Rural lender develops inline portal to help business owners

Northern Initiatives covers a large 78-county service area primarily in rural Michigan, along with a few counties in northeast Wisconsin. While it worked over the years to provide capital and know-how to small business owners in Michigan and Wisconsin, the community development financial institution (CDFI) knew it had an issue: How could its staff best provide entrepreneurs with support services that improve a business’ chances of succeeding with a start up loan? To solve this problem, the organization launched an online “customer portal” with information and training that address the most commonly identified business needs.  “In 2014, we decided to build this customer portal,” said Northern Initiatives President Dennis West. “We started to put together the resources. We produced 10 videos, started to be able to deliver content online for our borrowers, saw that it was promising, and we continued to build out the portal. Now it has 21 videos, six financial calculators, 100 articles and recorded webinars.” The online resources are organized around the topics of money, marketing and management. “The platform becomes a way we can deliver more content to our customers, a portal for delivering a blended learning approach where our customers can get access to information, terms and definitions so that coaching sessions can be more productive focusing on strategies and tactics to solve challenges,” West said.