A few weeks ago Catherine Muriel, CMO at Prosper announced Prosper TV commercials (Prosper TV Spots) and a new slogan: Let’s bank on each other™.

NetBanker covered the story (Prosper Kicks Off Nationwide Lending with New Slogan and TV/Radio Advertising):

From a branding perspective, I think they are extremely effective, doing a good job communicating the benefits to both borrowers and lenders. And Prosper positions itself as a smart bank alternative without getting overly negative (eg. Lending Tree’s $100-million “When banks compete” campaign in the late 1990s) or going so over the top (think WaMu) [...]

One thing I’m sure of: Prosper did a great job showcasing the ads on their website, including the very Web 2.0 touch of posting “behind the scenes” videos of the TV commercials.

Here are the behind the scenes videos NetBanker is referring to: Behind the Scenes 1 and Behind the Scenes 2.

Other interesting Prosper and Personal Finance recent blog posts…

Loan Chimp liked the nationwide rates (WebBank partnership) so much that the Warm and Fuzzy Index reached it’s highest score ever. (See Loan Chimp in the High ROI Video from Prosper Days 2008.)

Lazy Many goes existential in The Power of The Dream.

brip blap offers 10 Career Quotes and somehow manages to work in Boba Fett and Han of Star Wars.

Cash Money Life said, “No, I Won’t Accept Your Counter Offer” when it was presented after he turned in his resignation due to a lack of career advancement paths in his current position.

GenXFinance offers  Ten Steps To Take When You Are In Financial Trouble.

The Digerati Life reveals How to Increase Your Salary Without Increasing Your Work

Blogging Away Debt is Finishing Up a Not-So-Fun Task - Creating a Will

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RateLadder is a Prosper lender and has been since July, 2006.  He has a passion for p2p lending.  He owns RateLadder — My Prosper.com Journey and other P2P Lending Adventures, P2P No Bank the P2P Blog Aggregate, and ProProsper — Professional Tools for Prosper Lenders featuring SQL access to Prosper data.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that our CEO Chris Larsen made the announcement at Prosper Days 2007 that Customer Support was coming in house to SF. It’s definitely been a challenging but fun 18 months for our department. We are a close knit team that strives hard to provide the best customer service to our community. As a result, we have built a solid foundation upon which we are continuously looking to improve. It’s no secret that with any start up company things can get pretty hectic. However, I feel management has been extremely supportive in dealing with any issues we’ve presented to them — which in turn only makes for a better user experience for all of you.

I’ve worked in support for several different companies in various industries and working here at Prosper has been one of my best experiences. In other companies I’ve worked at, the customer service departments were treated as outcasts which generated this feeling of irrelevance. Here at Prosper, other departments enjoy hearing our feedback. Seriously, why wouldn’t they? We talk first hand with you, the community. Confused about messaging you get or screens that perplex you? If you’ve emailed or called us about it, then we’ve brought it up to someone who’s listening.  (Contact Customer Support.)

Personally, I’m amazed at the improvements we made in such a short period of time. We could not have achieved this if no one was listening. For those of us that were here in Feb 2007, we now catch ourselves saying “Remember when we had to…” I expect a few months from now I’ll be saying that more and that’ll be music to my ears.

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Terence Dela Cruz is member of the Prosper Support Team and looks forward to helping Prosper Members on a daily basis.  He highly recommends the Prosper Tutorials.

A couple of weekends ago, I a good friend of mine invited me out on his boat. It was beautiful day, around 80 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. We headed on up to McCovey Cove to sit outside the San Francisco Giants stadium and enjoy the day. There’s also the small chance that someone will hit a homerun into the boat. And as it turned out John Bowker of the home team delivered his first major league homerun into the water. We never had a chance to retrieve it as someone with a telescoping net from within the stadium scooped it up. Nonetheless, short of winning the lottery it was the perfect day.

Maybe it was the perfect day or maybe I got a little too much sun, but I found myself thinking about the future. How many days like today will I experience? If my wife and I have kids and grandkids, will they be able to enjoy the same fresh air? It was that thought that triggered my wife and me to finally recycle some old electronics that we had sitting around the house. Thought it was a shame that doing the right thing left our wallets $18 lighter (we had to pay to recycle the electronics), we realized that in the grand scheme it’s a small price to pay.

You don’t have to lighten your wallet to make a difference. Here are just a few tips to get you started:

• Use Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs - This is the definitive way to save money and the environment. They are a much more efficient than incandescent bulbs.
• Don’t Drink Bottled Water - Especially avoid imported bottle water. Instead, get a filtered water pitcher and a refillable bottle.
• Read The Good Human. It’s full of tips on how to do things in a more environmentally friendly way. The writer is modest, he’s a great human. I’m only an okay human.
• Recycle Aluminum Cans - The price of aluminum keeps rising. That means people will pay you for your efforts. Some states charge a deposit so by not recycling you are throwing money away.
• Donate Items You Don’t Use To Charity - You can earn yourself a nice tax break.
• Drive a Small Car - I’m not going to suggest you sell your current car and buy a small one, but consider a fuel-efficient car when you buy your next car. Better yet, carpool when you can.

I know you have a lot more tips. Submit your favorites in the comments. Remember, a lot of people doing a few little things can really make a difference.

Photo Credit: 1

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Lazy Man has been a lender at Prosper since February 2006. He is the author of the personal finance blog, Lazy Man and Money and the health and fitness blog, Lazy Man and Health.

In observance of Earth Day, Prosper surveyed US consumers last week to better understand their financial attitudes towards implementing eco-friendly home improvements.

The main finding is that although consumers have a strong desire to implement energy-saving home improvements, they are deterred by the high costs of these projects:

• 91% care about conserving natural resources
• While 60% of survey respondents listed ‘saving money on bills’ as an incentive to adopt a green lifestyle, 75% of respondents indicated that they are deterred from pursuing energy-saving home improvements due to high costs of implementation.

As a community for social lending, Prosper offers eco-conscious Americans with good credit histories a way to connect with their like-minded peers to fund green projects in an affordable way. A separate survey of Prosper lenders found that 25% of respondents have bid on borrowers’ loan listings to support green projects, and 93% of respondents would consider bidding on such listings.

1. Are you concerned with conserving natural resources?

2. Which of the following is the number one incentive for you to implement energy saving personal / home improvements? (please select only one)

3. What is the number one deterrent for you to implement energy-saving personal / home improvements? (please select only one)

4. What types of personal / home improvements have you invested in to save energy? (please select all that apply)

5. About how much did you spend in 2007 on energy saving personal / home improvements?

6. What types of personal / home improvements do you plan to implement in 2008 to save energy? (please select all that apply)

7. How much do you expect to spend on energy saving personal / home improvements in 2008?

The following is a guest post by a Prosper member: CreditKarma…  You can use the Prosper Performance tool to estimate default risk for Prosper loans.

When I was a marketing and risk analyst with a credit card issuer, the customer’s credit score never really mattered per se. My concern was always with the default risk for any given score. For example, it was more important to know that a 720 FICO™ Score customer had a 1 in 237 probability of default. The score was meaningless to me (the lender) without the corresponding risk probability.

As such, I always wondered why Fair Isaac and credit bureaus used arbitrary scores when default risk is so much more informative to all parties. If I had to speculate, I would guess the following reasons:

1. Intellectual Property Protection - It is probably much easier to patent and copyright some arbitrary score and score algorithm than it is to patent logistic regression (the math term used in developing scores) and an arbitrary score range.
2. Consumers Don’t Want to Be Labeled - Consumers may object to such an outright classification as default risk. To say one person is a 450 FICO™ is probably not as offensive as saying that person has a 1 in 3 chance of defaulting on a loan.

Today, the reason is moot as it has become ingrained in consumers. As I read the comments in various blogs and discussion forums, I am still amazed at the level of mis-information accepted as truth. People claiming there certain scores are FAKO’s* or that doing X will yield Y result in your score. I personally think the confusion stems from the number of data sources, models, default variables, and uses of scores. It took me a degree in mathematics, economics, and 10 years of industry experience just to get my arms around credit scores and credit uses.

All this brings me back to the question: why doesn’t the industry just share your default risk? Isn’t that just an easier thing to understand than some arbitrary score range. Some people may object to a probability label but as they say, “a rose by any other name…”

Editor’s Note: *FAKO or Fake-O has been around for years, but the term was popularized by Suze Orman fairly recently. Orman is, admittedly, on Fair Isaac’s payroll.