The Learning Project:

5 Highly Effective Ways to Draw a Crowd Online

Today, online opportunities abound for business owners to increase awareness and connect with vast networks of prospective customers. Most often, the challenge is not identifying those opportunities, but narrowing them down. In our December Learning Project session you’ll learn proven strategies and techniques to help you leverage online opportunities to increase leads and drive sales.

We’ll focus on how to best use free media query services, blog tours, social networking, and online press kits to boost public exposure and generate more revenue.

Take your online presence to the NEXT LEVEL!

If you’ve been “planning” on attending one of our sessions this year – don’t miss this one. In fact, please forward this invite to anyone in your organization who may be interested in this topic.

Presented by: Shannon Nicholson, VP of Sales, Wasabi Publicity, Inc. – a leader in connecting experts with the media, providing services that boost online exposure, and training entrepreneurs on how to maximize their coverage to get more clients.

We’ll provide the coffee and insight, no cost to join us.

When: Wednesday December 8 – 8:30 am to 10 AM

131 Sweeten Creek Road, Asheville, NC 28803

Please RSVP to Tim Bryant at 277-8250 or tbryant@danielsgraphics.com

Saying Thanks

Xerox is doing this really cool thing Let’s Say Thanks.  You go and pick a card (all of which are drawn by kids all over America), personalise it,  and they print it and send it to a troop.  You don’t get to pick which troop, which to me is even cooler.  It’s like random acts of kindness. Here is a perfect marriage of the internet and print.  The end result wouldn’t be nearly as cool if it were electronic,  and the process wouldn’t even be possible without the internet.

RIP print?

I sort of thought all of this “Print is Dead” talk ended in the early 2000′s…But I stumbled on the Demise of Print Blog today. According to the About page, this site doesn’t celebrate or mourn the loss of print, it’s merely a documentation.

I’m not sure what it’s describing really illustrates the loss of print. Certainly when the internet exploded there was a major shift online. Most marketing poured into email campaigns because of ease of use and cost issues and many publications went unprinted.

It became quickly clear that this strategy alone wasn’t going to work. It’s been proven over and over that an integrated campaign is your best bet and specifically that print to web works. A typical example I think about a lot is with catalogues. I like to thumb a real live catalogue, but I’ll go order online. I think most women (this is empirical evidence at best) would agree. When you stop mailing the catalogue to me, I forget all about you.

Print and mail are still very viable. People still see mail as “important” in a way they don’t view email. Computers in general give people a short attention span and the mindset you enter when you go online is one of “hurry up”. People still stop and take a minute to review the mail.

Print has definitely changed and maybe even “gotten smarter”. Targeted data driven pieces that truly speak to your constituency has replaced the shotgun method of crossing your fingers and hoping you get 2%. Certainly people don’t have to print 25,000 brochures just to throw out 10,000 of them anymore. Things have tightened up and that’s not a bad thing.

The print industry has obviously changed dramatically -marketing in general has-but it’s only shifted. It hasn’t died.

Why make it so hard?

With all this Penelope Burk talk I appreciated this recent post from Seth Godin.  He makes a great point here. 

So often in both the business and non profit worlds we get bogged down in what’s easier for our system and not what makes it easiest to buy from us. 

 A little while back, Spike at Brains on Fire told a great story about being helped in NYC by a concierge at a hotel where they weren’t even staying.  That is exactly the kind of thing that stays with a person.  They might not have stayed at that hotel that trip,  but I betcha that they will be quick to stay at that hotel in the future.

 It makes good business sense to think of the donor/customer first and make it easy to buy from you (or give to you).  Ultmately the customer doesn’t care how great you are.  They care about what you’re doing for them.

Donor Centered

Terri and I went to see Penelope Burk speak (thanks to WNC Pathways).  She is an incredible speaker,  and her ideas are so obvious they’re brilliant.

Basically she started out to find out some fresh ideas for donor recognition.  Finding nothing new out there she went to the source,  the donor.   What she determined has changed the face of fundraising,  and it’s so obvious it’s almost scary.  Donors basically require three things:  Acknowlegement, Recognition, and Communication.  It pretty much boils down to customer service. 

 With the rate of attrition (90%) amoung donors so high,  the profit lies with loyal donors,  yet non profits spend the bulk of their marketing budget and efforts on collecting new donors that give once and disappear.  The reason she found that most people give once and never give again is that they never receive any information or acknowlegement from the non profit that would cause them to stay.  Smaller NP’s can take really benefit from this,  and take advantage of an opportunity to really get to know their constituency.

Inkless?

I stumbled on a new company today, Zink (Zero Ink).   I’m pretty fascinated with the idea of printing without ink.  Basically the technology is a paper embedded with CMYK chrystals,  that are heat activated. 

While the site leaves me with as many questions as answers (Will the paper be activated in any heated environment?  Why is it so small?  Can they not increase the paper size?)  the possibility of this changing the face of digital printing is clear.

Bless you!

Once again personalisation is employed to stave off becoming the dreaded commodity. 

 Kleenex is so much a commodity that their brand is synonymous with the product.  But by launching personalised tissue boxes,  they have expanded their market base.

When Kimberly-Clark re-designed the box into an oval they already punched up sales and interest (especially during the holiday season). But now they’ve taken that design even further by giving the option to make personalised tissue ovals.

It’s a great study in expanding the market through smart design and personalisation. 

You can go to http://www.mykleenextissue.com/ and design your own boxes with anything at all on it.  It’s a cute idea for a fundraiser or for any group.   Most appealing is that it’s really quite affordable,  and there’s a discount for large orders.  The word hasn’t even been spread with much advertising,  most of it has been viral.

Giving it all away?

Interesting article in Good Magazine raises questions about the validity of corporate philanthropy.

Undoubtedly, most philanthropists mean to make the world a cleaner and more equitable place. Yet it’s like trying to reduce your sugar intake by eating 125 chocolate bars every day and then swearing off the occasional Pop-Tart. It’s as if the right hand has never met the left. But here is the punch line for this argument: We can all be good citizens much, much more effectively in the course of making money than in the course of giving money away.

I hate Mission Statements

It almost seems like there’s some law that mission statements have to be lame.  They have to sound the same and feel the same and really throw out a bunch of touchy words that don’t really mean anything. 

 Why did this start?  Should your mission statement be a powerful proclaimation of what you’re trying to do and why people should get involved?  You could easily create “Mission Statement Magnetic Poetry” with the following words:

Under-served

Community

Partnerships

Preservation

Commitment

Assist

Achieve

Supporting

Leadership

Promote

Advocacy

Resolution

Education

Dedicated

Implement

Contribution

Advancement

Development

Encourage

Aid

Emerging

Practices

Enhance

Strengthen

Diversity

Grass roots

Cultural

Empowerment

I could re-arrange any of these words and come up with most Mission statements I’ve ever heard. 

You hear all the time, “Our mission sells itself”.  Which is probably not true.  But one thing is for sure,  your mission statement is probably not saying much to anyone.

Consider a stronger statement that actually captures people’s emotions and willingness to become involved.

Hospitality

I stumbled on a new site by Hilton, Be Hospitable.  The concept is absolutely fantastic.  The idea is that people from all over the world submit “Good Samaritan” or random acts of kindness types of stories.  I am in love with the interaction and the theme.   (My only beef is with the actual useability of the site.  I find all that flash cumbersome and somewhat annoying.  Things are popping up faster than I can read and the map is a little unwieldy.)

 The idea is a great one and it easily translates to a non-profit site.  I can think of many ways people in charitable organizations can share their story through the experiences of people helped or missions accomplished.

Member based organizations should especially consider things like this in terms of letting members interact and get more out of their involvement.