Catch up post (3/22/2005)

Mifos Update

Although the RDVP program has officially been on spring break, it's still been a busy time for me. One of my Grameen colleagues, Ericka Lock, came down from Seattle for a couple days, as she, Steve Mushero, and I started combing through the Business Requirements Document, looking for ambiguities or things that weren't specified clearly enough.

The process continued for a week while I was in Seattle, though we did take a couple of days out to give our technical advisory board an update and gather information about the possibility of outsourcing the development work, probably to a firm overseas, in an area of the world where microcredit is actually done. Even after two solid days of plowing through a list of open issues, many still remained, so we’ve continued the process in the exemplary manner of a distributed team: two members in Seattle, a third in the Seattle area (but at home), one at Berkeley, and one at Stanford. For one of the meetings today, we added another continent, with Ericka calling in (via Skype) from Peru.

http://www.Namaste-direct.org

In addition to the Mifos activities, I sat in on a board meeting for http://www.Namaste-direct.org a microcredit organization started by Bob Graham. His vision is to use the power of the internet to attract donors and allow them to have a much more detailed view of the impact that their donation makes, by having their money directly fund a “Group of 100” (women borrowers) in places in Guatemala like Ixil or Villa Canales or
Chimaltenago. Team captains (primarily college interns from the US) will visit the groups, record the stories of the borrowers and share them with the donors that funded the group, giving donors a real sense of how their money was invested. I'm curious to see if some of the internet marketing techniques that I learned at Vividence.com will help boost online contributions and conversion rate.

MicroMentor

I also had a chance to meet David Rand, the Founder of http://www.micromentor.org, an online service to match micro-entrepreneurs in the US (for now) with mentors who can provide business expertise, such as advice in strategic planning, marketing, fundraising, networking. Micro-entrepreneurs self-register, mentors register on the site, and when approved, can search through the profiles of the entrepreneurs, and contact anonymously (via the site) the entrepreneur. If the entrepreneur (who sees a "blinded" mentor profile) agrees to the match, the site exchanges the contact information. After a two year pilot, Micromentor re-vamped last year (moving to the model just described) and is growing in a controlled fashion while they prove out the model.