FUTURO BOLIVIA - Envisioning a better future

Growing up I learned a lot about FUTURO, a project that my mom and some of her friends started in 1989 in La Paz, Bolivia. The aim of the project was to help women that were patients in the local hospital, Hospital de la mujer, to make a living through the creation and sale of productions made out of a traditional textile called aguayo. My mom would be in charge of selling the products and collect donations as well, so that the money would go back to the women and their families and to pay for more people's hospital bills. Since then, many women have been helped.

Now, however, starts a new cycle in FUTURO's life. The son of the main lady that was in charge of the project together with my mom, is working with me trying to make FUTURO a sustainable micro-enterprise capable of generating income and providing fair employment opportunities for even more women in the city of La Paz. Specifically, FUTURO's vision and mission are as follows:

Vision:

• To strengthen the social and economic development of each member of Futuro and their families through an improved and guaranteed access to health and education services.
• To become an entity of economic cooperation for patients in the Hospital de la Mujer with low resources by paying for their medical expenses.

Mission:

• To become a self-sustained microenterprise with the goal of creating new jobs for people with scarce resources and to push the economic and social development of Bolivia forward through the manufacturing and sale of innovating and high quality products.

• To allocate a percentage of the income generated to the Hospital de la Mujer.

• To introduce the work of Bolivian artisans to both local and foreign consumers.

A main step in the process was to revamp the image of the project which is why we got a new logo (see above) and decided to create a nice, flashy website. Little did I (or we) know that having just a website is not even close good enough for a successful marketing campaign.

Specially now in the times of the groundswell, when there is an infinity of (free) online tools that can help you make your brand everyone's brand. I've learned quite a bit in this Social Media Marketing class about how to use the web to increase visibility of one's projects and this is an attempt to apply my new knowledge into something that I care about. So, let me get started.

Our website (that we actually paid quite a bit of money for) is quite nice, but there are some minor mistakes that haven't been taken care of and I don't think anyone really knows that we have a website. So, I went ahead and used Weebly to edit our website. Fortunately, Weebly allows users to keep its website domain so I could keep the domain we had paid for: www.futurobolivia.com.

This is what our old website looks like - not bad at all. Really, not bad at all. But the problem is that it doesn't really do the job of keeping the audience engaged. For example, it doesn't do the BASIC: link to the organization's facebook and twitter accounts. Last time I wrote about how that was one of the main elements of a succesful website and facebook page. **The reason for this is because we didn't really have either of those accounts (but I got that covered now as part of this final project!) **. So, Weebly, kindly allows me to do that. Now customers can visit the website AND in addition they can check us out on facebook and twitter and get more involved. Now they can post questions, share ideas about products that they want to see (remember how Dell was really successful at doing that?), and be part of the progress that we make.

Much better, right? (Also, bear in mind that this new website is still work in progress! It takes so much more than I thought to create a cool website...).

Within the groundswell one cannot forget that customers' opinion is the most important element of success for which both Twitter and Facebook are crucial. In her blog post on this topic, Trista reminds us that it's not longer an A+B conversation and that it is soo important to listen and to respond to what the customers have to say.

I went ahead and created both a facebook and a twitter account for Futuro. And although it is too early to really see the impact of these accounts, I have no doubt that my newly acquired social media monitoring skills I will have no problem assessing the progress that we make online. So far, there is only 3 people "liking" the site and only one comment (from my brother...) but you got to start with something. I'm sure at some point in time Lady Gaga also only had 3 "likes", right? The class has also taught me a lot about how to make your online media presence more effective: we all made recommendations about what to do for an improved online presence so I will refer to those as much as I can.
Plus, I'm learning about more stuff that one can do with facebook that I didn't know was possible. For instance, if I post something on Futuro's wall for people to see, comment, or like, I can get a metric of how many people have seen this. When I posted that "Futuro is going online, get excited!" I was able to see the raw number of times that this story had been seen on the wall and in the News Feeds of my fans. Isn't that pretty cool? With all these tools I'm positive that soon Futuro will be as popular as Lady Gaga.

In terms of the Twitter account I've found a bit hard to keep putting in tweets (Trista really was right when she said that social media marketing is a FULL-TIME job). However, I'm positive that it will help FUTURO meet news connections and potential customers. I'll keep Trista's presentation on community building in mind. She covered a whole section on how to use Twitter most effectively.

A cool thing that I did was to link Futuro's facebook and twitter accounts (still trying to figure out how good of a strategy this is) so that my Twitter accounts gets the updates I have on my facebook account.

I've also created a blog because it is important to create rich content that people can benefit from. As part of my new Weebly website, I can create a blog to keep our users updated and share about some more in-depth insights with them. I still haven't posted anything but I'm hoping that in the future I will be able to generate some interesting content on the following topics, among many others that I can think of:

• Personal stories of the people involved in the project
  
• The history and tradition of Bolivian textiles
• Our progress (including difficulties and problems to be as transparent as possible)
• The phenomenon of social entrepreneurship
  
• The situation of working class women and their families in Bolivia
• Collaborations with designers and similar organizations

When doing my project about KIVA, I really like to see that they had a wide variety of blogs: not only does KIVA's staff blog, but so do their field partners around the world as well as their volunteers. Ideally, I'd like to implement a same sort of system in which we can hear the experiences of, for instance, people managing the organization and people doing the products as well as people buying them. That will be important, and also, I'll try to make sure I keep some basic rules about blogging in mind. There are many resources online (and much of what we have talked about it in class applies) that I can use for Futuro's success in blogging; I really enjoyed reading this article that compiled a bunch of tips for effective blogging plus I also wanted to share this video (not to get really off track but I love to share interesting stuff when I find it!):



There is a multiplicity of factors that I have not been able to cover on this blog because of time and space limitations. However, there are a bunch of things that I would like to touch on in my presentation in class next week. I'm going to go a little bit more into detail about the interesting things that I learned by using Weebly, creating a Facebook account for an organization that means to use the account for more than socializing purposes, and more about this experience of creating an new image for FUTURO.