When we first started working on the Fund, we put a lot of thought into how our brand and user experience could help us uphold our values as a fund. As we started to think about the Fund and how we wanted it to look and feel — we realised we were in unchartered territory. It quickly became apparent that funds spend very little time thinking about how their brand increases or decreases access to different audiences.

We spoke to founders, and heard how many found investment brands dated and uninviting, with online applications confusing and unnecessarily complex. So we set our sights on something new.

To start things off, we made some commitments to anchor our new brand around. We focused on three key things that would define how we needed to be:

Transparent, open, and jargon free

From the beginning, we wanted to provide clear and simple content across all of our communications.

Welcoming and inclusive

We set our sights on a visual brand identity and tone that felt open to people from all backgrounds.

Impactful

We wanted everyone to understand the mission of our fund throughout our brand identity — so everyone who interacts with us knows that we exist to open doors for founders from underrepresented communities tackling inequality in the UK.

Key learning so far

We know our brand experience isn’t perfect, but we’re pretty happy about changes we’ve made based on our initial learning. Here are some learnings we’ve gained putting these commitments into practice.

Our visual identity

Our visual identity builds on the feedback shared by social entrepreneurs in focus groups. Applicants liked the colour palette — which they felt balanced maturity and credibility with warmth. When we selected the colour palette for GIF, we wanted to differentiate ourselves from the sometimes sterile palettes popular in finance, something different to applicants and the curved lines and shapes aim to reflect the flexibility of what we’re offering. It was also important to us that potential applicants could see the types of applicants we’d invested in as well as who was in the team.

“I like that the front page shows you are all about community and employability”

It’s all in a name

One key learning for us when developing our brand was choosing the right name for the Fund. We explored a number of different names. Some felt more impactful, but didn’t clarify what the fund was. We also found lots of aspirational branding in the market, often through enterprise support and accelerator programmes, but felt that using a similar name might limit our impact. Other brand names we explored were flagged as a compliance risk, used elsewhere across the UK. We ended up sticking with our working title for the fund — the Growth Impact Fund. Whilst the name was popular with investors and some of the social ventures we spoke to who felt that it was transparent (e.g. focused on organisations looking to grow their impact) others felt that it didn’t feel as welcoming or impactful as the rest of our brand identity. On balance, we kept the Growth Impact Fund in favour of simplicity and alignment with our mission to make finance more equitable. A targeted online experience.

Another key learning has been ensuring a simple user experience for social businesses looking to apply with us online — and we’ve iterated this process since launching the Fund. To do our new brand justice, and differentiate it from the work of BII and UnLtd as a separate entity, we needed a dedicated website. Within a few weeks, we had a working web prototype, and as UnLtd’s in-house developer I led on this work. We then asked a few social ventures to help us test it. Testing showed that social ventures looking for investment were looking for a simple, quick online process, that helped them understand:

• What funding (amount, types, and flexibility) is available from the fund
• Whether their organisation was eligible for investment
• How to quickly make progress with a simple form and access to a real person
• What the process would look like moving forward

This led us to strip back a lot of our initial website copy and content. We simplified everything to ensure that our online processes were not a barrier to access.

Increasing accessibility and readability

Once we made edits to our website, we wanted to ensure we were meeting good practice. We’re fortunate enough to be working alongside Scope, who are members of our growth impact advisory board. Before we launched our website in 2022, we were fortunate enough to have our content audited, and we took those insights to help us improve our digital offer. Here are just a few of the edits we’ve made based on their feedback:

On accessibility

We want as many people as possible to be able to use ourwebsite. So we made sure that the website is fully compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard. This means that our website should be easily zoom-able without text spilling off the screen, navigable with just a keyboard, or via speech recognition software or a screen reader.

On readability

We’ve tried to limit investment jargon across our website. We actively use the Hemingway editor and are targeting an overall Grade level 8 on our website, and Grade 12 on our blog. When we do use jargon (it’s really hard not to!) We include explainers or singpost website users to access more information.

We’ve still got areas to improve. For example, there are parts of the website where flow of the website could be easier to navigate. We’ve also identified that some screen readers struggle to navigate parts of our website clearly, and we recognise that our application form is not as accessible as the website itself.

“It could have a slightly stronger contrast and the flow could be broken out more to be more clear.”

If you are interested, we recommend using Scope’s free resource hub on accessibility guidance and Axe’s accessibility plug-in to monitor and audit accessibility on your website.

Aligning our values

We know that our learning never stops, and we’ve already identified some new areas that our online user experience needs some work. Over the coming weeks we will be digging into how people are using the website via Hotjar, developing our reasonable adjustment guidance to support applicants with neurodiverse needs and developing additional resources that should help applicants identify what types of investment could be a good fit for their preferences and stage of development.

The “Growth Impact Fund” is managed by Big Issue Invest Fund Management Ltd (BIIFM). BIIFM is the alternative investment fund manager (“AIFM”) of the Fund and is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN: 610618) as a “small authorised UK AIFM” in accordance with article 3(2) of the AIFMD to manage unregulated AIFs. The fund is addressed to professional investors only. Please note that: past performance cannot be relied on as a guide to future performance. The capital of Investors in the Fund is at risk. Any target is not a predictor, projection or guarantee of future performance.