(10%). The total scores of each of the three judges was then averaged to get a final score for each firm.

Our main follow-up data measure impacts approximately one year after the program started. We conducted a follow-up survey, which was answered by 180 firms (80%), with 87 control (77.7%) and 93 treated firms (82.3%) answering. This is supplemented by data from the traction sheets for an additional 14 firms, to give some follow-up data for 194 firms (86% of firms, 84% of control and 88% of treatment). Some of the firms only supplied partial follow-up data, resulting in item non-response on some of the financial measures, including our key outcome of export sales. However, Appendix B shows that we cannot reject equality of response rates by treatment status, and that the set of firms responding to the endline survey are balanced on baseline observables, as are those who supply export data.

This follow-up survey contains data on our main outcomes of interest for measuring whether the program enabled firms to gain more customers, increase revenues, and expand exports. We investigated whether administrative data sources could be used to provide more information on these outcomes. However, with firms from six different countries, it was not possible to link these firms to administrative tax data that could provide information on revenues. Export data, such as that included in the World Bank’s Exporter Dynamics Database, is not currently available for these countries in our follow-up period, is provided in an anonymized format, and most importantly, comes from customs data that only captures goods crossing borders, and thus would miss the service exports that the majority of firms in our sample specialize in. Hence survey data provide the only sales and export data available.

Our final source of follow-up data comes from a detailed scoring exercise we undertook on the digital presence of firms in December 2021, also one year after the program started (with a more basic version collected at baseline, and used as control variables). Improvement of digital presence to attract new customers was a key area emphasized by the program, and took on more importance during the COVID-19 pandemic as other opportunities to interact in-person with potential customers were limited. These data were collected by two independent consultants with linguistic knowledge of the prevalent languages in the region, who were blinded to treatment status. An additional advantage is that these data can be collected for all 225 firms in the experiment.

We measure three elements of digital presence, capturing the extent to which firms are employing modern marketing methods to be attractive to domestic and international customers. The first is based on Google searches, and reflects whether the firm has used search engine optimization techniques to make it easy for potential customers to find them. Our consultants score the firm on seven features of this search, including their page rank, whether there is a description in an English search, whether google provides a right menu address and contact information, and whether it is clear from the search result what the company does. The second measure examines the firm website, and scores in based on 12