Wokai Blog: The Great Wall, voting on Chase Giving, and our $1 Million Marketing Goal: Wokai China Microfinance Blog

Our staff retreat at Mutianyu at the Great Wall was productive and rewarding, but took a dent out of our time last week, and I returned on Monday trying frantically to catch up. The Chase Giving Challenge had almost slipped beneath our radar, and there was only a week left to vote for 200 charities to win a total of $5million. How rad is that for a giving model??

If you haven’t checked it out yet, go to Wokai on Chase Giving - and if you haven’t voted for Wokai yet, PLEASE click VOTE before July 12th!! It is so simple, and yet has such a huge impact.

We scrambled to put together this video on Monday, followed by a Chinese version the next day. (If you are in China, go to the Youku link )

It was my first time using iMovie and damn they do not make things easy. Luckily I had a trusted friend nearby who helped outfit the music (isn’t it awesome?).

Back to the retreat. This was the first time since Ben, Julia and I started that the whole team was in the same room, discussing some of the crucial connectors between our roles. There is a lot of work on the web product and design side that falls between my role as Marketing and Product Director and Ben’s as Chief Software Architect. The marketing and product decisions will affect Zhang Sheng’s requests of the Field Partners, ie. what borrower profile info they need to submit. Any requests I have for volunteer resources will also involve Julia, our Chief of Staff.

We sat down with one over-arching goal in mind: $1 million raised in loan capital by July 2011. It was an afternoon of discussion on how each and every one of us planned to make this goal a reality through the specific plans we had. To save from boring you now- I’ll do it on one of my future posts, and go into a bit more detail on the marketing plans.

For now, here are some photos from my camera last weekend.

The team working in a conference room hosted by the Schoolhouse at Mutianyu. Great space and lunch too!

Beautiful view of the mountains around Sancha, the tiny village of 200 where we stayed with my friend, Wei Zi Qi. (Read a story about Sancha by writer Peter Hessler)