FELLOW
A new professional community for women in Advertising.
Fellow, funded by San Francisco based advertising agency Venables Bell + Partners (VBP), is an app-based professional community for women in advertising. What started out as an idea and a pitch from one of the agency’s Art Director turned into a start-up like venture hoping to inspire and uplift women within and beyond their agency walls.
Challenge
In a historically male dominated field, women in advertising has difficulties finding relatable mentors especially in leadership roles.
The challenge is to build an MVP that matches mentors with mentees and maintaining within budget.
Solution
Create a platform that builds community amongst women in the industry providing one-on-one, female-to-female mentorship.
Results
A beautifully designed app that simplifies the UX for mentors and mentees focusing on important topics that matters to women the most.
“I had a lot of great male mentors as I came up in this industry, and as I rose, there started to be these situations where I craved the point of view of a woman who had lived through the same situations that I had.”
Process
We are framing our product development based on the concerns of women in creative agencies. During our Discovery phase, we reached out to the women in VBP to hear about their experiences and challenges of navigating the world they work in. With our colleagues in mind, we were able to assess pain points of their professional journey and the qualities they look for in a mentor. Using these insights, we were able to brainstorm ideas for our workflows.
Design
User Matching Algorithm
The conversations with the women of our agency and listening to other women’s stories about the challenges they faced in their industries helped us compile a list of topics and concerns we can address through this platform.
On this round of iteration, we wanted to test whether personality traits would be another useful attribute to match compatibility with mentors and mentees.
Matching Results
Professionals seek mentorship in the same areas of expertise or other similarities in life experiences. At Fellow, we aim to keep our algorithms simple by basing it on matching topics and personalities.
Next Steps…
The completed MVP allows us to test the features we have and find out where pain points are in our designs.
We are partnering up with The 3% Movement for a November launch during their annual conference. The 3% Movement is an ideal partner on our side heading into our launch because of their impact in empowering women in the creative industry. In a male dominated world and with current societal concerns shining light on women’s issues, the time is evermore present and necessary for a woman-to-woman mentoring app to exist in industry specific niches.