Tag Archives: corporate responsibility

eBay in the Microfinance business.

MicroPlace.comA friend recently sent me an article in BusinessWeek about eBay’s Microfinance engine. The article, EBay: The Place for Microfinance, speaks of eBay’s 2006 acquisition of MicroPlace.com.

MicroPlace.com’s mission is “to help alleviate global poverty by enabling everyday people to make investments in the world’s working poor.” Pretty impressive.

Pierre Omidyar, eBay’s founder, is also an investor in Kiva.org, which is a similar site for investing small amounts of money to entrepreneurs in developing countries.

MicroPlace.com fits eBay’s direction so nicely, and takes advantage of their infrastructure to do good in the world. Nice to see big players enabling Microfinance and bringing it to the masses. That’s doing well by doing good.

ChangeSomething contest down to final five.

The ChangeSomething contest on ChangeEverything.ca has been whittled from the initial list of 18 organizations down to a final list of 5. ChangeSomething encouraged people to write a compelling blog post (or a series of them) about a cause or organization that they felt deserved to receive $1,000. Eighteen organizations were nominated and, based on voting by the community, the list has been whittled down to the final five, one of which will get the cash.

The final list includes:
BCSEA – promoting sustainable energy
CARES – helping homeless cats
girls education international – building schools for women and girls in Pakistan
SAINTS – caring for animals with special needs
working gear – clothing men in the DTES entering the workforce

Get voting!

New NetBanker post: Spending Your First Social Media Dime.

I haven’t posted on NetBanker in a little while, but I released a new one today. It actually came out of a discussion with the wise Ted Josephson from People’s United Bank a month or so ago. Ted is obviously someone who gets it and wants to try out social media, but is at a crossroads I hadn’t thought of:
I want in, but where do I start?

I kept thinking about this situation, and it seemed to me that there might be others in the same boat. I wish there was a roadmap I could describe to make the journey easier, but in the end it’s a very customized strategic development process. Different for every company.

So I wrote an article called Spending Your First Social Media Dime. Enjoy.

Here’s where you can see all my NetBanker posts.