other alternative has been to work with somewhat larger or growth-oriented firms, and offer one-on-one virtual coaching (Anderson et al., 2022), or live online sessions combined with one-on-one coaching (Cusolito et al., 2023). This allows for more interaction and tailored content, but is far more expensive and less likely to scale. Our study compliments these approaches by testing the feasibility, cost, and effectiveness of offering synchronous business training content with a poorer and more typical set of microentrepreneurs.

# **2 Context, Content, Sample, and Data**

We partnered with the Mexican NGO Crea Comunidades de Emprendedores Sociales, which has been providing programs in Mexico since 2008 for women entrepreneurs in economically marginalized areas. They typically offer in-person training courses to women, funded by a range of government and private sector partners. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, inperson training was no longer feasible, and they were interested in seeing whether they could instead deliver training to women online.

## **2.1 Recruitment and Enrolment in the Program**

CREA launched their program under the name _Fortalece tu negocio_ (Strengthen your business). The program was advertised as a free online course where microenterprise owners could learn resilience, costing, prices, marketing, e-commerce, and making their business plan. Recruitment took place in ten waves spread between November 2020 and November 2021. Recruitment mainly took place through social media channels, the principal one being paid Facebook advertising. In addition the program was advertised on the social media pages of CREA and some of its funders, through SMS messages and emails sent to a sample of firms in a Mexican government database, and through flyers in Mexico City. Guatemala was added as a second country after five rounds of recruitment had taken place, in order to test the feasibility of further geographic expansion. Overall, 65% of the Mexican sample and 86% of the Guatemalan sample were recruited through Facebook.

Facebook usage is high in Mexico, with an estimated 90 million users in 2022, which is 84 percent of the population aged 10 and over.<sup>2</sup> This illustrates the potential for online recruitment to reach large numbers of microenterprises. To participate in the program, individuals had to click on the advertisement and fill out a short pre-registration form indicating interest, and then they were invited to attend an online information session to find out more about the course. They then registered by filling out a form that serves as our baseline data. CREA’s paid advertising campaigns were seen by 3.3 million unique viewers. However, as is typical with online advertising, the conversion rate is low: 52,719 (1.6%) of viewers clicked on the link, 10,700 pre-registered, and 2,208 registered for the program across all sources (1,478 from the Facebook ads). The estimated recruitment cost from advertising was $3.38 per person in our sample.

Table 1 provides summary statistics of the experimental sample, and compares them to a

> 2User data from https://www.statista.com/statistics/282326/number-of-facebook-users-in-mexico/; population of 127 million and 16 percent aged under 10 and assumed to not be Facebook users for this calculation.

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