Does anyone know what the cost of setting up an exchange server is? We are currently just using the included email from our webhost (yahoo) but I think at some point I need to expand our document retention policy so that I at least archive all our emails. We give email address to our non-employee Ambassadors and at some point I know I ought to retain those emails. I am also looking at hosted solutions.

Please welcome the two newest members of TEN to o-net.

Becky Bavinger – Director of Student Programs. Becky is a recent graduate of Georgetown University where she founded SSTOP (Students Stopping Trafficking of People). SSTOP is a nationwide program of students seeking to bring attention to the issue for human trafficking. She bought TEN to SSTOP and hosted several successful events as a TEN Ambassador. She created and hosted a national student conference on trafficking and SSTOP continues to expand into other campuses. She also was an intern at Vital Voices and UNICEF. Becky’s primary responsibility at TEN is to build our college marketing program. As a fluent Russian speaker she will also work with TEN to find NGO Partners in Russia and Eastern Europe. She will be traveling there this July if you know anyone she should visit.

Lauren Garrity – Summer Intern. Lauren is a student at NYU who is already doing a little bit of everything at TEN. (A lot of everything really) Currently her two biggest priorities are helping us with the transition to our new ERP/CRM system and helping Becky develop our new TEN College programs. As a fluent Spanish speaker she is also helping us expand our list of NGO partners into South and Central America. Lauran will be in Bolivia in the fall and Ghana in the spring where we hope she will be able to continue to represent TEN.

Welcome, Becky and Lauren. Great to have you both here!

Where in Eastern Europe will Becky be traveling? I'm sure Bronwyn Jones may have some good leads in this region. I know of a few orgs in Bulgaria, but I learned of them through Bronwyn's work with MADI. I also have a Peace Corps collegue who is still in Bulgaria and she might be able to get more information.

Welcome to O'net Becky and Lauren. Looking forward to your contributions.

:D

Hello, Becky & Lauren. I'm sure that John will put you through the ringer this summer -- but it's all for a good cause, right?

Thanks for the welcome notes! It's been great working with TEN, and hopefully the college program will be a huge success.

I'll be in Croatia, Bosnia, Hungary, Italy, and maybe Romania. Susan, if you know someone in Bulgaria I'd love to at least converse with them via email if I can't get there this summer. Thanks :)

Becky

Great news for TEN - we are getting a feature story on our regional NPR station. If you live on the Cape or South Shore, you can tune in Thursday (90.1, 91.1 or 94.3) at 7:30 am or 12:20. If you live elsewhere or if you miss those airtimes, you can stream live online, or hear the story online at any time, at www.capeandislands.org.

One of the highlights of the 5 minute story is an interview with So Cheat, one of the survivors working on TEN products with AFESIP Cambodia. As a result of her hard work, So has been promoted to management level at AFESIP's workshop, has gotten an apartment, married, and now she is expecting a baby! Sarah had the honor of meeting So last year in Cambodia, and she is certainly an inspiring young woman. With commitment and teamwork, anything is possible. The story also includes interviews with hosts, guests and Ambassadors at recent Awareness parties

The NPR Story is online - we are very happy with it. We are already getting people signing up on the new party signup form I only just cludged together yesterday. There is nothing like a deadline!

U.N.: Koranic schools in Senegal fuel child trafficking

Hello my name is Caitlin Mackenzie and I am going to be a senior at Kutztown University. I am a psychology major and I want to help in the fight against human trafficking but I have no idea how. I am not involved in any clubs on campus or off and I dont know many people to invite to an awareness party. Any information on how I can become a TEN ambassador or start something in my community would be greatly appreciated.

I think you found the right place!

I go your email Caitlin and responded - I look forward to talking to you some more.

The new student site is up and running for TEN - subject to live edits we are doing. http://www.tenstudents.com/

Great work from our intern Lauren on getting that done - I am going to use the layout for our main site as well.

We have a great partner in promoting the student anti-trafficking efforts - but I am not sure if can announce it yet. They are in 500 campuses already.

We have a great partner in promoting the student anti-trafficking efforts - but I am not sure if can announce it yet. They are in 500 campuses already.

Come on. Just announce it, already.

Good article about TEN at: http://www.peacexpeace.org/resources/peace_times/Edition59.asp#ModernDaySlavery

with an online interview with Sarah at: http://www.peacexpeace.org/Audio_Files/SarahSymons.mp3

Follow this link http://www.globalgiving.com/madebysurvivors.html

to see a new program we are setting up to fundraise for our partners. We hope to expand it, especialy to the student program where we hope to do a series of mini-fundraisers/awareness events.

John, I hope last weeks event was a raving success. Would love an update or video when you have the time.

THanks for asking Mark. It went really well. I just put a quick post up here http://www.omidyar.net/group/humantrafficking/news/11/39/

and will post more about it as soon as I can

Meant to ask on the video conference too. Did you get good video footage?

Doh, I should click and read before I post.

edit: Doh

As you may know, TEN recently took a group of rock musicians to Calcutta to help some of our partners, and to see first hand the reality of slavery and human trafficking. We just got back, but if you want to see an early draft of our report - it is here:

https://system.netsuite.com/core/media/media.nl?id=523&c=625162&h=f9ba8c20794d1bcd8bd0&_xt=.pdf

I am going to post two posts in this thread, in the first I want to recap TENs performance in 2006 . In the second I want to give an overview of our plans for 2007 and list some areas where we could use some help.

As I write this it is amazing for me personally since this time last year I was still working in finance in Boston. I don’t miss the four hours a day of commuting! At this point in 2006 TEN was a successful experiment that we decided to take the risk and to scale up. We had the nonprofit, TEN Charities up and running, but the TEN business was mostly a live experiment. Almost all of our sales in 2005 were from home-parties hosted by Sarah or one of about a dozen Ambassadors, all of whom were volunteers. We had no online sales to speak of, and we were not really set up for e-commerce. We had no real systems for controlling our inventory, not to mention the whole supply chain, we had a bad CRM, and bad accounting tools. Basically, while we had sold $40,000 in products in 2005 and really believed our model for TEN would work on a larger scale, we did not have the tools in place to grow.

So, when I joined Sarah fulltime at TEN, we spend the first 5-6 months building up our systems. We often spoke about being ready for “the hypothetical Oprah article”. We needed to make sure that if we could handle the business we thought we could generate. We also needed to create better trafficking education materials, and come up with a marketing plan beyond the organic home-party growth.

We had all the systems in place by July – systems robust enough to grow with us for many years, but the marketing plan was not in force yet. From July to September our average monthly sales was only about $5,000 a month, but we knew that we needed to plan for success and build up our inventory. So we purchased $50,000 in inventory and created a pipeline for more orders, all based on our plan – we did not at that point know if it would work.

Skipping to the end of the story – the plan worked. Our books are not closed yet, but roughly we ended 2006 with sales of $100,000. This is only for the last 6 months of the year. Of that, roughly $58,000 was awareness events, $26,000 online orders, $5,000 from student events, and the rest a small experiment in wholesale and retail. Our gross profit was $60,000, but with startup expenses and overhead we had a net loss for the year of $25,000. Our overhead expenses will go up as Sarah and I will need to get a salary, and we probably need to hire at least two other employees. As we believe in full disclosure, we will disclose our detailed financials up on the web as soon as we have them complete.

In the last six months I think we have proven that the social enterprise business model we have developed at TEN works. If we can get the capital we need, we are confident that we will be a multimillion dollar enterprise, and in the process will be helping thousands of survivors.

It is important to point out that with every sale we made this year we accomplished two of our primary goals. We helped the survivors start earning the income they need to create successful independent lives. We also educated all of our customers about human trafficking, and not just with abstract figures. Our customers learned the stories of some of the survivors, and more importantly, learned that trafficking is not hopeless, and that by brining TEN into their communities and homes they can do something that directly helps the survivors.

In 2006 we hosted our first “Dreams of Freedom” conference on Cape Cod where we integrated arts and the local arts communities with trafficking education. It was an experiment to see if we could get regular community members to come learn about trafficking, and it worked. The team is already planning to do it again, and we are also working on expanding to other cities. We are excited to announce that in 2007, the Dreams of Freedom conference will be coming to New York city!

We also started building out our college network in 2006, in partnership with CCAT, Polaris and Fair Fund. This is an area that we are planning on expanding significantly in 2007.

This is getting longer than I wanted, and I want to move on to the next post about 2007 and where we need help. But first I want to thank you all for your support this past year. I thank you on behalf of TEN, but also personally. One of the big social adjustments I had to make is that 90% of my friends were friends though my old business – people I spoke to every day. One of the great things about o-net for me personally is that through it I have meet new “co-workers” and developed new friendships. Thanks.

John, congratulations on such a terrific year! Perhaps we'll be able to work together around your conference in New York?! I'm looking forward to learning about the potential for integrating your used wood blocks into peace tiles' trafficking kits.

here's to a great year for T.E.N.!

Thanks Lars - I have some new info on the paper ill be posting on the peace tiles thread,

This a quick overview of our plans for 2007 at TEN. 80% of what we are doing is what we were already doing, just more of it. The plans here are areas where we are doing something new or need to fix or change things that were not meeting expectations. There are several things on this list that we could use help with, so if you have any ideas, time or skills, lets us know.

Ambassador Management and Community Development: This is the most important thing we will be doing for the next few months. So far, when we recruit awareness event hosts and ambassadors, we have been managing the relationships one-to-one. That is, every new recruit was another relationship to directly manage. There is one exception to that, which is our home base of Cape Cod, MA. On the Cape, we have a vibrant community of Ambassadors that meet regularly, back each other up, and come up with and execute their own ideas. We need to find a way to create these kinds of communities throughout the US.

This is such an important topic that I will be posting a separate thread with more details - we can use the thread as a workspace for the project. We currently have more than 270 people on our prospect list – that is 270 people who signed up online to become Ambassadors or host a party. We need to get a better system in place for managing them fast.

Youth Programs: We started our college program this past fall. We are building the awareness side of it well, but it is not resulting in the types of sales and awareness campaigns we had hoped for. There are several reasons for this, but the biggest are 1) we have not made it easy for college students – we cant rely on finding the few stars who can take initiative and do it themselves, and 2) our products are not really targeted for the youth market.

We are doing two things try to address the college, high school and youth market. First – we have partnered with Babson College and they have assigned a team of business school students and undergrads to help up learn how to do youth marketing raise awareness of trafficking. So I am outsourcing this problem for a while.

The second thing we want to do is create a line of Made By Survivors products targeted at youth, like T-Shirts, hoodies, etc. Some of our partners already have skills to make these products, at least through block printing and batik, but we also want to raise the funds for some of our partners to get silk screening equipment and training. This will also be linked to the work we are doing with bands, discussed in other posts.

We also need someone who is good at design to help create products. Another thought we had was to work with some of the design colleges to get them to create the products. If you have any ideas about this pleas let us know. As with everything we do – we will link any new product sales to continued awareness rasing.

Retail Stores We are thinking about opening our first Made By Survivors retail store this spring, in our home base, Cape Cod. We have most of the inventory we would need, so the incremental costs would be rent, labor, and overhead. I’ve been researching the store level economics of Ten Thousand Villages, and I am confident we could quickly make a store succeed. Our vision is to make the store a community abolitionist center, and a recruiting base for new Ambassadors. Since Cape Cod is a summer tourist destination, we would be visited by people from around the US and the summer sales would help offset our 4q weighted seasonality. If it works we will expand the idea elsewhere. We have started looking for a location, but don’t have the deal done yet.

Sponsorship Programs This would be a TEN Charities project promoted by TEN Inc. The idea is to create a child sponsorship program to pay for school for the kids, both at risk and survivors. I am a bit wary of sponsorship programs that are used for mass fundraising, so we will set this up a little differently than most. We would only recover our direct overhead costs, like wire fees – so this would not be used to raise general funds for our partners or TEN Charities. This is still a work in progress, and would only be for under a hundred kids to begin with, but it is something we want to experiment with this year.

Catalog: We want to create a professional, but affordable to print catalog of our products. There are bunch of reasons for this including 1) we want to experiment to see if our customers will order off a catalog, and 2) a good catalog will reduce the amount of inventory we have to ship to awareness events. We have just started to look into the costs, but have no experience with designing catalogs and would welcome advice from anyone who does.

Microfinance + Loans/Fundraising Like the Dreams of Freedom events, we want to do more events to raise funds for our partners. We have several ideas, including working with partners like Kiva or Global Giving. We would like to link this to the youth and college programs if possible.

We have three specific goals: 1) to raise the funds needed to help the survivors set up their own businesses (probably co-ops), 2) help the survivors and our NGO partners get the equipment and training they need (for example – we want to get several partners into silk screening), and 3) to be able to help fund the other, non income generation programs our partners are working on that help the survivors.

Steady/ High Volume Products: Up to now we our ordering process has been farily lumpy. That is – we might give one partner a big order that takes them three months to fill, they fill it at the end of three months, then it takes a while for us to sell enough to be able to order more. This process also means we have to use air freight as opposed to less expensive container shipping.

Even though we have good supply chain software in place, we were mostly in buildup stage this past year and did not have the ability to manage a more efficient process. Now we want to shift our partners into a monthly production cycle. This is better for them because of the steady stream of orders we hope to create. It will also let us shift more of our orders to sea freight. In the short run, this process might cost us more than it saves us if we underestimate our volatility or misestimate our growth. We are willing to take that risk though because this is the right thing to do for our partners.

We are also working to shift our partners production to items that are more efficient and profitable for them to create. As a result, we will be adding a lot of jewelry this year.

Geographic Expansion: We want to expand to include partners in Africa, South America and Eastern Europe/Former Soviet. If anyone has any ideas of NGOs we could work with, please let us know.

Data Collection: We need to start doing a better job recording outcomes data. For example, I would like to have better data about the number of people we educate in the US each year, the number of survivors and the increase in the number of survivors we help, and data tracking the economic progress of the survivors. We already have a lot of this data, but we don’t have the tools or the people needed to really process it.

Funding: Ultimately, this will be what I will be focusing most of the next six months on. I would greatly prefer to be focusing on programs and growth, but Sarah and I have only about six more months of personal savings. So we are at a very capital stage – we need capital to keep going. Again, if anyone has any ideas pleas let us know.

John,

Love the progress!

Some thoughts:

Funding - take a look at Prosper.com. I am thinking there must be a way to use the "group" approach to develop a lending vehicle for investing in social enterprises; also look at xigi.net -- a beta network with folks from Calvert and the like. Also Nonprofit Finance Fund. Let's talk more about getting capital at the HBS conference.

Data Collection - I have some discussions going on developing a database/info system for FOT. Maybe there is a collaboration here, as I would guess that our needs, e.g. managing lumpy inventory, are similar.

Inventory - sea containers; depending on your volumes, maybe there is a "split" on containers for shipping ? We could potentially consolidate TEN, FOT, FOT customer(s).

Retail store(s) -- exciting news! again, maybe some opportunities for collaboration here. An instore, branded kiosk of Tilonia items (like the concept of the World of Good kiosk w/in Whole Foods) -- summer bedding? table linens? weekend bags? Women of Tilonia CDs (empowerment tales that align with your mission).

Ellen