants for future courses. As a part of the agreement for the free course, they were asked to take part in a survey that would go towards the development of future classes for the Creative Women’s League. There was a no-name survey conducted on Google Forms with 25 completions registered. Questions requested general demographic information such as
• Age
• Sex
• Location (Country, City, State)
• Income Level (Less than $20,000/ Annually, $20,000 to $29,000/Annually, $30,000-
$39,000/Annually, $40,000-$49,000/Annually, $50,000-$59,000/Annually, $60,000-
$69,000/Annually, $70,000-$79,000/Annually, $80,000-$89,000/Annually,
$90,000-99,000/Annually, $100,000+/Annually)
• What types of projects would you like to see featured? (Sewing, quilting, graphic design, writing.)
• How many projects do you work on in a month?
• What do you feel is an appropriate amount of time for a YouTube video? (1:00-5:00, 5:00-10:00, 10:00-15:00, 15:00-20:00, 20:00+)
• What other services do you have subscriptions to? (Hulu, Netflix, HBO, Birchbox, etc.)
• What amount would you be willing to pay for more classes from the Creative Women’s League? ($100, $200, $300, $400, $500)
With Google Forms, all data is captured and quantified natively on the platform. For the Qualitative data pertaining to the question about “what types of projects would you like to see featured?” categories of work were coded into four different categories (1 for writing, 2 for sewing, 3 for quilting, and 4 for graphic design). With a range of 3, a mode of 2 and a mean of 2.28 an acceptable range of answers was established. In total, with 25 participants answering 9 questions resulted in 225 responses. Respondents were 96% female with an age range of 22 to 54 and a mean age of 38 years. 40% of the respondents had an annual income between $40,000 and $49,000.
Results
Out of 25 respondents, 32% of respondents worked on 2 projects a month. 48% of respondents felt 10:00-15:00 was an appropriate amount of time for a YouTube Video. 96% of respondents had a subscription to Netflix. 68% of respondents would be willing to pay $200 for future courses. 44% of respondents would like to see more sewing projects featured in content on the Creative Women’s League.