Evan Carmichael advises a Ghana-based nonprofit founder on raising funds for women entrepreneurs. Use a website with photos and personal stories of borrowers, share loan updates on social media, and consider partnering with Kiva to reach individual donors who want measurable impact.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my newsletter readers, Harriet, who is in Ghana and is setting up a nonprofit organization to help raise funds, startup loans for people in Ghana, women entrepreneurs in Ghana who want to start up their own business as a way to, you know, get out of poverty, be able to enrich their lives, hire people, and, you know, build a new life for themselves. And she's trying to raise funds and wanted my advice on how to do it. So, Harriet, I don't know the whole process about raising, you know, money for a nonprofit in Ghana, but what I do have some experience on is with using services like Kiva. So we work with Kiva to give microloans to entrepreneurs across Africa. We've raised thousands and thousands of dollars. Help in doing it. And what really attracted me to it was how easy it was to be able to lend money and see that you're helping people. So there may be a whole bunch of government grants you can go after, loans. Uh, my experience is more from the individual investor, somebody who wants to give back. So if you're targeting a North American audience who feel like they want to do something helpful and, and help other entrepreneurs grow their businesses, that could be an interesting market. That's guys like me and a whole bunch of other people who, you know, want to find a way to give back meaningfully. And so we loan out thousands of dollars to Kiva. So this is another market for you to be able to go after. What I would suggest doing is you need to create a website, show the people who you're helping. And that's one of the great things about Kiva is you can see who you're helping. You know, you take a picture of them, and hopefully it's a smiling picture. I know there's some cultural differences where it's not always easy to get a smiling picture. But for us in North America, we like seeing people with smiles. It makes us more willing to want to work with somebody and help that person out. So you want to try to take smiling pictures. Tell us what the money is going to be used for. Try to tell a story to pull at the heartstrings a little bit and make us want to help out. So it's not just, you know, here's an entrepreneur Susan who needs $500 to start her business. You want to tell her story. Say why she wants to start a business, some of the hardships she's been through, any family information that you want to share. All that stuff is great and ties the readers closer to that person and makes them want to help. So you want to tell a story, have updates, so tell people how they're doing as you're raising the money, or as the money's been raised, if you're paying it back, then have quick updates to show how she's doing. That's also fantastic and keeps people more motivated, want to help other people. It'd be great to be able to share through social media. I think that's something Kiva could do a better job of. So whenever you give a loan to somebody, it could be integrated with your Facebook or your Twitter account to say, "I just helped, you know, whoever, and I raised $100 or $25 or whatever it is to help them get started." That'd be great to be able to integrate with somebody's Twitter feed as an example. So those are a few ideas. I'd definitely model Kiva, or there may be a way for you to just work with Kiva, and that could be an interesting opportunity as well. They basically work with different organizations to give out the funds, so that could be an opportunity for you to get access to a large pool of capital. And we only work with entrepreneurs who are in Africa through Kiva, so if you do get on there, let us know and hopefully we can send a little bit of money your way to help your organization grow. So I hope that helps. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me want to make more of these videos for you guys. And if you like the video and you have something to say about it, please leave a comment underneath. If you have a question or some other advice please leave that comment underneath, and we'll see you in the next episode.
