This is my WHY, HOW, WHO and WHERE for the next decade! Let's partner to make it happen!

Friend,

As you and I already know, data is the new gold of the 21st century! He who has the data will be able to design successful strategies to deploy services, projects, whatever is needed, to achieve his goals.

It's terrible to acknowledge this, but data, like money, is morality neutral. It can be discovered and used by the wrong people for malicious purposes, or it can be used by good people who have good intentions in mind.

As a certified cybersecurity professional, I witness this principle every single day. Every single day, bad actors attack the assets of our customers, using all kinds of tools, to fund a vulnerability and carry out an exploit. Their ultimate goal? The data of their victims!

I would like to believe that when God looks at this very confused world, he counts you and me among his faithful servants:

Job 1:8 And the Lord said to the Adversary, “Have you considered My servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and an upright man, who fears God, and avoids evil?”

Sure, Satan may attack us and might be tested, but nevertheless it's worth anything, so long as we pass the test and be found among God's faithful servants.

THIS is MY WHY

I would like to first clear up my WHY. Why am I still involved with the effort to reach all Bulgarians with the Gospel of our Lord and Messiah?

Because I experienced HIM and His love and power over 30 years ago in a life-transforming encounter, and my life belongs to him!

I have a burning passion for all people in Bulgaria to be reached with the Gospel of Jesus, our Lord and Savior! I want to make sure all of them have heard the Good News of who God's Son is, what He has done for us.

HOW I DID IN THE PAST

Back in 1990, when Communism collapsed, I went out on the street and began preaching to all and anyone who would listen. This is how my ministry began. This is how our church became one of the fastest growing churches in Bulgaria and in Eastern Europe. Tens of thousands have heard the Gospel through my work in the last 30 years.

But much more work remains to be done.

Here are the FIVE DOMAINS of activity I will be helping develop in the future. This is part of HOW the people will experience the full impact of God's truth and power in their lives:

Develop local communities: Christian fellowships where real people can meet with other real people and share their faith. Also known as "churches" in the past. We don't have to even use this term. Local Christian Communities is a lot more "user-friendly" even if they are essentially "churches". We have now partnered with NEO LEADERS - Near East Outreach, the largest Christian ministry network in the Middle East, to launch their super-successful program that decentralizes the process of forming new communities. The work with NEO LEDAERS has already begun!
Recovery programs: So many people today are in the bondage of one addiction or another. Every Christian community should actively develop a recovery program to help people effectively. I have access to several different programs who will be ready to deploy if and when we are ready to identify the right place and local team to work with.
Leadership Development: It's not enough to organize fellowships and recovery programs. We can identify the next generation of leaders in business, in society, in education - and help raise them up. Some excellent partnerships are waiting in the wings to be launched in this space.
Civics and society: Our Discussion Club has been an amazing success in the last over 5 years, with some of the leading intellectual voices in Bulgaria lecturing and leading discussions each and every month. We now plan on taking this format to universities and getting the young people engaged - not in "politics" but in civics - how to be active citizens, engaged with their city and the country, working for society, not for cut-throat political elites. This is how we will raise a new generation of godly "politicians" who will first learn how to serve society before they ask for the power to run the country.
Arts and culture: We cannot underestimate the power of the arts and culture as a whole. As I have spoken in the last year or so with some brilliant people who are in the arts and who are also believers, we can help influence this arena as well.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DATA

The above encapsulates the WHY and the HOW of the strategy to reach all of Bulgaria with the Good News.

Now let's talk about the WHO part.

Who are we going to reach? And where are these people.

If we can't answer these questions, we're only talkers. Pipe-dreaming won't change the world. Visionaries even won't change the world. It's the people who will know their WHY, who will have a HOW, and who will know WHO they will be reaching. It's the fundamental rule of business, sales and marketing: KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE!

It's time to talk about data.

The digital square is now the space we need to go to and reach all people with the message of God's love and truth.

Social media, websites, the Internet as a whole, are the channels through which evil is flooding the minds and the hearts of our people. Why not flood them with God's truth?

For this reason, I have started a data-mining project that I need some help with.

To reach Bulgaria, we will first reach the 100 largest cities and towns of Bulgaria.

Here is a map I just created that shows the top 73 cities in Bulgaria. The number before each name show where each city ranks in this top-100 list. The rest 27 cities will be added soon.

After we map out the top 100 cities, we will identify all the data points. For example:

specific demographics

male
female
age breakdowns
educational levels
social trends
ongoing critical issues (pain points)

leaders and influencers

who are the people who have the most influence in each city
we will identify them by name and will attempt to mine their contact information
who are the organizations (commercial and non-profit) who influence each city
media organizations, their leaders and their influence reach
foreign influences

economics

economic profile of each city
economic trends
potential profile

education

educational institutions
their profiles
their contact data

Other data points might be added in the future.

When we are done, we will have what no one can give us now: a much more complete picture of WHO IS WHO in Bulgaria's top 100 cities, who are the people God wants to reach with the Gospel, what is their situation, how they can be reached and how we can impact their lives - through the Gospel and within THE FIVE DOMAINS I outlined above.

As it is today, if someone has all this data, I can only imagine how much it costs. We might as well develop our own data-mining capabilities.

HOW TO HELP

I have hired a capable assistant from the Philippines who, at very competitive rates, will be helping with using web scraping technologies to begin compiling this data under my guidance. For example, the custom Google Map of the top 100 Bulgarian cities was a true collaboration between us - I mined the data, sent it to her in raw format, she created the Google Map. I didn't even touch Google Maps!

What have we learned thus far from this data set?

Did you know that:

the total number of people who live in the top 10 cities in Bulgaria is: 2,846,438 people
the total number of people who live in the next 40 largest cities is: 1,216,572
and yes, you guessed it, the total number of people living in the top 50 most populated cities in Bulgaria is: 3,352,221
the number of people living in the next 23 most populated cities is less than 500,000

Reaching Bulgaria's top 10 most populated cities seems like the best strategy, given the fact that 2,8 M people live in them. But reaching the top 50 is definitely a fantastic goal to have in our lifetime.

We can help make existing Christian communities get stronger
We can help form new ones where there's none
We can start recovery programs in all top 50 cities in Bulgaria
We can deploy leadership training

We can impact the arts and the culture arena

That's little over 1.5 million people! But it will make a huge difference in their lives, as well as what the country will be like.

This is only one example. There are many possibilities of where this can go.

This data can be used for various marketing campaigns, public awareness campaigns, whatever the purpose is - so long it's legal, ethical and not in conflict with our values.

Would you help this mission for the next 12 months?

It's honorable to help the poor, and I'm doing my best to help some of the poorest in the Philippines. But it's also a blessing to hire skillful Christian workers from there, use them for the purposes of the ministry, and in this way allow them to earn income.

If you can help me raise $750/m more for the next 12 months, this would be awesome! I have made the executive decision to direct $250/month to this undertaking. For a total of only around $12,000 in the next 12 months we will have data that if we had to purchase might be two or three times more - if even someone can get us such data set.

Between paying my Philippine associate, and paying for some tools and technologies, the final result will be a database we can use to do what God has called us to do.

You of course will have access to this data as well. And if you know people who might need this type of data, we can structure a way to license it under a white-label solution.

Our next goal would be to use this same approach for other countries as well.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the above.

Regards,

George