Growing the economy in your region

Enterprising Women delivers measurable and cost-effective economic development through enabling more women to start up and achieve greater business sustainability and growth.

Enterprising Women delivers measurable and highly cost-effective economic development through enabling women to start up in business, and achieve sustainability and growth, and increases reach and engagement of mainstream Business Link IDB.

Enterprising Women was launched in July 2006, co-funded until December 2007 by EEDA and the ESF. An investment of just under 1% of EEDA’s annual budget resulted in over 2% of their key RES outputs for jobs created, training places, and businesses created and showing growth.

Some of our achievements to date:

• Over 5000 women in the community
• Over 1000 women trained in business skills
• Over 700 businesses improved performance
• 250 new jobs created so far (businesses must be showing growth after 1 year to be counted)
• Participation of over 250 business support organizations

Click here (PDF 960KB) to download a pdf of our introductory brochure.

Enterprising Women’s unique business model has made a real difference to women across the Eastern region, and to the economic and enterprise goals of its funders, yielding unparalleled levels of return on investment unique in the UK. This economic development success is matched by the high levels of satisfaction reported by women.

Our business and delivery model fits closely and effectively alongside the Business Link IDB Gateway. High levels of successful outreach and engagement with pre-aspirational women provide extended reach and client pipeline for mainstream. Post-start sustainability and growth training and support provides a trusted, proven source of onward referral and brokerage. Business Link East are now reporting well over 50% engagement with women clients.

In addition, the model brings all sources of public and private support together in one place, making it simpler and quicker for women to find and choose exactly what they need, and helping other organizations reach a wider audience. The active engagement of over 250 organisations followed committed stakeholder consultation prior to launch, and ongoing collaborative work.

This holistic and joined up approach, bringing supply and demand together, has resulted in the creation of a large and vibrant community of entrepreneurial women at all stages of the business journey, from pre-aspirational and multiply disadvantaged to high growth, across all sectors, from rural to inner city, from all educational and ethnic backgrounds. Download the executive summary of our research and evaluation study here (PDF 1.2M)

Our award-winning technology records full ESF data (up to 64 fields) for each member of the community, tracks their business progress, event attendance, referrals, and customer relationship management. It provides a robust and effective tool for audit, output capture, longitudinal research and customer surveys.

Enterprising Women offers a range Flagship quality training programmes at all stages of the business journey, including specialist areas of market failure, or can support and enable your existing providers to be more effective.

Enterprising Women is a proven, sustainable and scalable approach to women’s enterprise development. It assists those tasked with economic development, skills and regeneration to gain an excellent return on their budgets, build capacity, and accelerate their economic competitiveness.

To find out more about how you can reap these benefits, or to request a full copy of the research and evaluation study, please email us at info@enterprising-women.org