Thanksgiving Thursday: Celebrating Progress, Support, and Successes
I am a goal-oriented individual. I have a target in mind
that I want to hit and I tend to be single-minded in my devotion to getting
there.
That can be good, because it means I am relentless in my pursuit
of any objective once I am convinced it is the right objective, but it can also
be bad because it means I tend to focus so intently on where I want to be that
I don’t take time to appreciate those who have helped me get there or the progress
that has been made toward achieving the objective.
That’s why I’m dedicated Thursday to Thanksgiving. Not the U.S.
holiday where we set aside time for food, football, and family, stuffing
ourselves full of food until we slip into a turkey-induced food coma as a means
of celebrating the pilgrim’s first successful harvest and the founding of the
nation we know as the United States. No, this is more of a universal
thanksgiving.
Celebrating A Major Success
Many people who work in marketing know how difficult it is
to get even well-established brands ranking above the fold on the front page of
Google. Project FED Nigeria did it in a week with two of our YouTube videos. I took
a screenshot because it was so incredible I wanted to record it for history’s
sake.
We are beating out Unicef and several other non-governmental
organizations, which lends credibility and visibility to the project. Whenever
someone searches for those terms, they are going to see us first. That gives us
a higher chance of them clicking through to watch our video and learn about our
project.
That kind of visibility is something a lot of companies have
to pay SEO companies a lot of money to achieve. I did it with a $0 marketing
budget.
Celebrating Support
While all thanks and praise is due to God who has definitely
had His hand on this project, I would be greatly remiss if I didn’t take time
to thank our brand new Chief Financial Officer, who will be handling all the
finances for Project FED. Her name is Rita Larrivee. I am so grateful to have
her on board with us.
As I mentioned in my first post, Introducing Project FED, I am a financial mess, and I didn't want that financial mess to become a reason why Project FED failed. That's one reason I was hesitant to launch, but if I hadn't launched, she and I would not have met and we would not be having this reason to celebrate.
Toward that end, we have worked hard this week to move the
store to its own account, set up a Pinterest account for it, and am also setting up other social media accounts for it so
that not only is there no risk of the finances being mingled but Project FED
can be, if needed, handed off to others to run.
A retired doctor, Rita started her own charity to support the 100 widows whose husbands were
martyred in Ossira, India. With support from Father Richie Vaz, SVD and Sister
Frisca, they helped the widows form self-help groups. They would donate the
money for the purchase of goats or supplies and then help these women to set up
self-sustaining businesses that allowed them to support themselves and their
families.
She is an inspiration to me and has offered support both
through sharing online and materially by helping to purchase the domain name for
the project (https://projectfed.org), as well as to keep the programs I need to do my
design work running while I am searching for work.
Celebrating Progress
This is the 8th day of Project FED’s official
online presence, and I am amazed at the progress we have managed to make so
far. Our website is still not done, we have a long way to go in that regard,
but we have many things in place already.
Our blog has migrated over fully from project-fed.blogspot.com to our new home at projectfednigeria.blogspot.com. We have a new, improved Pinterest account for it as well. We’ll be adding boards and improving the look of them in weeks to come so keep watching. This is where I will be posting new products as they become available.
Plenty of Reasons To Celebrate
We are a long way from the point where I aim to be in the
future where Project FED is bringing in $333 a day through its products, or $10,000 a month, but as
I mentioned earlier, every large oak tree begins as a seed and we are still
putting down roots and working to establish ourselves.
In the meanwhile, we will celebrate what is good even as we
look forward to the day when we are growing at the rate we desire to grow and
all the systems needed to support and sustain the project are in place.

"Thanksgiving Thursday" is such a great idea, Brandy!
ReplyDeleteThanks :) It was all part of God's content strategy. Taking time out to say "thank you" is just a healthy practice.
ReplyDelete