Frustration

I spent the day yesterday with my daughter Val working on our nonprofit organization. The better part of two hours we slaved over our business plan. Neither one of us has any clue how to do this and are just winging it from sample business plans we have found on the internet. Val has asked a few “experts” but hasn’t been able to get a straight answer from them. The one guy just keeps sending her documents. We have enough documents; we can pull more from the internet. What we need is someone to go over the business plan we have and say, “yup, you are on the right track” or “boy, maybe you should scrape this and start over”.  

Simple enough. Feedback. That’s all we want. Why haven’t we been able to get any???

Next thing we worked on was social media. Tumaini Volunteers is already on Facebook and has a website. I thought that LinkedIn would be an appropriate place to get connected, so we tried that. After typing in our organization’s name, they wanted the work e-mail address of the person (me) who is the designated contact. We thought that the organization’s email address should be the one to use, which is tumainivolunteers@gmail.com. And LinkedIin can’t accept gmail accounts as a business email. Why would that be? It is the truth. That is our email address. So that went nowhere.

Next I set us up on Twitter. That actually worked out okay. I found a bunch of other nonprofits to follow who all either work with Kenya or orphans or clean water. Now they all just have to start following us. Except that I really don’t get Twitter anyway. I think that there is just too much going on. The goal, I suppose, is to have lots of followers, but the more followers you have the more Tweets start popping up and there is no way to read all of them.

On my personal Twitter page, I can get a hundred Tweets coming in within a few minutes. And often times there isn’t even anything to read. All that comes up are random numbers, letters and hash marks, which I know are all links to websites, but when there are four or five of these in each Tweet, which link do I even want to go to?

Arggh! Is there anyone out there reading this who can help us with any of these issues? We would so much appreciate it.

Thanks so much and have a great weekend. My goal is to have a weekend without frustration. Which may mean unplugging. 

This is little Monica. Her father had abandoned her and her mother. When her mother couldn't take care of her child anymore, she hung herself from a tree outside their home. A neighbor took Monica to Agape Hope Center orphanage. This, believe it or not, is a story with a happy ending as Monica is now being taken care of. Thousands of children in Nairobi end up living on the streets - or worse - when their parents are no longer in their lives.