Arab Entrepreneurs Board
Content and outreach for an Arabic business community in London.
The business
A London-based community platform for Arab entrepreneurs, an audience that is bilingual, internationally distributed, and unusually resistant to conventional marketing.
The brief
Community platforms are not sold, they are joined. Growth had to come from content people wanted to forward.
What was in the way
- Community platforms are not sold, they are joined. Paid acquisition can buy signups but it cannot build a community.
- The audience is bilingual and switches between Arabic and English mid-sentence, so single-language content loses half its impact.
- Members are internationally distributed, which makes events and local tactics largely useless.
- This audience is unusually resistant to conventional marketing, they recognise and dismiss it faster than most.
What I did
Grew through content worth forwarding
Reach was built on material members wanted to send to a peer, which is the only distribution mechanism a community platform actually has.
Wrote genuinely bilingual content
Not translated, written for an audience that code-switches naturally, where forcing a single language signals you do not know them.
Prioritised outreach and partnerships
Relationships with adjacent communities and organisations, because credibility in this category transfers through people rather than impressions.
Avoided the paid shortcut
Paid acquisition would have inflated the member count and hollowed out the thing that made the platform valuable.
What changed
A project-based engagement run alongside the Beroya mandate.
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