Editor's Note: We want to thank David Schappell of Unitus for contributing this post as a Guest Blogger for Know More Media.

I work for Unitus. We strive to reduce global poverty by increasing access to banking (microfinance) services for the world's working poor.  These microfinance services include small microcredit loans (often less than $100), secure savings accounts, insurance services, and more.  These services empower the working poor to start small businesses, protect what they earn, and guard against unforeseen events.  In essence, we work to give the working poor a hand up, rather than a handout.  Our work is impactful, motivating and challenging – in fact, our partners are now serving ~600,000 working poor around the world!  So, how do we get more people involved?

That said, I was scheduled to visit our MFI partners (SKS and Bandhan) in in October 2005, and so I thought I'd give it a try.  The initial posts from the Unitus Partner Expedition were really quite good, if I do say so myself.  We were able to capture observations from MFI partners, photos from the Partner Expedition, and we received a lot of positive feedback from employees, Board members and other supporters.  Since then, however, the blog has vacillated between a middling PR Vehicle (it truly is much easier to post press releases, news clips, and quick stories) and a very good experience-collector (we recently held a Leadership Summit in Malaysia for our MFI partners, and one of our Board members, Dave Richards, captured information from the sessions – he also hosts a blog at Defeating Global Poverty – these posts were fantastic.

So, my questions to the Know More Media community are: 

• "How do I encourage our organization, especially those on the ground, to become active bloggers?"
  
• "How do we overcome the apprehensions of non-marketing employees to capture their experiences and broadcast them?"
• "Have you found effective incentives to encourage this behavior?"