MicroCapital Institute

The MicroCapital Institute is a nonprofit organization promoting commercial microfinance. With an aggressive fundraising goal, the directors of the Institute realized they needed to refine their message, build a research base, and start promoting themselves to the financial community. They were also sponsoring several conferences, and yet they had no marketing materials or information to target the financial community and to educate them on the role of the organization.

Solution: IAB Custom Media developed a full-scale research and marketing plan for the MicroCapital Institute. With just three weeks before the first conference, we designed a portable trade show display and a marketing brochure that reinforced a new brand image we developed. Nancy Yonge, director of the Institute, boasted: "Our materials were more attractive than all the big banks at the conference." Building on that success, IAB created a new Web site to complement the new look, and a communications plan that included white papers, email newsletters, and a series of conferences targeting the financial community. Additionally, IAB was enlisted for a custom research project that including developing an index and rating system tracking commercial microfinance.