Make Your Mark Blog

I went to an interesting panel discussion last week hosted by Weber Shandwick. The title was ‘What’s so hard to reach about the hard-to-reach?’ It quickly became clear that the consensus was that groups were only hard to reach if companies and organisations didn’t make an effort to reach them, and that there were plenty of opportunities to do so.

The key points raised were the importance of ‘integrated communications’, using a variety of methods to reach different groups (not forgetting face-to-face) and ‘partnerships’ - working with organisations or media who do have a route into certain communities. They also discussed how groups did not want to be labelled by their ethnicity or age, something we have also seen through our own research into enterprise behaviours.

I also raised the point that those of us who do understand the need how best to reach these groups should share their learnings and make sure that organisations aren’t having to duplicate research and approaches. So, if you work in the enterprise field and want to target groups with untapped potential (I’m not going to call them hard to reach!) do come and speak to us and learn from our experiences.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 9:40 am and is filed under Ethnic minority enterprise, Global Entrepreneurship Week, Women's Enterprise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.