Black Ballad

Idea

Introduction

Black Ballad started out as a free access blog in 2014, due to the mainstream media constantly ignoring the perspectives & issues that Black women & the wider Black community in Britain faced.

Since then, Black Ballad has transformed into the leading subscription media lifestyle platform for Black women in Britain, with 1000s of members paying upwards of £4.99 per month or £49 per year to access our combination of content, events & lifestyle perks.

Due to our engaged and trusted relationship with black women, we are able to work with advertisers, who want to reach this often underserved audience & we constantly talk to this audience through surveys to understand what they need from us and the wider world.

Through our membership and data collection, Black Ballad is unrivalled in the relationship it has with Black women in the UK & Europe and wants to continue to empower this audience to change their worlds with every click they make & every conversation they have.

Substantial accomplishments to date

Key Milestones

- Launched in 2014

- First successful crowdfund in 2016 raising over £12,000, pre-selling 300 memberships.

- Over 1,000 paying members

- 20,000 email subscribers

- Forbes 30 Under 30 - Media & Marketing in 2018

- Recipient of over £125,000 in grants from organisations that include NESTA, Deutsche Bank, Kings College London & more.

- Investment from Founders Factory in 2019

- In 2020, we launched two successful surveys about Black Motherhood and Black Women in Britain producing over 400,000 data points from nearly 6,000 respondents

- August 2020, Black Ballad used the data from the Black Motherhood Survey to takeover HuffPost UK

Key Stories

Three-month content series investigating Black Motherhood

Three-month content series highlighting stories of Black women from outside London across Britain

Most read story: Finding the author of Keisha Da Sket

Content partnership with BBC to launch Steve McQueen's Small Axe mini-series

Monetisation strategy

Black Ballad uses direct-to-consumer media to build relationships with black women at scale. Using Black Ballad's data-driven flywheel as leverage, revenue is generated in three core ways.

1. BB Membership + add-ons: Black women pay an average of £60 p/a for access to the Black Ballad Membership. plus additional tickets to events.

2. Advertising: Brands pay to reach black women through Black Ballad's audience via our range of content & consumer products. This is currently done through advertising on newsletters, social channels, website & events. As Black Ballad evolves, advertising products will become increasingly targeted, self-service & scalable.

3. Insight & Intelligence: Black Ballad's extensive content library & propriety datasets can be packaged to give corporate clients tools & resources so they can better understand Black women. Still a nascent revenue stream, Black Ballad is working towards its first clients for group subscriptions & consulting services

Use of proceeds

Over the next 12 months, Black Ballad plans to spend £250,000 of investment, split across the following parts of the business:

- Technology - £87,500 (35%)
- Content - £57,500 (23%)
- Audience Development & Marketing - £57,500 (23%)
- Business Development - £32,500 (13%)
- Legal, Accounting & Misc - £15,000 (6%)

This will allow us to:

- Improve Black Ballad's technology and infrastructure, so we can provide the best membership experience possible, from making it easy to buy a membership, to creating personalised newsletters based on what subscribers have read in the past
- Invest in more content production across more formats, topics & geographies, so we can attract the largest group of black women possible
Develop new products based on our data & research for black women and the organisations that want to reach, engage & understand them