10 Wonderful Carers Working in Digital

The Digital Women Awards takes place every year to celebrate the work women are doing through digital.

The Digital Women Carer of the Year Awards recognises and celebrates women who are working in digital or using digital in business and also happen to be Carers. Digital Carers are juggling work and home life often having to overcome many new challenges.

Here are our brilliant women, your Carer of the Year 2022 Finalists:

Name: Stacey Calder

The Business Success Network was created by Stacey with the ethos ‘Grow You, Grow your business’ as she is a big believer in learning new skills and personal development. But she realised early on in this business she wanted it to be different from a previous one.

Stacey brought the Business Success Magazine so it was more than just a business community and something she thought would just be an ‘add on’ has grown to take centre stage of the business, allowing her to work with businesses to offer complete marketing and visibility packages across digital and print media. The community now has over 1200 in the main Facebook community, 60 members in the PRO subscription group and 500 subscribers to the magazine and all these channels continue to grow.

Name: Avni Gohil

Avni is the founder of Virtuelicious (ten-minute zero-waste recipe blends) and carer for her dad. She used to work in the Insurance sector as an actuary which she enjoyed very much. She would assess how much insurance companies were required to hold to pay future claims but in 2015 she realised her true calling was to figure out how to reduce food and packaging waste. But she knew it had to tick all the boxes if it had any chance of taking off. So she came up with the idea of recipe blends that take only ten minutes in the kitchen, are portion sized so there is no food waste and are super easy to make.

Name: Robbie Schneider

Whether for print or on small screens, Robbie Schneider believes in reaching readers where they are. Few areas are more important as physical and mental health in the age of Dr. Google. Robbie’s journalism background has helped her be a responsive social media manager, content developer and strategist focusing on accessible information to help consumers be empowered about their health care decisions.

For the last two decades, Robbie specialised in online communications and B2C social media marketing for medical schools and hospitals. While her title has been social media manager, she has also developed educational and marketing materials and campaigns for our hospital’s bariatric and diabetes services, as well as created user-friendly content at the sixth-grade reading level for her hospital’s accountable care organisation.

Name: Ali Williams

Ali has been been working within digital for 7 years, starting life as a mummy blogger while on maternity leave. She has self taught herself web design, and built up a personal brand with over 25,000 social media followers in 2 years.

In 2017 Ali skilled up her social media with the self funded Digital Mums course, looking to juggle her new life with flexible working. This led her to wind down her blog and starting out as a Freelance Social Media Manager.

Following a brief spell working as a communications officer for local council when her then youngest started school, she lost her job while on maternity leave, just as covid hit. Never one to accept defeat, Ali retrained as a Facebook Ads Consultant, built a new website, and now manages several accounts and her business is growing month on month.

Name: Katy Styles

Katy, as a full-time unpaid carer to her husband Mark, set up We Care as a grassroots campaign to challenge the fact that there is no national Carers Strategy in 2018. She wanted to bring together unpaid carers who often feel too tired, isolated, and disenfranchised, and create a community where they felt more empowered to engage with decision makers.

Katy has been a full-time carer for Mark, her husband, who has a rare form of motor neurone disease since 2014. Increasingly she is also helping care for her mum who lives 30 miles away.

The campaign has been recognised for creating a digital space where unpaid carers have a platform and voice. Katy was awarded Digital Campaigner of the Year at the 2019 UK Parliament Awards. She built on this momentum through a highly successful ‘Sticking Plaster’ General Election campaign.

Name: Michelle McCance

For her clients, Michelle provides a ‘done for you’ Facebook & Instagram Advertising service and has had the pleasure of working with some of the top brands in the UK. As well as this, she is passionate about training fellow small business owners how to run their own ads until they are so successful, they can outsource it themselves. She does this via workshops and more recently through the BETA launch of her Facebook Ads course. She set this up as she hated having to turn down those in most need of help because they couldn’t make the finances work.

Name: Natalie Dewhurst

Natalie’s business, The Incredible Life, is all about creating support and awareness of disabilities, mental health, special educational needs, rare and chronic diseases and carers.

She is constantly looking at ways to improve her business and add things to the business. She is planning to start a podcast, and is currently creating online choices so they are available to all.

Name: Louise Major

In 2020 Louise closed her agency after eleven years. She decided to freelance so she could support her autistic teenage son growing his e-commerce, retailer and wholesale business Castaway Cottage. In Sept 2021, Louise’s son featured as a young entrepreneur in The Telegraph, and in Jan 2022, he won Heart Radio Hero Award ‘Young Achiever’.

The experience with Castaway has made her a better freelancer, and her professional marketing expertise has propelled Castaways brand and marketing strategy. As a freelancer, she builds marketing strategies and plans and manage their delivery, including social media, content creation, digital PR, website development.

Name: Victoria Deamer-Smith

Victoria started working for vetstoria 3 years ago. Being a technophobe this was quite risky to say the least, she says! However upon learning about the product and how they support veterinary clinics in a digital way, she believed in the product and the aim.

Since then Victoria has worked her way up in the company and now leads a team of CSRs while also being responsible for onboarding new clinics and educating their clients. She also home educates her daughter who left main stream school last year due to the pandemic.

Name: Sophie McLaren

Sophie’s husband was diagnosed with Epilepsy 7 months into a digital role she was working in and almost died – then the pandemic hit. Sophie and her family went from security to complete unknown – she says it was her lowest point. To get through the uncertainty of her health, her husband, and their financial situation, she started Digital Mavericks.

Sophie says that she didn’t know what to do other than what she had always done, help others. During that lockdown period, she helped over 20 women turn to DIY their social media, gain confidence, and create a community of over 300 people. Sophies says they saved her and enabled her to apply for the role she is in now.

Discover More Features: