This Sunday, Ruth Thomson will be enjoying her second Mother’s Day as parent to 16-month-old Oliver. She’s a working mum, though, and amid the national blitz of cards, flowers and chocolate, she will be busily hitting the internet as a freelance social media manager.
For Ms Thomson, 34, tweeting, Instagramming and Facebooking wasn’t always the day job. Until last October, she worked at Cass Business School running its charitable partnerships, the culmination of a 13-year career in the not-for-profit sector.
Then she had her son and full-time employment “didn’t work very well with having a young family”. She was keen to work more flexibly but was frustrated at the nature of the roles on offer. “There were very few that were challenging, rewarding and senior enough to use my skills and experience yet gave me that level of flexibility to combine with my family life.”
The solution, tracking the social media feeds of The Soap Co, a small luxury toiletries brand, was provided by Digital Mums, a company that trains women in social media skills, alongside providing work placements at small businesses, providing what it describes as “live learning”. Students apply everything they pick up in online modules to real-world social media marketing campaigns at the companies they’re paired with. More than 300 women have completed the six-month programme, which includes four weeks off in school holidays, with many becoming permanently employed after their placement.
Digital Mums was started in 2013 by Kathryn Tyler and Nikki Cochrane, who previously had run a more conventional social media agency. They had witnessed demand from small businesses that had tiny marketing budgets but were eager for help with getting their messages out through sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
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The pair also had experience of the problems caused by mothers being out of work. Growing up in the Rhondda Valley in the 1980s, Ms Tyler’s early life was marked by unemployment: “All of my family were unemployed, including my mum, so I saw not just the financial impact, which is obviously massive, but also the loss of confidence. When people become unemployed, they lose the ability to do things they used to find completely normal.”
Her mother had struggled to find flexible, part-time roles she could fit around childcare. The jobs she did find were “poorly paid and uninspiring”.
The two entrepreneurs concluded that many mothers would make excellent social media managers if they had the right training. “Most [companies’] reaction is to get young people to do it, but mums spend much more time on social media than anyone else,” Ms Tyler says. “We knew that these businesses would want part-time people to fill the roles and they’d be able to be flexible. It’s about grabbing five minutes here and there and it can all be done remotely.”
Claire Bingham, who finished the course in September last year, is still working with the client she was matched with during her studies, a small interior design agency called Furniss and May. Before having her two children, Maia, three, and Jake, one, she worked as an account director at a series of large branding agencies, working with clients such as Raffles, a members’ club, and Jumeirah, the luxury hotels chain.
“There was lots of travel and lots of late nights working on pitches until 3am, which is all great and doable when you don’t have a family, but it’s quite a different story once you do,” Ms Bingham, 41, says. She admits her self-esteem suffered as she considered alternative careers. “It did knock my confidence because I thought: ‘This is what I’ve done for the last 15 years, how am I going to earn money and retain my experience going forward in this new capacity as a parent?’ ”
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After spotting a Facebook ad for Digital Mums, Ms Bingham began the course last year. There was a lot of work to be done at Furniss and May, the business she began working with from the outset. “They had no Twitter channel, they had no Pinterest [the photo sharing site], none of the things they really need as a visual business,” she says.
Jeremy Robinson, chief executive of The Soap Co, which continues to employ Ms Thomson, says that it is worthwhile for small businesses to invest in social media skills: “It’s definitely a skill we were missing. We were doing basic maintenance social media, but nothing creative that was going to expose our business to the people we wanted to expose it to, at anything like the speed we want it to.
“Comparing our social media before and after [working with Ruth] is like chalk and cheese.”
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Jayne Furniss is a co-founder of Furniss and May, a small interior design agency. She paid £400 a month to work with trainee social media managers via the Digital Mums course, but now pays the worker she was paired with, Claire Bingham, a retainer.
For Ms Furniss, there was no altruism in hiring a working mother. “We thought: ‘It’s a bargain. Let’s do it and see what happens,’ ” She admits, though, that at first she thought Digital Mums was probably “too good to be true”.
Furniss and May now has more than 40 boards on Pinterest and a healthy following on Twitter and Facebook. Ms Furniss says that improving the company’s visibility on social media is having an impact on the bottom line already. “We’re getting lots of new connections and leads we would not have been able to get otherwise.”