#GrabTheMIC Client Journey Interview

In this #GrabTheMIC client journey we speak to Nickala Torkington, co-founder of Flourish Together CIC. We make their ‘Supporting women in social enterprise’ podcast.

We kick-off by asking Nickala why she gets out of bed every morning…

What we’re super passionate about at Flourish is supporting people to create the change they see needed in communities. We’re very keen to see women gain solid economic independence. In doing so, they can make choices, be that in their personal lives, have some level of freedom, or be able to sustainably create social change.

Flourish is much more than enterprise support, mentoring and running events. It’s cultivated into a trusted network of people. We’ve engaged about 750 women in the last five years. We sow a few seeds, and it just ripples from there to create positive, personal professional development for the people in our network.

We’re now putting podcasting into our funding bids and our consultancy pieces. The podcast has helped us to win new work.

What do you love about what MIC does?

MIC’s got great ethics. We love your professionalism, flexibility, the skills we’ve been able to develop, the confidence we’ve gained, the reputation building and the new audiences for our work.

Why did you get MIC involved?

There were a few pains we were trying to address:

1) To create more digital content.

We’ve known for a few years that we needed to do this, but we don’t have the skills. We needed training and professional help. Plus, we’d rather support a social entrepreneur that we knew to help them to boost their business, rather than trying to do it on our own.

2) We needed somebody who understood us as a business and could work with us well.

MIC gets our network. Your knowledge of our business really helps us get the most out of our guests, find the stories and deliver the podcast format that we wanted to deliver.

It’s much better to work with MIC than someone who is cold to social enterprise or the crazy women that we work with! Plus there’s trust there too. Our contributors feel that they can open up to you.

3) We wanted to produce some easy-access, training tools, resources, and stories for the women we were already working with, but that could also attract new audiences.

We thought a podcast could give people who couldn’t get to our events, an insight into what we’re doing. It’d be a ‘reputation builder’ and a marketing tool that we could share and get more people involved.

MIC gets our network. Your knowledge really helps us get the most out of our guests, find the stories and deliver the podcast format that we wanted to deliver.

Why does your podcast exist?

We want to tell stories and showcase social entrepreneurs. We’re also creating a training and learning resource, and wider we’re creating a positive reputation in our sector.

It’s not just a podcast that you sit and listen to in the bath. We wanted people to take action. React. Do it. Get on with it. MIC understood all this, and you’ve been able to work with us to achieve that. You really let us run this in the way that we wanted.

“We’ve got this great library of support with our podcasts that we can signpost people to. They really compliment our training and learning offer too.”

What’s the podcast feedback been like?

People are using the podcast and are reacting to it! Just today I picked up a message on Facebook from a woman who said that she’d been listening to the podcast and enjoyed it. And as a result of listening to our measuring impact episode with Kat Luckock, she’s now joined Kat’s online community!

There are these mad ripple effects that are happening that we wouldn’t normally get with anything else we do! We’re also actively promoting our podcasts as part of a suite of support. It’s really helping us because we’re a small team and we can’t be there for everybody.

For example, the women on our Resilient Leaders Programme and the start-ups on our Time to Grow Programme are listening to it. We’ve got women who couldn’t come to all the sessions and they often feel very guilty that they can’t. And so being able to say, ‘don’t worry, listen to this’, they can still feel connected and part of what’s happening. It keeps hold of them and stops thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t do this!’.

The podcast is helping us to join the dots and reach and engage more people than we could otherwise reach with just our physical events and Programmes.

“Policy reports always talk about ‘hidden voices’ and ‘getting people’s voices heard’. But often we simply just ‘read’ about them, with highlighted quotes or similar. We don’t actually ‘hear’ them.

Podcasting lets us actually hear those voices.”

What’s it like working with MIC?

You’ve helped us to develop our skills around things like, what are podcasts? Why did we want to listen to them? And how should we be structuring ours? Plus the technical bits!

It initially created more work for us and the ‘how do we do this?’ and ‘how do we not feel silly doing this?’ But then when we actually got into the flow of it and your way of doing it. For us, it’s a quick and simple way of putting all this stuff together. It’s really effective.

The podcast has motivated us to find the money to keep doing it because it’s so useful.

We’re actively building podcast production into our funding bids as part of our evaluation promise. We don’t just want to produce a report that may or may not get acted on. So we’ve said, ‘let us create a podcast, get it on our website and let more people listen and learn from the project.’

Our podcast participants are really diverse too. The level of people who are vulnerable or who mental health needs is also quite high. They’ve developed communication and active listening skills. Plus our listeners have picked up a plethora of knowledge, especially around or enterprise development. So there’s some real social value impact in all this too.

I think podcasting could be icing on the cake for social research policy work, where podcasts are produced as standard. Wouldn’t that be great? It would open people’s eyes more, hearing people in their own words. It’s better than a survey, you get more out of it.

Do you share the MIC love?

Yeah. Everytime! We promote people who we know are relevant. MIC is relevant, clearly on quality, on you being a social enterprise and understanding the sector. So it’s a real, neat, easy, no-brainer to send people to you and to your meet-up MIC’s Podcast Club. So we’ll continue to do that!

Our sector needs MIC’s stuff.

Take a look at the Flourish Client Journey digest

Are you looking for podcast training for your beneficiaries, members, team or group? Contact MIC HERE, let’s have a chat about your workshops wants and ideas!