Welcome to my Pencils of Promise website

I decided to build this website for two reasons:

1. To test out the new Weebly website editor. As some of you may know, I have been on a mission to code and make websites, starting with code-free WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) website builders and now with real code.

2. To document my fundraising efforts and to keep everyone else updated with the latest news.

This is an exciting project not only because  it's something I've always wanted to do, but because it gives me the opportunity to try out many social media marketing tactics that I've been dying to try. 

Building a school has been something I've always wanted to do. I've never done it before because I had not found the right partner to do it with and it's also a scary commitment. What if I don't raise enough funds. What if no one contributes to my campaign. 

When I heard about Pencils of Promise from the Bain alumni newsletter, I went to it website and I fell in love with PoP. Pencils of Promise is data-driven, results-driven, for purpose  for profit rather than non-profit, and focused on creating sustainable, long-term results.  These are all core Bain principles so it's not surprising that the founder Adam Braun was an ex-Bainee. 

I have no doubt that this is the right organisation for me to support. But it's not just me.  PoP has many amazing partners who have built schools with it. This includes Motley Fool (UK) who's Foolanthrophy Holiday Drive campaign raised enough money to build 5 schools, Chegg, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Google, Warby Parker (Bain alum), Microsoft, Birchbox (Bain alum), Elizabeth Arden, Estee Lauder, Scotch, General Assembly, Delta Airlines, British Airways, Hewlett Packard,  and many more. See the full list here 

In fact, Pencils of Promise breaks ground on a new school every 90 hours. 

I was further enthralled when I read about PoP's experiments with Sugata Mitra and Laos is one of my favourite countries in South East Asia.

This blog documents:

1. Website modifications: The next post has a full review of the new Weebly editor. Any modifications or add-on apps are also documented in subsequent posts. 

2. My social media marketing campaign - This includes:

• Data! Track my campaign performance and results in interesting and interactive ways 
• Design! Design a campagin logo! Create lots of shareable content (pictures, quotes, videos, articles, e-books, blog posts)
• Digital! Build a dedicated website. Set up an automated email marketing campaign. Create a dedicated Facebook Page. Create a campaign hashtag for Twitter and Instagram 

3. Updates to my fundraising campaign 


To subscribe to  my newsletter: please go to http://deb.bi/PoPNewsletter.


Thank you to those who have supported, and for all the new visitors, please feel free to look around, leave a message (and hopefully a donation).

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​Debbie