We all get those emails that include a handful of email addresses of other people.  To CC emails without the recipients consent can be perceived as unethical, but you maybe wondering why people do not complain?  Well the answer to that is quite simple, a lot of people like us use outlook and since BCC is not included as default they think it is normal practice.  It is true!
Here is how to use the BCC in outlook:

First go to compose a new email ready to be sent out i.e. click on new.

Click the arrow next to the options button and from the drop down select Bcc.

Here you can see that the Bcc has automagically appeared.

You can close that email down since the bcc will always appear.  Now just send out an email out and have at least one recipient as normal and the rest as Bcc, everyone receiving the email will only see the email address of the first recipient.

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If the organisation you are with is looking towards Social Media as a medium to promote your services online or start a fundraising scheme or simply just starting, then you may want to check if the usernames on these sites are available.

The right domain name is always important to reflect your website, most charities especially national ones have the domain name that reflects their core branding; obviously you should be doing the same.  Social media is slighly different and although it may not be the core URL that matters when you promote your site, it does matter when you are promoting your services on that particular service.

For instance you want to use youtube as a medium for promotion of videos, you would certainly want to be able to use your brand as the youtube channel.  But if it is not available you obviously want to try another similar username. Now what you do not want to be doing is looking over a dozen or more sites trying to match the right username.

Here is were the feature of Namechk comes into effect.  This a simple but effective tool that will check over 76 social media sites to see if the username is available.  You simply type in a username into the text field, and a nice little ticker will run along each of the sites, within a few seconds you will see sites where your  username is available in a  green colour, and sites whereby the username has already taken appear in red.  To be totally obvious the words ‘taken’ or ‘available’ will appear.

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A co worker accidentally saved one of the files in a docm format which she originally created in Microsoft Office 2003, therefore unable to open without having a lot of gibberish appear on the screen.

There is a simple and easy fix to this problem.  Download the Microsoft compatibity tool.

A frustration that a new start up group or charity can have is keeping up with the technology.  At times there is not sufficient funds to support the purchase of a new PC or laptop and an older model has to used.  This older model will be Windows Xp with Office 2003.  However when you liase or communicate with other services they may send you a document in 2007, and this will not open on your PC.

The dilemma is that the person who sent the document does not know any different to you as to why the document did not open!  They either inherited the machine with Office 2007 or it was installed for them by the IT person and nothing was done further with it.  The problem you both end up having is spending a day trying to figure out what has gone wrong and end up wasting a lot of time sending emails back and forth!

Essentially I would suggest a PC checklist that you should create to make sure that you have all the tech’ in place to make your productivity seamless, at the very least install the Microsoft Compatibility tool.

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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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To create a successful following to your site or blog and then ultimately to convert these following into potential leads that will contribute to your cause is the ultimatum of an online presence.

Blogging is a standard now to creating branding and awareness, and people in general seek out the voices, opinions and expertise of bloggers.   RSS feeds are a way to keep upto date with the latest posts on any of the blogs you intend to follow, What if if you want to achieve more?

What if you want to create your own branding and awareness? what if you want to get the attention of those bloggers that are considered authority in your field?

If you think back to when you were at school about the pupil that is attentive to what the teacher says and is the first to respond, this is the student that gets the attention and develops a bond.

Here is were a smart little tool called CommentSniper comes to play!

CommentSniper offers you a way to build targeted, valuable, strong and lasting traffic to your website at no cost, by tapping into the first mover advantage of blog comment posting.

CommentSniper is a windows desktop tool, and here is how an effective strategy can be executed:

• You find the most popular & influential blogs relating to your industry and niche audience and load them into Comment Sniper for 24/7 monitoring of new articles being posted.
• You then configure the Comment Sniper with your mobile phone number (for optional SMS monitoring notifications), leaving Comment Sniper running in the background and connected to the Internet.
• You’ll receive immediate Desktop Notification and/or an SMS to your mobile phone the second a new post is made on any of the blogs you’ve selected to monitor.
• With the advantage of being alerted (regardless of where you are) of the new post, moments after it has been made, you can then visit and be the first to comment on the new post. Your comment should of course be genuine and add value to the article being discussed… readers will click through to your website more often if you take the blog article and add value to it with your comments.
• Repeat this as often as you can when notifications are received. Not only will you receive an immediate influx of visitors from the leading blogs in your industry, but the more valuable, targeted, and theme relevant links you create to your own website on these blogs, the better your overall search engine rankings will become.

Influential blogs related to your niche industry make new posts all the time, posts that may be read by thousands of people in the months to come. You only have one chance to be the first to comment on that post and ride that unique wave. There are hundreds of such opportunities, and the Comment Sniper gives you the edge to seize them before anyone else does.

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Start up organisations and the voluntary sector are very practical and spend a lot of the time in the field, and although trying to embrace social media and web development the pace that the whole internet culture is evolving is daunting.

Early adopters and developers need to understand that in the wider world and especially in the 3rd sector people  just are not keeping up with the innovation.  I am following the lifstreaming applications the are developed and the lifestream blog is reporting that a number of lifestream services are hitting the dead pool, this usually occurs for two reasons 1) not fullfilling the need 2) marketing, sure I am over simplifying it; but that’s the way it is.

Ben McRedmond a transition student spent a weeks experience with Contrast, an Ireland based web development team.  The interesting thing he mentioned on the Contrast blog that the biggest thing that he learnt from his week experience is that ‘less is more’.  This rings a bell with the mission of 37Signal that created basecamp with the same principal in mind which celebrated its 5th birthday on the 4th of Feb and now 3,000,000 people have Basecamp accounts.

Ben has created a simple web app Picomark that allows you to bookmark a web page and have it displayed to share with others.  Ben has completely stripped all features that you would find with an online bookmarking sharing services i.e the need of tags, search, filter, votings, etc.  In fact the simplification is so brilliant that true to the word of a discovery he made from Eoghan another member of the Contrast team who dislikes registration and login forms you can actually bookmark a page without logging in and it will be displayed on your page!

For me at work this will be a great tool since our offices are on two locations and members work remotely and to create a page that can display bookmarks that can be shared for all us is perfect.   I have made a suggestion to Ben to just add categories, I just hope keeping true to the style it can be done without the login function; since that is what makes this application unique.

Hes the video that explains how it works:

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Working for a CVS {Council for Voluntary Sector} we are inundated with documents, links, pdf’s, images and countless number of files.

Now there needs to be a seperate post that looks at tools that can file and categories the information on your computer in folders, however this is a nifty little tool that can organise the clutter on your desktop.

Fences is a addon program that runs on all Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.  It will organise the desktop and you can also hide the icons when they are not in use.
Here’s what it will look:

Fences in action

Pretty, huh!

Veronica ‘ Community Officer – Children and Young People’s Agenda’ is inundated with files and the fast pace she needs to move makes it easier for her to just have short cuts or files on the desktop, this however has her entire screen full to the brim.

Fences has her desktop looking like the above and has encouraged her to create folders to categories the files. As an indirect bonus there were files lurking on her desktop that neither of us had a clue what they were for and can now be fed to her recycle bin.

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Another video from the common craft show. This is a simplified explanation of how a search engine works, there is a short cut that appears in the video that is very handy to know.

Fried fish anyone?

Web Search Strategies in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

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 The signature lines, that is the email signature is not just exceptionally effective, it is absolutely free {providing you use email} and will give high returns as the marketing tool that serves in effect as a ‘business card’ or even an advert for your group or organisation. 

If your group or organisation has 20+ employees that are sending out an average of 10 – 15 emails a day outside of the organisation, then let us suppose the business days are 250 per year that in effect is over 100,000 adverts or business cards that are distributed every year.   

What Is the Signature lines?

Simple put the email signature is automated information that gets added on to the email that goes out.  It usually lets people know more about you, who you are, what your location is and what you do. 

It is your virtual business card and it allows a way for people ‘to back to you’.

Here is an examples to look at:

Michelle Watson
Project Manager 
Local Group For Community Change
Ph: 0121-567-2856
Fax: 0121-567-2857

What an effective Email Signature can do for your group or org’:

In this information age when we are all inundated with far too many emails, the email signature that goes out provides a plain indication to the recipient whom the message is from and gives the viewpoint that clarifies who you are and an instant understanding of what the message may entail. 

It can be taken beyond the basic advantages and can alert the recipient of updates and special news giving then instant and direct access to the website or respond back to the email.

How a Consistent Email Signature Style Benefits Your Org’:

What is essential is that everyone in the org’ uses the similar signature line format.  For instance name, title, email, and the direct phone lines will not be the same.  However, certain fundamentals i.e. the org’ name, its website url, strapline and the display order of fundamentals should be at a set standard for all members.

Signature line recurrently is of benefit and advantageous to the  org’ in these ways:

It will build upon the brand or serve as a recognisable identity for the org’. 

The signature becomes a critical factor of the overall branding.

It will enable the email recipients to make a connection from the variety of emails that are received from various members of your org’.

Below is an example of a standard and appropiate signature and have it can be made more effective: 

{Name} 
{Title}
{Name of org’}
{Street Address}
{Town, City, Postcode}
{Phone Number}
{Fax Number} 
{Email Address}

The recommendation I make is to cut away the street address, any line space, the fax number, and email address. Replace these by adding the org’s website url.

How to Create an Effective Email Sig Line:

Short and sweet.  Signatures should be 4/6 lines, try not to go beyond 8 lines. If you take in to consideration those who receive you email often they will see your email signature again and again. 

What you would include:

{Name} 
{Title}
{Name of org’}
{Phone number}
{Web address}

Some optionals to consider:

Strapline i.e. Promote a specific event that is coming up, any campaign, etc.

A particular graphic that seperates your signature from the email content.

You would not want to include the email address since is appears in the ‘from’ field and also gets forwarded on.  

More creative use for your signature :

A signature can be used motivate clients to access services provide or register for events and workshops. Either ass a line or a link to the webpage. 

Some examples would:

A quote that shares and displays org’s perspective.

A call to action to contribute towards a campaign or some other fundraising activity.

An tagline focusing on an issue.

An announcement of new/current services, events or programs.

An invitation to a new/current services, events, programs, confernece or subscription to a mailing list or newsletter.

Make sure to keep the signatures up to date.

Once you have decided on what will be the content of the signature content and format, you will need to add it to your email program. Remember to train all members in putting a signature per the org’ style and how to add to the email program. 

If you have volunteers then they may also want to share a line or two to promote the cause.  You may not include specifics that are attached to an employee, but may want to include a strapline or target messages and this can be spread out far and wide. maybe a simple message that states, ‘hey! I volunteer for xxx, do you want to too? Click here’.

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Although this fabulous guide is targeting someone who goes into a marketing role for a non-profit organisation, in principal I think there are a lot of things that anyone starting in a new role can benefit from.  

The Non-Profilt Marketing Guide is produced by Kivi Leroux Miller and intends to be a guideline of the essential task you would want to get covered in the first 100 days of your role, however you have been in the role for longer there is no reason that it can not still offer guidance.

Having a look through, here are few of the suggestions outlined in the book:

#15:  Find out what your coworkers think your job is.

 - Marketing in the nonprofit world means differnet things to differnet people. Do you you write the newsletter? Do you have control of the website design?  Are you responsible for fundraising? Are you the spokeperson for the nonprofilt?….You can’t manage expectations until you understand what they are.

#17 Update your social networking personal profiles.

You’ve been in this new job long enough to update your personal profiles on social netowrking sites link Linkedin.  (if you do more than update your contact information much before this, you risk describing the organization or your job in ways that don’t quite mesh with how others see them)

The list will assist in your success personally and also assist your organisation to create a marketing program that works  for your good cause.

Download it at this link.

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