When COVID-19 forced many small businesses to close or severely limit their operations, the Town of Davidson saw an opportunity to support its business owners by offering practical resources and training to enhance their business acumen and contribute to reviving its thriving community.

In support of the Town of Davidson’s Economic Development team, we conducted a small business and community-based needs assessment in the fall of 2020 to:

• uncover common challenges, needs, and gaps of local business owners to determine what services and learning tools will make the most community impact,
• discover what communication channels are preferred by the business owner community especially in a time where in-person connection is limited, and
• better understand how residents’ behaviors and preferences changed due to COVID-19.

Upon completion of the assessment, we designed and facilitated six virtual interactive business recovery modules to target the most critical business challenges identified. A few of the topics covered included gathering useful customer feedback, creating powerful moments as marketing, and how to use experiments to pivot effectively.

Planted over pints of craft beer, bloom. continues to be part of the seed and the growth of LaunchCLT a local organization of entrepreneurs, executives and business leaders created to empower the startup ecosystem, enhance mentorship opportunities and encourage economic growth.

bloom. has helped build and lead LaunchCLT (originally LaunchLKN) since it originated in January 2017. In collaboration with several serial entrepreneurs and investors in the Lake Norman area, we developed an organization focused on community, education, mentoring and investment. We helped create and currently lead the LaunchCLT Mentor Program, fueled by over 60 volunteer mentors. We partner with The Hurt Hub @ Davidson and First Turn Innovations to provide the resources and support local entrepreneurs need to scale their ideas. In 2022, due to significant growth across the city, we rebranded the organization to LaunchCLT.

Demonstrating its commitment to access and equity, Davidson College wanted to scale the liberal arts and develop adult learning courses to equip more people with durable skills and capabilities at a lower cost.

We served as part of the President’s Office Innovation Initiatives team to launch an upskill program for adult learners in support of economic mobility in Charlotte. We did a listening tour, engaging with and learning from workforce development organizations and large employers to ensure we understood our target audience and could design needed learning experiences to spur internal mobility and strong pathways for advancement. We served as project managers to support the course development with Davidson faculty and to create the pilot course, Ready to Lead, which launched in March 2022.

First Presbyterian Church Burlington (FPC) had an outdated website with a look and feel that didn’t showcase the growth and change taking place in its vibrant church community. The church wanted a website that displays the church’s rich tradition as well as its evolution.

While the ultimate deliverable was a rebrand and an overhauled website, bloom. conducted and supported strategic discussions with the FPC team with the goal of improving operations and communications. As part of the process, we were part of vendor pitches from Church Management Systems to help the church find an option that would seamlessly integrate with the website and enable ease of giving, registrations, and overall communication. We identified communications opportunities and next steps so that the website is just one of the tools FPC will use to deliver its message.