Revere teens help local businesses get online

Mass Innovations, From the Beacon, May 2014

An effort by the city of Revere to help its small businesses establish an online presence received a boost recently from a group of high school interns.

The small-business program, known as the “Get Your Business Online City Challenge,” was launched last August with support from the U.S. Conference of Mayors and Google. Since then, according to the mayor’s office, nearly 50 Revere businesses have participated in the process and about 20 of them now have a website, including a law firm, a limousine service and a children’s book publisher. The participating businesses receive a domain name, web-hosting services and educational resources free for one year.

Beginning last October, the mayor’s office, working with the East Boston-Revere Rotary Club, helped match up Revere High School interns working in the mayor’s office with the owners of small businesses.

Mayor Daniel Rizzo, the founder of a local insurance firm, had been focusing primarily on large-scale development in the city when he learned about the small-business assistance program, according to chief of staff Miles Lang-Kennedy. Rizzo was impressed by figures suggesting that having a website could increase a small company’s revenue by 40 percent. Helping businesses go online, he concluded, could generate hundreds of new jobs in the city.

One of the companies establishing an online presence through the city’s program is Doc’s Nuthouse, a longstanding retail business run by a woman who had never used a computer. “For her to use the website, we basically said, ‘let’s get some kids in here,’” Lang-Kennedy said.

Training sessions for small-business owners took place at a public school that was already being used as a venue for English-language and financial-literacy lessons, so there was no additional cost to the city.

“The fun thing was watching the kids collaborate with the business owners,” Lang-Kennedy said. “If one kid couldn’t figure [something] out, then he’d ask a friend and they would use that experience to deal with a new problem. It was almost like a small think tank.”

Bob Upton, president of the Revere Chamber of Commerce, said roughly 20 of the small companies have taken advantage of the chamber’s offer of three months of free membership.

For more information, contact Miles Lang-Kennedy at (781) 286-8111.