This weekend, I attended Christine Comaford-Lynch’s first Rules for Renegades Summit in Irvine, CA. It was an inspiring event with world class trainers and over 200 business people in attendance. One of the trainers that I most appreciated was Alex Mandossian – a marketing guru with many fabulous tips and strategies. As a trainer myself, I enjoyed his energy, presentation style, and use of visuals and handouts in addition to the content. As a new member of his “fan club”, I bought his Stick Strategies Program to learn how to develop new ways to engage prospects and customers in my business. Alex also has a teleclass program on Virtual Book Tour Secrets that started yesterday that I was lucky enough to get in to learn cutting edge ways to promote my book, Business Philanthropy: How Smart Companies Give Back, which will be published this fall.
I first heard about Alex from Christine Kloser, of Love Your Life Publishing and the Get Your Book Done Program. Christine is my book coach and will be publishing my book. Christine’s will be promoting her new book, the Freedom Formula, through a Virtual Book Tour that Alex is helping her with.
Doing some research, I learned about Alex’s SmartStartGiving micro-giving program to benefit Kiva. According to the email I received after signing up for notification about future SmartStartGiving calls, “SmartStartGiving (SSG) is a consortium of micro-fundraisers with the objective to become the organization that funds the most Kiva small businesses in 2008. The collective aim of SSG is to utilize the leverage of micro-fundraising to empower entrepreneurs in developing countries to uplift themselves out of poverty forever!”
Alex’s email also stated “In 2008, the final Friday of each month will be designated as “Kiva Micro-Fundraising Day”. I’ll donate a minimum of $500 out of my own pocket and request micro-donations of $10, $20 and $50 from entrepreneurs on our SSG subscription list … just like YOU.”
The “micro-fundraising” calls start at 8am Pacific (11am Eastern) and will be 40 minutes in duration. Here’s the remaining 2008 schedule is: June 27th, July 25th, August 29th, September 26th, October 31st, November 28th, and December 26th. Alex extends an open invitation to join in and pass on the word to as many entrepreneurial friends and colleagues as possible.
What a great idea! Alex is helping raise the visibility of Kiva, an organization with the mission ”to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty. Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world.” He is also raising dollars from his broad network to support his efforts with the developing country entrepreneurs Kiva assists. And, by choosing Kiva as the organization to support, the donated resources go to specific entrepreneurs, not into some big black hole. Cool, eh?
I plan to be on his next teleseminar for SmartStartGiving and will make a donation – I like Alex and what he is up to…AND microfinance is the cause I selected a couple years back as the primary focus for Business Nonprofit Connections, Inc.’s philanthropic efforts. Join us!
