Kudos to Kiva

We live in The Age of the Case Study, where rapid information-sharing allows great ideas to circulate quickly. There are entire websites devoted to housing these case studies, and the majority of PR agencies usually will present a handful of their own case studies online for prospective clients. (Check out the dovetail solutions’ case studies on our website.

As a result, great ideas often inspire new great ideas, and “piggy-backing” is fairly commonplace in business these days. On the flip side, completely original ideas are pretty rare in marketing.

That’s why Kiva’s “Entrepreneur Hero Trading Cards” campaign is particularly cool and worth highlighting. 

If you haven’t heard of Kiva.org yet, it is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website. Borrowing principles from the Grameen Bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, Kiva.org empowers individuals to lend money online to entrepreneurs across the globe. It’s really an innovative approach to social business, and its growth and success are really inspiring.

To raise money for its “Entrepreneurs in Africa” initiative, Kiva partnered with EvanCarmichael.com to create a series of trading cards that showcase the top entrepreneurs in the world.

To start, Kiva asked the web’s most recognizable bloggers to pick their favorite famous entrepreneurs and provide reasons for their selections. From there, Kiva and EvanCarmichael.com created trading cards, like childhood baseball or football cards, to capture these “Heroes” of entrepreneurship. You can purchase and collect all 33 cards to complete the set; all proceeds go directly to the “Entrepreneurs in Africa” program.

I’m sure this “trading card” concept has been done before, but the idea feels like a fresh and fun way to ask for money through marketing.

I haven’t been able to find any metrics to gauge this campaign’s success so far, but even a modest return is absolutely commendable. If nothing else, Kiva has provided a worthy case study to inspire thousands of other marketing professionals that work to advance philanthropic causes and organizations.