Your Community on Hooey

s I work on the Kickstarter proposal and marketing plan for Hooey Savvy's Cookie-Wise Pablo, my kids book on financial education, I really want to show that it can have an impact on a community. To that end, I'd like to quantify that impact by tracking one community that reads Hooey against another similar community that does not.

Unfortunately, I sincerely doubt a single kids book can improve the average credit scores of a community in one, three, six or twelve months. It may take years. But, hey, you never know. Long story short, I'd like to show folks the progress they've made in a tangible and/or quantifiable way. What I do know is that it shouldn't take millions of tax payer dollars to achieve.

In Nudge, a book about libertarian paternalism, the authors, economists at the University of Chicago, give numerous examples of clever government initiatives that yield big results at little cost. Competition and public humiliation always seem to go down well. In this case, we could pit two communities against each other to see who can improve their average credit scores the most in a year...with the scores updated monthly in the local paper or painted on a wall in a very public place for all to see. Throwing in a prize for the winner (other than better credit scores and lending rates) never hurts. Getting elected officials to line up behind an out-of-towner might hurt.

Project Updates: Got a rather uncompetitive quote from the L.A. illustrator and so the search continues. Am hoping folks in Texas will be up to the task. Floramay Holliday is interested in giving some of Hooey's songs a go. She's got a great voice, lots of experience and a natural way about her music. I'm excited to hear what she comes up with. Thank you, Dewey Ervin, for bringing her talent to my attention. Have a meeting with Equifax next week in Atlanta. Looking forward to learning more about the company. Early work on my baseball work of fiction, The Boston Squeeze, continues to come together a little everyday.