How to use highly engaged Facebook groups to grow your business with Valeria Ignatieva from WORK180

Metigy Podcast - Marketing for SMEs

In this episode we have WORK180’s Co-CEO and founder, Valeria Ignatieva.

Valeria's passion and expertise is in gender diversity, recruitment and employee engagement. And as Mark Puncher from Employer Branding Australia says “She's a thought-leader without the hype and a strategist with rolled-up sleeves. If you're working on diversity, talk to her”.

WORK180 connects women with progressive employers by pre-screening companies on amount of paid parental leave, pay equity, flexible working and much more. Transparency around these policies is driving incredible change; on average, once every two weeks a WORK180 Endorsed Employer improves a policy or benefit.

Founded in 2015, WORK180 is backed by Atlassian’s private investment fund Skip Capital and raised over $5.8m in venture capital.

What you will learn in this episode:

• How the push for transparency facilitated a positive social impact for female workers
• How WORK180 grew from the ground up with $20,000 and campaigns on diversity
• Tips on gaining event traction in the early days
• The benefits of building a strong Facebook group
• Networking with the right people to grow your startup
• How anonymity drives Facebook engagement and facilitates valuable and shareable content
• Changing careers with transferable skills
• How to grow your business globally while working remotely
• Preparing your candidates and employees with the agile environment of startups
• Setting boundaries when you’re working from home

Notable quotes:

• "It’s going to take over a hundred years to close that gender equality gap"
• "Through transparency, we have employers now changing their policies at a rate of one employer every three weeks, sometimes more"
• "Don’t look for cultural fit, look for cultural contribution"
• "We have very engaged facebook groups where we have shortlist topics we think are interesting and people can vote on them. Then you’re getting that engagement around. If you’re already invested into coming to an event, you’re more likely to attend"
• "In areas where it’s really hard to pull off an event, ask people to pre-commit"

Resources mentioned:

• WORK180
• WORK180’s Professional Women’s Network
• Sharepoint
• meetup.com

Book recommendations:

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
• What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture About Culture by Ben Horowitz
• Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results by Christina Wodtke

What business would you build on Mars?

You know how they say “whatever you experience personally you always try to find a solution for”? I got lost on the way here from the station so for me, a google maps to get around. I’m sure the martians would appreciate it as well!

Anything around integrating the community. If there’s a meetup platform where there’s translation services in place, how do we actually get people to mingle with the martians in terms of events? Because I love playing basketball… don’t know how gravity will help in that case- how do we start a sporting event? Imagine the marketing. Everyone wearing their Chicago Bulls singlet. Space Jam! There you go. This is obviously if work180 isn’t launched over there.

Reach Valeria here:

• on linkedin
• on twitter