Branding should be an important element of any organisation.  No organisation is too small to promote themselves professionally.  Sure the community and the volunteer sector i.e. the 3rd sector is not the same as the commercial sector and most people are attracted by our values and not our corporate looks, but that does not mean we should not make a good impression.  

Branding can be attached to high budget and expensive marketing , but in this wave of social media and inter-connectivity all of this is done away.  There are many examples of small start-ups that have bootstrapped and made massive successes by making sure the branding and marketing is sound.  

I am currently using 5 volunteers to build a brand, the initial stages are focusing on Twitter and Facebook.  Within about 30 days each one of those facebook accounts will have approx’ 2000 friends each and the target for the Twitter account is 10,000 followers.  Each and everyone of these followers are selected from the demograpic’s of the target niche, it is very much so about quantity but quality is essential. 

For your marketing material it is the logo that defines your brand and it is your logo that people people will catch as they glance by for the 3 seconds of concentration that they give to any material before they make the decision to stop and look!

Anna who runs the T3SC health network designed 3 logo’s herself and sent them out to one of her networks to see which one they like the most, one of them came down as a hands on winner; but this simple method of asking your network, tribe, followers, client, or whatever you want to call them to vote is an effective method to get them to connect with your brand.

Here is a strategy that you can apply that not only gets you a logo design at a cost effective price but will also strenghten your brand to those who matter most to your organisation and potentially develop an increase to more loyal followers.  

99designs.com is a design service with a twist. 99designs gathers graphic designers and web designers to this one platform and they enter into a contest.  These contests basically ask designers to submit their work in response to specifications given by companies or individuals. These companies then award prizes to the winner. Those who want designs but have limited budgets could get great work to suit their budget requirements.  

The advantage you have is that you are a not for profit organisation and that in these contests you will receive at least 3-4 designs. 

You should take advantage of your situation.  

Express that this is for a not for profit organisation and that is why you have a tight budget {I suggest $100/£50} and the selected winner will receive credentials on the website and a link to their portfolio.  On average when a contest is approx’ $200 it can get results of 4/5 logo’s but since you may be on a tight budget you would express that you are a not for profit org’ and appeal to peoples good nature.  

Once you have got a selection of logo designs redirect your co-workers, clients, followers, etc to this page to make a vote for one of these.  Get onto facebook, twitter and other social networks to get others to vote.  In fact find the websites and bloggers that are in the same niche and send them an email or a comment about voting on a logo, having bloggers championing your cause can do wonders to get more exposure for your org’.

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Events, conferences and seminars are important driving activites that allow us to network and promote services to a larger audience.

At T3SC we have several events that take place throughout the year and generally we send out booking forms to our networks and anticipate the response.

Online event management services can be an effective way to distribute more information, creating engaging conversations and convert leads to sign up.

Aminado is a service that can cater for such events.  if you are running a event that is free then they also have a service that is free.  If you intend to charge then you can sell the tickets online and be charged for each ticket sold at a rate of 7.5%.  This is expensive compared to other services that are available but the features that they offer are much more.

Although we intend to look at the free service in this post we can look at the costs that would occur if you were to sell tickets:

If a ticket cost £100 then the charges would be thus if you use PayPal as a payment solution:

£100/7.5% = £92.50, £92.50/3.4% + £0.20p {PayPal fee} = £89.15.

lets take a look at a demo of the service:

Amiando Demo from Azzam Sheikh on Vimeo.

The user interface to create your events page is user friendly.  You are present with a page that provides sufficient information on how that page can be edited:

Once signed up you will get instant access to creating an ‘event’,  the page is populated with ‘edit’ buttons for were changes can be made.

Title, background image, dates and times, etc can obviously be changed but the simply interface allows you to edit each area individually.

Since Aminado allows user interaction videos and photos can be uploaded.  This gives an opportunity to get personal and really try to push the boat out for promoting.

The Guest-list feature allows visitors that are signed up to the event be displayed on the front-end.  This could potentially encourage others to sign up once they see the ‘delegates’ that are signing up to your event.  Networking is an a key reason that people attend events and if a particular person is attending this can encourage others to join up.

The wall feature will allow visitors to leave comments, again another tool that can  entice people to engage with the event.  Similar to twitter people can pose questions and your response will be visible for others to see.

Participants can be invited via email or from previous events.  The previous events feature can in the long-term be a powerful tool since the data is stored on the system and with a click can send an email to all previous participants.

There is also a widget that allows you to paste code into a website that will redirect visitors to the events page.

There is a question about why this can no be done on your own website? Well the simple reason is that it is a free service and the entire set-up has been simplified.

The ability to add videos, photos to the existing layout,  have guest-list displayed and a wall feature for commenting without have to consider the modifications of a website; this is all time consuming.

And not forgetting to mention the analytic feature,  which allows you to see statistic about the participants.

here is the demo page I set up looks like without any modifications:

http://www.amiando.com/3rdsector.html

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Gimp Mascot Wilbur

Posters and publications should make an impact on audiences that we intend to capture.  In a previous blog post I discussed how to gain access to photos from Flickr under the Creative Commons attribution.  

However at times images need to be altered or additional creative work needs to be created i.e. logos. letterheads, fancy flyers, etc.  Sure most people expect that a start-up group his hard up on cash therefore they will use the basic tools available and print up either on the home printer or pay at a local printers to do some cheap copies.  

But that need not be the case and in this blog we will be looking at the alternatives to providing a professional perspective not just because of a shoestring budget but because it is the SMART way to go.  

later I will be creating a series on outsourcing.  Something I believe can radically change the way the 3rd sector thinks and operates and embraces globalisation.   {Bold statement}

Back to the creation on publication inhouse.  We want to look at the following tool:

GIMP  is a free imaging program (GNU Image Manipulation Program) available for Windows.  GIMP is absolutely free and the premier Image editing and painting software available under a GPL open source licence.  It is a Free version of the most powerful immage editing tool Photoshop.  

Amongst the features on offer there the full suite of painting tools which include the brushes, a pencil, airbrushes, colour fills and sampling and cloning.  Anti-aliasing, full alpha channel support, transparencies and layering. 
Transforming tools include rotation, which allows rotation of the image to any angle, scale and shear. The usual cross platform file formats are supported, Bezier curves, smudging and measuring distances and angles. 

GIMP however is not targeted at someone who is beginner, it is very much  a professional quality package which is targeting  those who are  more experienced users. 

If you have any experince of a professional quality image software you will be familar with what most of the features do and how to be able to use them, therefore otherwise understanding it is a free program this means you will be very much on your own to figure out how to use it.   There is ample documentations provided and volunteer support is great.  

Video creating expert Lon Naylor has created a video tutorial service for GIMP the cost of $17 {£12}, a series of 28 videos explaining exactly how to use all aspects of GIMP, the purchase also comes with an 8 week money back guarantee.  

So if you want to give it a try but seriously do not want to spend hours in learning this tools from a document then this would be a way to go.

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