For our EEE 382 class, we were asked to develop a marketing plan for the entrepreneurial support site Kiva.org. Our objective was to either create an event to raise money for the site, or to create and execute a marketing campaign that will raise awareness and garner some sort of publicity for Kiva.
We opted to take the more challenging of the two options, and decided that awareness was needed far more than a few hundred bucks. It’s like the old saying, give a man a fish, you’ll feed him for a day, teach him to fish and feed him for a life time.
If we only got donations from five people, we would be able to help a few entrepreneurs, but if we teach twenty or thirty people about Kiva and they tell their friends we can touch a lot more people! After several group discussions, we decided to take a “shock and awe” approach to our marketing strategy.
Originally we had wanted to hire a real prostitute to work on Marshall St, but we were genuinely shocked to find out that even the fat ugly prostitutes were several hundred dollars an hour! So in the end, it was decided that one of our own team members would have to sacrifice their dignity for the good of Kiva (and our grade).
Kiva.org is a brilliant website that allows individuals to give micro-loans to aspiring entreprenuers in 3rd world countries. One thing that we really tried to emphasize to people was that this was not a donation, it was an investment in a business!
For more information on Kiva.org and what it has to offer we really encourage everyone to check it out and make a small $25 donation through the Syracuse University lending chapter which can be accessed at https://www.kiva.org/team/syracuse_university
Kiva.org from Cuse My Campus on Vimeo.
