Moses Lee

The Future of NextBillion

A few months ago, the managing partners of NextBillion (Acumen Fund, WRI, and WDI) met in New York for a strategy meeting on the future of NextBillion. One of the items that came out of it was the need to better understand the needs of our readers. That’s why we created a quick online survey. If you haven’t done so already, please take 5 minutes to fill out this survey.

Additionally, our team came up with a two-year plan with the goal of increasing readership, involvement, and the brand equity of NextBillion. We plan to achieve this goal by doing the following:

  1. Build Leading Content: This will involve developing an editorial calendar, adding new content partners to the site (e.g. Technoserve), and keeping news and research fresh.
  2. Enhance Marketing Efforts: We plan to do more to make NextBillion top-of-mind for people interested in development through enterprise. We’ll be leveraging social media, using tools such as Google Analytics and Adwords, and partnering with other mainstream media to get our message out to the public.
  3. Create a Robust Career Section: From our conversations with many of you, we realize that we can do a better job of providing career resources for the BoP and a more organized career database. Be on the lookout for these improvements.
  4. Incorporate Advice from Leaders in the Field: By now you can see that we’ve added a stellar advisory board to NextBillion. The board is composed of many leaders in the development and enterprise sector such as Stu Hart, Al Hammond, and Randall Kempner. We plan to solicit their help in the building NextBillion.
  5. Grow Our Team of Staff Writers: In the past few months, we have added a number of new staff writers to our team. We are now in position to better cover a myriad of issues in this sector.
  6. Improve Site Operations: There are a lot of backend areas of the site that we can improve, such as spam filters and RSS feeds. We’re on it and look to roll out these improvements shortly.

Of course, a lot of this is subject to change based on your responses to our reader’s survey. So if you are still reading this and have not completed the survey, please do so now!

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