NamStarter continues to empower

Tunohole Mungoba NamStarter hosted a follow up campaign to brainstorm ways to create more traffic on their website and how to attract supporters by creating rewards at different levels. The Zone attended the workshop which was held last week in Havana, Windhoek and all the different campaign owners were present. NamStarter turned the usual concept of a project receiving funds on its head, by eliminating the concept of relying on one big sponsor to fund projects, but to focus on crowdfunding. “If you have a great idea and people from all over can give funds and other assistance from all sides. The idea is that you promote yourself and anyone who wants to support you can do it easily and quickly,” Ben Schernick, the project coordinator.The workshop was coordinated with RLabs trainers, together with Schernick to help them campaign for their projects. RLabs, a project of NamStarter was established in Namibia in 2012 as a training project. The aim of the workshop is teach and establish self-promotion like using technology to promote their campaign. The campaign owners are a group of young men and women from Havana and neighbouring locations that are aspiring entrepreneurs. “This is done with social media interacting training as the work is done online. One can copy and paste their campaign on their own social media pages and also on their WhatsApp status updates,” Schernick says. The project funding by the Finnish embassy is also to be extending the campaigns that are already on the website. The workshop also focused on attracting more supporters by coming up with creative rewards at different levels for both local and international community. “If you are an artist and someone contributes a certain amount to your campaign, you could give them different rewards like something simple like giving them a CD that you signed or something big like performing at their birthday for free,” explains Schernick at the workshop. They also came up with different rewards for their global community by sending a thank you postcard as people see it as investments and they would want to be long-term supporters. Laimi Katengele, one of the campaign owners says she is enjoys working with NamStarter as she has learned a lot over the past few months. She has received a lot information and even though her campaign might not kick off as she hopes, she says the mentoring and support she has received is enough to try out other avenues. Her campaign is about opening a hair salon and she has been doing hair for a long time so she felt it was a good business idea. “I do it to create an extra income for me so sometimes people come to me, but I am also mobile,” says the 21 year old. NamStarter believes in bridging the gap between the rich and the poor. “We basically want people who have brilliant ideas, but do not have the financial means to execute their ideas. It an opportunity for any Namibians to get funding for their projects as diverse as can be. The main targets are unemployment youth and they get additional support. Visit the website at www. namstarter.rlabsnamibia.org.

NamStarter continues to empower

Comments

Namibian Sun 2025-05-09

Please login to leave a comment

NamStarter continues to empower

Comments

Namibian Sun 2025-05-09

Please login to leave a comment

Login