How to Support Business Owners During National Small Business Week

May 2-8 is National Small Business Week here in the U.S. We love small businesses at Skip, and we wanted to share some ideas for how you can help small businesses in your community recover from the pandemic and thrive for years to come. In this post, you’ll find 4 ways you can help small businesses this week.

Support Funding For Small Businesses and Push Your Legislative Leaders to Do the Same

Small business owners need more than committed customers; they need funding and governmental support. You can help small businesses in your community by advocating for legislative action that will provide them with more recovery and relief funds, mentoring and other assistance.

Contacting your elected officials to ask them to support small business funding, and voting for officials who share your values, is a key way to make sure that local business owners have what they need to succeed.

Programs like the PPP, EIDL and SVO have helped millions of businesses get back on their feet, but there’s still a long way to go. We're currently doing a campaign to help push for expanded EIDL grants eligibility and thousands of you have supported it on our YouTube channel.

Social media engagement is key for small businesses, whether it’s posting on your own accounts about businesses you like, sharing or reposting small business’ posts, or even commenting on and saving their posts.

Social media algorithms reward engagement, so the more you interact with your favorite small businesses online the more people will see their posts. Help them get eyes on their page by liking, commenting and reposting! If you follow and tag us on Instagram, we'll do our best to share and support your posts!

Review Your Favorite Small Businesses Online

Reviewing a company that you love on a platform like Yelp, Google, Amazon, FourSquare or Etsy (if they’re an Etsy shop owner), is hugely beneficial in helping business owners get more sales. In fact, reviews help businesses increase their sales by an average of 18 percent.

Shop Small (Locally and Beyond)

As many of us know, shopping at small businesses is the most direct way that you can support them. You can visit small businesses near you that are open safely, or shop at small online retailers. If you want to see which small businesses near you are open and even like the ones that you frequent as a customer, you can check out our region-by-region small business listings at SupportCovidRecovery.com.

Conclusion: You Can Help Small Businesses in Your Community

Whether it’s buying their products, posting about them on social media or even writing to your elected officials, you can help small businesses in your town or city to successfully recover from the pandemic. You can follow along with us here on the Skip Blog for more information on small businesses, finance, government services and more.

📌 Pro Tip: We have new grants and loans available in our curated database for Grants Premium users. You can join nearly 100,000 others getting early access to grants and other funding opportunities.