2nd Best national practice and experience from Italy

General information

Name of the good practice:	#SheMeansBusiness
Name of the organisations in charge:	Facebook globally, Fondazione Mondo Digitale in Italy
Website of the organisation	https://www.mondodigitale.org/
E-mail of the organisation	info@mondodigitale.org
City	Rome
Country	Italy
Year	2018
Length of the project/practice	2 years
Is the project/practice ongoing?	no
Link to the training program	https://shemeansbusiness.fb.com/it/training/
Language of the practice/program	Italian

Presentation/Description of the method

In addition to a training program around Italy, which includes online marketing lessons and the use of Facebook and Instagram platforms, #SheMeansBusiness also provides women with a website to consult training materials and discover stories of successful entrepreneurs shemeansbusiness.fb.com/it. In Mondo Digitale website it is reported by the Director Mirta Michili that in 2018 over 4000 women of all ages chose to join the #SheMeansBusiness program. They organized, with the collaboration of local bodies and institutions, 35 training events in 24 Italian cities, using the experience of 18 professional coaches from North to South. In 2019 they replied it starting from Sicily and from all over the South, with the vision that a systematic approach, strategic alliances and positive models can encourage women to achieve their professional and personal goals and contribute to gender equality in working environments. They created a platform where you can find free of charge on line training courses and speeches on specific arguments connected with digital marketing.

General objectives

#SheMeansBusiness is the global Facebook project created to help women who do business to grow their business and to inspire all those who dream of starting a business, providing them with the tools, training and examples necessary to achieve their own goal.

Why it has been selected as good practice

The specificity of the objectives chosen by Fondazione Mondo Digitale are in line with our project. They specifically created face to face training sessions for women self-employed on how to expand their businesses using on line resources, after that they created an on line platform for all persons (free of charge) and it is still working. It is very easy to use and designed with “gender lens”.

Final comment

Fondazione Mondo Digitale can be a strong stakeholder for our project as it also has a social vocation in its training methodology. They organize training courses with vulnerable groups, schools and they can be potentially interested in collaborating with us for our project. They did not think about a specific age in their target group, but in the training course they organized in Turin in 2018 the majority were over 40. Weakness is that a lot of the methodologies they propose are from Facebook (above all Facebook ADS).