Written by Zelia Leong, Co-founder of PraisePal
As a startup founder, you should not only focus on new fundraising but also taking care of your existing investors, keeping them engaged and updated on your company, amongst the hundreds of others in their portfolio. Yet building connections and relationships, which are key elements of investor engagement, are tough when physical meetings are restricted.
It was especially challenging for me when we pivoted from the travel space to working on remote productivity during the pandemic. There were many fast, moving parts that everyone got lost while reading the monthly updates while we build PraisePal from scratch.
Emails and calls alone don’t cut it anymore
For investor engagement, we’ve always sent monthly email updates to our shareholders, who are spread across three continents. But when you’ve not met for almost two years, an email with some bullet points feels impersonal and cold.
We also do video calls to catch up and have discussions with our shareholders and are fortunate to have so many smart and kind people to learn from. But these conversations are infrequent, happen only when we reach out for help, and mainly one-to-one.
Which got me thinking: How can we make the best out of this group of brilliant individuals, and keep all of them connected and engaged even remotely?
Creating instant engagement loops
Turns out, the solution was in our hands all along. Although it’s mainly used by larger remote teams, we created an account on PraisePal and invited our group of shareholders to it. Instantly engage even the busiest investor.
Anyone can send a recognition message instantly with just a quick text. Low effort, instant results.
When we added everyone into the account, I was shocked (and elated) that our shareholders started engaging on it without any prompts!
We’ve also been using it to thank individuals for their help. It’s the least we can do, and makes everyone feel good too.
See what other shareholders’ been up to
With all recognition messages being published publicly, everyone is now connected on the platform with frequent and full visibility on company happenings, while not being spammed unnecessarily.
You will only receive an email notification when someone gives you a recognition.
Keeping it fun with custom rewards
With PraisePal ultimately being built for remote team productivity and motivation, there’s also a Rewards component on the platform. Users can turn their recognition points into either unique Company Rewards, or choose from 1,000 gift cards worldwide.
For our shareholders, we customised some just-for-fun Company Rewards (as seen above), simply to give everyone a laugh.
They been loving it so far, and this has been a great way to keep our support network connected in a more informal way, instead of just a few bullet points in monthly emails as per the usual investor engagement approach.
(Screenshot from a message sent by a shareholder, photo changed)
This is no substitute for the human connections formed during coffee meetings, dinner drinks, and office parties.
But it helped me learn how to build community in a different way during the COVID-19-era, and I’m happy to be able to keep even the busiest of our shareholders engaged.
This article was first published on e27.co on 30 July 2021
