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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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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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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