Posts by admin:
- Drinks and networking with Lumana staff and volunteers
- Enjoy hors d’oeuvres, beer, wine and signature Wokai beverage
- Special preview of Wokai’s enhanced website
- Fun night of networking and learning
- Shape a fun, inspiring and effective public personality for Vittana
- Developing the right site, community and media messaging
- Balancing many different personality requirements: fun, inspiring, humble, genuine, effective
- Training our CEO and external-facing team members to make sure they stay on message
- Drive a regular flow of effective, meaningful media hits
- Developing and maintaining personal relationships of trust with journalists and media outlets
- Developing a long-term arc of stories and angles over the next year for different media outlets
- Researching background on, approaching/cold-calling journalists and doing whatever else it takes to get the “right” story
- Improve our website product iteratively over time
- Collaborating with our CEO, CTO and top-tier design, PR and startup advisors
- Shaping website messaging in accordance with the public personality you’ll develop
- Quantitatively tracking website performance and critical customer metrics: visitor-to-lender conversion rate, retention and visit frequency, website virality (k-factor)
- Increasing said customer and conversion metrics through creativity and A/B testing
- Develop and implement a marketing strategy using both traditional and non-traditional media
- Building out a deep, effective, sustained social media presence: Facebook, twitter, blog
- Collaborating with our Communities Manager to develop a bottom-up marketing strategy
- Experimenting with and developing innovative, effective non-traditional marketing tactics
- Making it all happen — ultimately, are more students getting loans through Vittana every month because of you?
- Helping manage volunteers, bloggers, interns and (eventually) other staff
- Collaborating with our Communities Manager to develop a fun, innovative work environment
- Offloading as much work as possible from our CEO before his head explodes
- Doing whatever else it takes to get this bird off the ground
- $20—Provide a 10-day business training course to a class of 20 entrepreneurs.
- $50—Train and employ one local school teacher to teach business training courses in the community for two months.
- $100—Provide a 6-month loan for a woman to invest in her business. Each time the loan is repaid it will be passed on to another woman in need.
“Banking on Change” Award Winning Video on Microfinanc
February 23rd, 2010
Banking On Change from Pilgrim Films on Vimeo.
Soap Hope and “Good Returns”
February 7th, 2010
I can across Soap Hope this evening as a result of a Tweet I received as a result of retweeting this article. Soap Hope’s business model, named “Good Returns,” really impressed me and I thought worthy of sharing — they invest 100% of their profits every year, for the full year, into anti-poverty non-profits. They chose microfinance as a niche to support and are currently partnered with 3 microfinance institutions (Esperanza International, Chiapas Project, and Plan Fund). 2009 was their first year in business, and they generated $20,000 in profits that was then loaned to their microfinance partners.
Their co-founder, Salah Boukadoum, has extremely ambitious goals for the “Good Returns” model — one billion dollars towards ending poverty. I applaud his efforts, and hope we continue to see additional entrepreneurs like him starting businesses that help alleviate poverty.
Two Microfinance Events in Seattle on February 18th
February 3rd, 2010For those in Seattle, there are two events you may be interested in on February 18th:
Microbrews and Microfinance with Lumana (organized by SeaMO):
When: February 18, 6pm-9pm
Where: 1201 1st Avenue South Seattle, WA 98134-1238 www.pyramidbrew.com
Events Details:
Wokai Happy Hour (in honor of the Chinese New Year):
When: February 18 ,5:30 – 7:30 pm
Where: Café Amore in Belltown, 2301 Fifth Avenue
Event Details:
Cost is $25 per person, of which $10 will be credited to a borrower of your choice on Wokai.org.
Vittana Looking for a Marketing / PR Manager in Seattle
January 31st, 2010Vittana is looking for a Marketing/PR Manager based in Seattle, with the following responsibilities:
Wokai has Three Open Positions in Bejing
January 31st, 2010I recently received the latest Wokai newsletter and wanted to highlight the fact that they have three open positions (based in Bejing) — a lead developer, executive fellow, and a marketing director.
You can see more details regarding all three positions here.
Wokai CEO Casey Wilson on Bloomberg
December 12th, 2009Congrats to Casey Wilson and the Wokai team for landing an appearance on Morning Call Bloomberg this past week!! Here’s the video:
Lumana Credit Gift Drive: Give Hope for the Holidays
December 6th, 2009Lumana Credit is conducting a holiday fundraiser – details below:
WHAT: Lumana Credit is working to raise funds to expand its microfinance program in Ghana. Give the gift of a micro loan on behalf of a friend, family member, or colleague, and they will receive a traditional, personalized Ghanaian Kente card expressing their gift of hope given to a woman in need.
WHEN: Tuesday, December 1st to Friday, January 1st 2010.
WHERE: Make your donation online at www.lumana.orgWHY: Lumana Credit provides loans and education to rural villages in Ghana with an impact that extends beyond the holiday season. Be a part of a movement to help lift people out of poverty through microcredit.
COST: Cards start at $20 and can be purchased for any denomination above that.
$20 may not go very far here in the US, but it’s quite a bit of money in Ghana. For example:
Hope you choose to give the gift that keeps on giving this holiday season!
Good…Better…Even Better – from Acumen Fund
December 1st, 2009Here’s a great video from Acumen Fund just in time for the Holiday Season!
World Vision’s “Micro” Joins the List of Microfinance Lending Platforms
November 17th, 2009
World Vision recently launched their own Kive-like lending platform named Micro. They are the latest microfinance lending platform to launch, joining more established players such as Kiva, Wokai, and Microplace. It looks like the site was launched in September (also on UrbanMinistry), but I was made aware of the site from SocialEarth’s blog post today. According to their site, World Vision has disbursed 3,500,000 loans totaling more than $1.8 billion since 1993, has 604,000 active entrepreneurs, and loaned $396 million last year — so they are not new to microfinance by any means. Loan sizes range from $25 all the way up to $500+. Currently, Micro only offers loans for entrepreneurs in Rwanda, Mexico, and the Phillipines — but I’d guess they will be adding new markets in the coming year.
I’m certainly a fan of anything that brings microfinance into the spotlight and am thrilled that World Vision is tapping their existing donors to help raise capital for microfinance, but am yet to be convinced software development time and effort should continue to be spent on building technology to power lending platforms. As I said in August, I’d still like to see Kiva.org open source, or white-label, some of their software to other players in the market who want to specialize in a particular geographic area or type of business; that would enable development time and dollars to be spent building features on top of some of the great P2P lending technology that already exists.
For those interested in following Micro’s progress, you can follow them on Twitter here. Head over to SocialEarth for more details.
IBM Microfinance Power Point Presentation
October 20th, 2009
