Youth Voices: Youth-Led Social Entrepreneurship in East Africa and the Middle East
A new report from DOT’s Youth Leadership Advisory Board (YouthLAB)
LinkedIn for social entrepreneurs
Tips from the co-founder of Developers in Vogue
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Ivy Barley Co-Founder, Developers in Vogue Accra, Ghana @ibivarley |
Often, social entrepreneurs get carried away by the many tasks to be completed and forget an important piece – social media!
“Well, after all, who cares about social media when I have to be in the field making things work,” they say.
Social media, when used right, can help create a strong presence for your personal brand, as well as that of your enterprise. Social innovators and entrepreneurs must make a conscious effort to invest time into developing an effective social media strategy.
LinkedIn has been very instrumental to our work at Developers In Vogue so far. I have always loved LinkedIn and I believe it is one of the best social media platforms ever. One thing I have always focused on is having an all-star LinkedIn profile.
These are some of my LinkedIn best practices:
In the early days of starting our social enterprise, Developers In Vogue, we were struggling to find a venue where we would train young ladies in Ghana. In January of this year, I got a LinkedIn direct message from one of the senior executives of a leading private college in Ghana. His message stated that he had stumbled upon my LinkedIn profile and loved it. He then mentioned that he would like to support the work I am doing.
Fast forward to few months after, and we are using Blue Crest College as the venue for our boot camp – all for free. When it was time to recruit volunteer tutors for our training programme, I reached out to Ghanaian software engineers on LinkedIn and 25 of them are currently volunteering with us. This is the power of LinkedIn!
In my opinion, LinkedIn is a powerful tool for scaling social innovations in Africa. Inasmuch as its potential is limitless, social entrepreneurs must always show professionalism in all their interactions on LinkedIn.
Get on it, social entrepreneurs! (And connect with me!)
About Ivy Barley
My social enterprise – Developers In Vogue – aims at creating a relevant community of highly skilled female developers who would use technology to revolutionize Africa and beyond. We train young ladies in web and mobile apps development and data science (big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence) and match them to real-time projects and jobs.
Due to my entrepreneurial drive as well, I have been able to partner with some great minds to start businesses. Areas that interest me the most aside Education are Technology, Agriculture, Food and Drinks and Fashion.
I believe more than ever that this is the set time for Africa to shine and I am very excited to be a part of the generation that would revolutionize Africa in a big way!
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A new report from DOT’s Youth Leadership Advisory Board (YouthLAB)