We finally started our internship yesterday (not that I’m complaining about the time off!) and I thought you all might be interested in hearing what three of us will be doing. Kirsten, Mimi, and I are working for an organization called The Business Place, which is a non-profit that provides guidance for South African entrepreneurs. Currently in South Africa, entrepreneurship is not highly regarded as a profession but is viewed by many as necessary for survival. The Business Place helps these individuals by understanding their needs and then matching them to various organizations in South Africa that provide solutions to those needs (business plan development, financial consulting, marketing consulting, etc.).
The Cape Town government has recently started an initiative, Cape Town Activa, to make the city more economically desirable from a business standpoint. Their goal is to try to create an environment that is more conducive for both Capetonians and non-Capetonians to start businesses and has tasked The Business Place with developing an implementation plan. Considering the current state of the entrepreneurial environment, extremely fragmented with little collaboration, this is an arduous task (especially as there are only two people currently working on this initiative). Kirsten, Mimi, and I were all brought on to help.
I, specifically, will be working on overseeing the development of the web site (or portal) for Cape Town Activa. We had a meeting last Friday with all the potential web developers (4 companies) and explained our objective/vision. They all have a week to think about the project and then I am working to schedule meetings with all of them to answer any clarifying questions they may have. In the meantime, I’m trying to determine exactly what we want to include on our portal and develop a site map to more easily categorize similar information. As I’m not exactly sure WHAT we want to include and as of now, the portal seems very very large and all encompassing, this is tricky.
As I understand it, each potential/existing entrepreneur will create a profile and answer a number of questions regarding their idea, which will eventually put them into one of several categories (have a fuzzy idea; have a concrete, well-thought out idea; run a struggling business; run a successful business and want to grow; etc.). These categories are all matched with various organizations that currently exist to provide help and will be displayed at the end of the questionnaire. (Mimi is working on researching all these suppliers and determining their dominant skill sets to match to various categories The Business Place has developed.) Additionally, there will be a place to apply for funding which we’ve called “Capital Connect” to match funding providers with funding requests. (Kirsten is working on developing this part of the portal.) There will also be a benefit for the suppliers – when an entrepreneur comes into one of their offices, they can create a profile for them and “refer” them to one of the other organizations that may be more suited to handle their needs (this also prevents the entrepreneur from re-pitching their idea over and over since all the necessary information will be in their profile on the portal).
I feel like I could go on and on regarding the potential functionality of this but basically, you all understand we have our work cut out for us. :)
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