Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
“When you look at the statistics when it comes to Black women founders, yes, I am an anomaly,” says Denise Woodard, CEO and founder of Partake Foods. “If Marcy Venture Partners hadn’t invested in us, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
Companies led by Black women typically receive less than 1% of all venture capital funding, according to Crunchbase. During the Diversity Tipping Point in May 2020, the period when corporate America acknowledged that Black Lives Matter, there was a significant investment in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. It also correlated with an uptick in VC funding for Black-founded and led start-ups. Then the ensuing DEI backlash happened, so the investments didn’t last long. According to Crunchbase, financing for Black founders dropped 45% in 2022.
Since founding her business in 2016, Woodard has raised more than $25 million in capital. In the past two years, Partake Foods, a consumer products goods brand offering delicious and better-for-you snacks free of the top nine allergens, has achieved 69% revenue growth. The company has increased distribution from 6,000 doors to 14,000 doors. She has built an incredible business, receiving industry accolades, a loyal consumer following, high-profile partnerships and more investors knocking on her door. And yet, Woodard knows this isn’t the case for many Black women founders.
“It’s clear that in my ecosystem, there is a deprioritization of DEI efforts over the last year. So, yes, I’m a Black and Korean American woman who’s raised more than $25 million for my startup, but there is still underwhelming, limited access to capital for Black and brown people,” Woodard says. “Less than 1% of all VC funding went to Black and Latina women in 2022. We are consistently over-mentored and under-funded.”
As she continues to grow and scale her company, here’s the advice Woodard has to share with other Black women starting businesses.
1. If you can’t stop thinking about your business idea, it’s time to go all in
“If your business idea keeps you up at night and pushes you out of bed in the morning, it’s time to go all in,” Woodard says. “Building a business can be soul-crushingly hard. So you have to believe in your capabilities and have an unwavering commitment that this business is going to solve a need and make an impact.”
Image credit: Partake
Woodard went all-in when it came to Partake Foods: She maxed out her credit cards, emptied her 401k and even sold her engagement ring. Building this business was a dream she couldn’t let go of. She decided to devote all her time, energy and resources to making it a reality. She also said she never once thought of quitting. “I would quit if the business concept no longer made sense or something had drastically changed. And I wasn’t going to quit just because things got tough. I want my daughter to know that persistence and patience are key and are, quite frankly, underrated qualities that more leaders need to embrace.”
2. Stay focused — you can’t do everything well
During the pandemic, more and more consumers were baking at home. So Woodard and her team decided to launch a line of baking products. She said she and her team are now course-correcting to focus on packaged cookies and other pantry staples. She recognized that they could have spent more time talking to consumers and studying the total addressable market.
“It’s easy to get distracted by shiny objects,” Woodard says. “The reality is you can’t do everything well. I look at Chobani, which is a mission-driven company focused on its core product of yogurt. It’s a reminder to continue to build your core business while slowly testing and trying what else you may want to build.”
Partake Foods recently launched Classic Grahams, which Woodard says are resonating with consumers, who use them for snacking and as an ingredient. In my family, my sister-in-law uses the Classic Grahams to make crusts for her assortment of delicious pies.
Related: Here’s the Biggest Way You Can Show Up for the Black Community Beyond Black History Month
3. Know your numbers inside and out
“Unfortunately, I still see investors who rely heavily on pattern matching when meeting founders. Investors may use experiences or patterns from their past to make decisions about future investments,” Woodard says. “While they may think this helps them make better decisions, there’s a risk they increase bias in the process. If they have never seen someone who looks like me, who is solving a problem they have never faced or heard of before, they may discount me and pass up an incredible investment opportunity.”
Woodard encourages founders she mentors to know their numbers inside and out. She acknowledges that many founders wear multiple hats like she has and will have a strong understanding of what’s working and what’s not. She had to learn it all: basic accounting, the return on investment in marketing and the details of what was happening with different customers. And yet, she knows the bar is different for Black women founders when it comes to raising capital, growing and scaling their businesses.
“My biggest piece of advice: Use your difference as your biggest source of advantage. Find the investors, customers and individuals who are aligned with your vision and mission and believe in your capabilities as a founder. Surround yourself with a community who will help you unlock the potential of your business.”
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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
When you think of startup funding, you may envision contests with almost no chance of winning or solid venture capitalists who will not be surprised by your concept. “Those who raise millions for their ideas’ implementation are just lucky ones,” you may think. It sounds surprising, but a strong community can help you achieve success much faster and easier.
The explanation is simple: The less a person has to contribute or “risk,” the more likely you are to receive a contribution. In this article, I’d like to share some tips from my own experience that may help you pique the interest of your audience in your solution and turn them into its backers. Each worthwhile idea will find supporters. Believe me.
Related: Who Needs Venture Capitalists When You Can Crowdfund?
1. Make sure your idea is providing a solution
In today’s world, no idea can be completely original, but it’s better if you can come up with a unique solution or significantly improve on something that’s already been made. How did we manage it? We saw the benefits and drawbacks of working in the music industry for a long time and wanted to develop something that would truly bring innovation to the space we know.
We carried out market research prior to building the platform. We researched whether similar initiatives already exist, what they do and the errors they made. Along with estimating the lifetime value of the product, we contrasted our idea with the needs of our target audience. It’s critical to understand whether our project has a solid foundation for the long term.
In our case, we saw the lack of including the fans on the journey and how the number of independent artists skyrocketed, but the way of getting funding for your projects was still limited to signing a label deal. Artists can invite their fans to be part of the journey while giving back to the community of people who have supported them along the way.
2. Show the audience a clear strategy
Be ready to tell the truth. Explain in detail how your platform works, say at least a few words about any possible risks, and show how the money you raise through the power of the community will be used to improve the project and make it more useful for this audience. It’s very important to give people a strong reason to support you.
Why am I emphasizing it so strongly? People are always reluctant to part with money when there is no obvious use for it. Once it is made clear to participants how their money will be used, what features they will have access to and what the ultimate goal is, a significant part of them will be ready to help you crowdfund.
Keeping in touch with your audience is not only about keeping them interested but also about showing how much you value their continuous support.
3. Make it easy to support you
The more clicks required, the less likely people are to join you. So, make the funding mechanism user-friendly. It determines the stability and success of your monetization. Prepare a brief registration instruction, and ensure that the website navigation is simple to understand. People in 2023 value their time and expect everything they use to be convenient.
There are numerous crowdfunding platforms available that are tailored specifically for startups or projects in the Web3 niche. Patreon, SeedInvest Technology, GoFundMe and other similar sites are examples. I will not recommend any particular platform, but I will share some criteria that will assist you in selecting the most convenient instrument.
First, look for a solution that can be directly integrated into your platform in the form of a button or direct link on the main page. Again, convenience is one of the top priorities for successful and predictable funding. Second, choose the one with the most payment methods integrated. Even the most ardent supporters of your idea may abandon you if they have to make multiple transactions to pay you. Third, because there are so many fake website versions out there, don’t forget to educate your users on how to spot a fraudulent link or platform page.
Related: 9 Steps to Launching a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign
4. Don’t forget to spread the word
When choosing the best way to share your initiative, think about which social media networks or media outlets your target audience uses to get ideas. Participate in networking and exhibitions. Making connections with thought leaders and others in the field of the industry you’re looking to enter multiplies your chances of success tenfold.
We played more than one instrument at once. We worked hard to improve our social media, pitched our idea to top journalists and went to events where we could meet potential investors on a regular basis.
The specific marketing plan you use will depend on the market you are trying to reach, your target audience and the services you plan to offer, but the following tools will come in handy 99% of the time:
Develop your media relations: Promotion through news releases in global and specialized media is beneficial at both the project’s infancy and maturity stage. They will create “hype” in the first instance and enhance your expertise in the second. Create articles for publications, comment on current events, participate in interviews, and share announcements in the media and on the project website.
Utilize advertising services: Set up targeted ads on social networks trusted by your primary audience, use retargeting, and connect with influencers. Brand ambassadors who are thought leaders in your chosen niche will lend credibility to your project.
Educational content: Blockchain, Web3 and other complex topics require user education. This task can be easily completed with high-quality content: a site blog, FAQ, research, whitepaper, videos (both long and short, like TikToks), podcasts, AMAs and case studies. In this case, the user interaction path with your product might look like this: reading a blog post, visiting a landing page, and finally, requesting a demo of your product or leaving a request.
Effective social media marketing: Over time, it contributes to the formation of a community of devoted brand fans. Share news, solicit feedback, introduce the team, post behind-the-scenes content, employ various forms of storytelling, use memes or niche-related jokes and so on. A funnel could look like this: clicking on ads, subscribing to a channel, visiting the site and requesting a demo.
Affiliate marketing: Startup founders frequently do not have enough time to promote their businesses, which is understandable given their other responsibilities. That is why it can be a great option to outsource promotion or launch affiliate programs. The latter allows you to get a predictable result at a predictable price, which is especially important in the early stages when resources are scarce.
Related: 12 Key Strategies to a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign
As you can see, an idea lays the groundwork for a project but does not guarantee its success. Even ideas that aren’t very original can sometimes work because the people who came up with them did a good job of assessing their resources, chose the best ways to market them, and perhaps most importantly, didn’t give up.
My goal was to show you that angel and venture capital investors are not the only sources of multimillion-dollar funding. Millions can be earned through creativity and consistency. You can design your own strategy that will ultimately produce excellent results using the resources I provided from personal experience.
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Crowdfunding, equity financing, grants, or debt financing? Which do you choose to raise money for your business?
Join our webinar, Bianca B. King, Entrepreneur & Marketing Strategist, teaches you 7 methods that you can use to raise money to launch their companies, including the advantages and disadvantages of each type of funding.
7 Financing Options
Equity Financing:
Debt Financing:
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Alternative Financing:
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About the Speaker:
Bianca B. King is an entrepreneur and professional matchmaker on a mission to help women accelerate their success. As the CEO & Founder of the exclusive collective Pretty Damn Ambitious™, Bianca matches high-acheiving women with premier vetted and verified coaches so they can finally amplify their ambitions and achieve the personal growth and professional success they desire. Bianca is also the President and Creative Director of Seven5 Seven3 Marketing Group, a digital marketing agency that has served hundreds of entrepreneurs since 2008.
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Tal Frankfurt is the Founder and CEO of Cloud for Good, a Salesforce partner that creates transformational value with technology.
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Reports of direct mail’s death have been greatly exaggerated. While it’s true that the amount of direct mail marketing has decreased over time, this is primarily because the United States has experienced a year-on-year decline in mail volume over recent decades. The most recent peak in mail volume was in 2006, when around 213 billion units of mail were delivered. In 2022, that number dropped to just over 127 billion units.
Despite an overall decline in mail sent, direct mail marketing campaigns remain one of the most effective strategies to increase awareness and reach for nonprofits. The key lies in utilizing direct response services to empower these campaigns.
Like any modern marketing strategy, zooming out to gain a bigger picture of a nonprofit’s entire ecosystem of marketing efforts is critical to success. Adopting an omnichannel approach to managing more traditional or “old fashioned” strategies like direct mail will help increase effectiveness when woven into more modern digital marketing strategies. To that point, direct response services not only empower direct response campaigns but also connect those campaigns to a nonprofit’s digital marketing strategy by parsing the most effective data coming from those campaigns.
There are four separate yet united components to modern-day direct response: ETL support, campaign execution, data augmentation and data visualization.
ETL Support
ETL (extract, transform, load) support describes the moving of data from one area to another through an integrated service. Nonprofit organizations today are sifting through massive amounts of data, and the likelihood is high that much of that information is being stored outside of the organization’s CRM through a data warehouse of some kind.
Through direct response ETL support, data is sent seamlessly to and from CRMs and data warehouses to ensure information, such as donor profiles, is clean, actionable and reliably available for staff to interact with. This, in turn, allows for greater campaign effectiveness and the ability for new campaigns, whether they be direct or digital, to be created efficiently based on a reliable source of truth.
Campaign Execution
The source of truth created through clean data opens the door for more intelligent campaign strategy design through metrics, cost analysis, forecasting and coding. The success of direct response campaigns, no matter the medium, is predicated on the steadfast segmentation of donors for each unique campaign. When factoring in the many types of information gathered on existing or targeted donors, such as location, interests and propensity to give, the process of segmentation and campaign creation can become quite complex.
However, with the right team and the right data, direct response services can help to explore the segmentation, discern which donors would be best for which campaigns and then place those donors in the campaigns most beneficial to the organization’s fundraising success.
Data Augmentation + Visualization
You might be wondering how all of this donor information would best be gathered and segmented. The answer is through data augmentation and data visualization. Metrics provide the foundation for augmentation through existing data that allows organizational staff to identify donors based on past relationships with the organization. Once that data is obtained, visualization of the data can then be built (think dashboards displaying KPIs across teams) to ensure the entirety of an organization is operating from the same page.
Marketing campaigns, whether it be through direct mail, email, or other outlets, are only as effective as the data informing the campaigns and the people following through, so it is imperative that a one-stop source of truth across all data environments across an organization is achieved.
Finding The Right Solution
When considering direct response fundraising, it’s important to consider the solutions necessary for achieving success through the strategy. An organization’s CRM should always be viewed as the first step on the journey, as it helps fundraising teams gain a more complete picture of donors to inform strategies. Next, organizations should consider whether or not all data should be stored in the CRM or if a data warehouse should be utilized. The priority is to provide staff with the information they need and for teams to take deliberate, empowered action on that data.
Aspects of an organization’s data might not be important for staff to interact with on a day-to-day basis. If this is the case, data warehouses should be considered as a way to help take the lift off staff processing large amounts of data and serve as an organization’s enterprise data repository.
Direct Response, Direct Impact
On the whole, direct response services exist to add ease and amplification to a nonprofit organization’s fundraising efforts. For example, CARE, a Cloud for Good client, organized an emergency fundraising campaign to support Ukrainian relief efforts in the wake of Russia’s unprovoked invasion. Direct response services were leveraged, resulting in 224,000 names and addresses being pulled from previous mailing lists to be used in a direct mail campaign funding the relief effort.
In just a few short days, the campaign yielded over $1 million raised across nearly 12,000 individual donations, all of which were sent directly to the Ukrainian people and places that needed the funds most.
While mail delivery is on a downward trend, direct mail strategies are still alive and well through the mindful implementation of services such as direct response. The state of fundraising and the livelihood of the nonprofit sector relies on the acceptance that our world is interconnected. When we view marketing strategies as omnichannel, nonprofits of today can ensure that the people of our interconnected world receive the support they need when they need it most.
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