How Youth Entrepreneurship Club hosted a virtual program with an 88% engagement rate

About Youth Entrepreneurship Club

Youth Entrepreneurship Club is a nonprofit, non-govermental organisation based in Chania, Crete, built up from young people interested in entrepreneurship, with ideas and eager to work.They believe, that if young people get inspired to follow their dreams and chase what they really want, they will unleash their full potential to scale up their ideas! To achieve this they are offering a free toolbox which contains every necessary tool to support the teams they support.

The challenge

Youth Entrepreneurship Club aims to unleash youth inner genius at scale. In order to do so they wanted to find a way to connect young students and recent graduates with the entrepreneurial world and help them start their own venture focused on the tech industry within their network of 6 different locations, from Crete to Athens, Ioannina, Thessaloniki and Tripoli. The challenge was how to reach out as many young graduates simultaneously while offering the same resources in just 10 weeks with a limited budget and keep all participants engaged from day one till the end to maximize impact.

The solution

Once they started analyzing their problem and putting their heads together to find the solution they conceived Brainfactory. Brainfactory is a 10-weeks online program for young graduates all around Greece providing resources, mentoring sessions, live talks with experienced founders, and mentor sessions with mentors from Deloitte. The goal is to support participants with all the needed material and insights to move from just an idea to a viable business model. This is where Founderhood came into the picture to cover their needs virtually so that they could get the most from both worlds. The online limitless and borderless reality, and offline engagement, minimizing time and effort of both organizers, teams, and supporters whilst maximizing the impact of the program.

The results

It took a month to prepare everything and create their virtual program hosting 5 mature and experienced startup founders as speakers, and 6 mentors from Deloitte working closely with the participants, in 6 groups with 3 startups each, every two weeks. SWEN travel also designed a trip to the US to introduce to participants the US innovation ecosystem. With speakers from well-known successful Greek startups like Pollfish, Phee and MyJob.now, the 18 selected founders moved from idea creation to designing viable business models, in 11 different industries. The most impressive thing? At the end of the program, both the engagement and the participation rates have skyrocketed. With an 88% engagement rate and 84% completion rate, almost all participants managed to graduate from the program.