Discounted software for charities and non-profits
We have been working with a few charities in the Yorkshire area and I have to say I am shocked to find they don’t know about the discounts on offer when buying software and services! Have a look at this website:
Most registered charities and certain non-profit organisations qualify for heavily discounted software from quite a number of providers so I wanted to share the discounts that are available. I have picked out a few choice packages from their price list and compared them to the standard pricing on the internet from a typical supplier.
| Product | Retail Price | Discounted Price | % Saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Windows 7 Professional (32 or 64bit) | £ 158.62 | £ 5.88 | 96% |
| Microsoft Office Professional 2007 | £ 269.60 | £ 12.93 | 95% |
| Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 Premium Edition | £ 1,101.22 | £ 45.83 | 96% |
| Symantec Endpoint Protection (10 licenses) | £ 291.38 | £ 43.48 | 85% |
| Cisco 520 Wireless Router for ADSL | £ 437.09 | £ 58.75 | 87% |
All the prices include VAT as IT supplies and services still attract VAT even for charities 
But what fantastic savings!
So if you are a charity looking to invest in technology to help you raise money and connect with your donors and clients use this service and save yourself a pile of money! If you want some help gathering your thoughts contact us.
Why wont my clients use e-statements?
In a short two word answer – sensory modalities!
Now for the more in-depth response. People prefer or are pre-disposed toward one set of senses over the others. So we shall now step over into the land of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) to put some labels on the senses.
- Visual – seeing
- Auditory – hearing
- Kinesthetic – touching
- Olfactory – smelling
- Gustatory – tasting
When we are talking about e-statements (or statements in general) we can ignore Gustatory and Olfactory sensories as these are least likely to have an impact on decisions that we can take as statement producers – until we include scratch and sniff or edible paper.
Tackling the final three modalities (Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic) allows us to take different approaches to how we present data. Before we start into those areas we need to understand a little about the people and the impact of their leaning to towards these senses.
Visual people will prefer to interact in person, like to see information presented in charts and diagrams and are likely to visualise ideas and have problems turning these into words.
Auditory people prefer to talk through their ideas and will avoid written words, learn by listening and asking questions and are more aware of subtle changes in the tone of voice of the person they are communicating with.
Kinesthetic people prefer to learn by doing, moving and touching, make decisions based on their feelings and are more interested in touching and physical rewards.
Now these are not absolutes. People have a preference for one of the modalities – but in reality they are all used at different times. I prefer to think of them in terms of rankings.
Kinesthetic peopel are likely to be very hard to win over to e-statements as they probably enjoy touching the statement and the whole process of opening and reading the information – something that e-statements can never provide unless they are printed out.
Auditory people will have no preference for physical statements or e-statements – they would much rather somebody called them and read the information to them – but if that isn’t available as a service then either format will do – they just need convincing!
Visual people will be happy with either format – but will lean towards the one that offers the best representation of the information so that they can quickly assimilate the information and not become bogged down in the information.
So how do we use this information to increase uptake of e-statements – clever design and simple ideas. E-statements can include a much wider variety of information at very little cost.
To win the Visual people over the statements need to provide clear paths through the information (think icons and highlights that guide people to the key information.) If the person receiving the statement needs to take an action then provide visual queues to guide them through the steps they need to take.
Auditory people are always going to be tricky to engage with in a statements project – but with clever selection of language and images this can be done. Images showing people in activities that include sound (e.g. concerts, race tracks, listening to MP3/iPODS etc) Auditory people can imagine the accompanying sound. Offers to discuss the statement on a special phone number will also be appreciated!
Kinesthetic people can be tackled in similar ways to Auditory people with specially selected images that engage emotions, mentioning the impact of the e-statements in terms of trees saved (real physical measurement) will also help. The more real & practical the examples the more likely Kinesthetic people will warm to the idea.
So how can you use this information to increase uptake of e-statements? Carefully – you need to know your clients and you may want to train your customer service staff to recognise language use as they interact with clients and then store this in a CRM for future use in marketing campaigns. You can also target ‘hold-outs’ in your signup segment with specific language and conversion offers. if all of that seems to much work – then use all three approaches spread across all of your customer interaction channels – eventually you will get a perfect match between sensory preference and conversion offer – but it just seems messy to me!
If you want to chat about this or any of the other information on the site – give me a call in the office or send me an email via the contact us page.
Bank to save $3.60 per customer by improving client communications
For this bank that works out at around a half million dollars a year in savings, and that is just the start. The interesting thing is that the new statements that will be delivered to the customers are more colourful, personal, easily understood and contain more financial information yet contain more marketing & branding messaging than the previous statements.
Most people think that improving equates to cost – but in reality moving to more intelligent client communications delivers costs savings in paper, power, carbon footprint (to count against your sustainable and green ambitions) but also in time by sweeping away the detritus that has built up over the years in processes and how teams & departments interact.
Whilst saving money is nice – generating profit is far more exciting. The costs savings we identified for our client resulted in them moving to a more finely grained marketing programme with an ability to react to the marketplace in hours and days rather than weeks and months. Their messaging is now targeted to individuals and thanks to their incredible IT team and a little help in creative solution design from ourselves – the people in business and marketing can take control of all this power with minimal technical involvement.
Over the next 18 months they will move the 90% of their client base to e-statements and then introduce charging for paper statements. The envelopes will be marked with the carbon cost including all production and delivery footprints. The individual savings for this organisation will be small – but the increased flexibility means they can introduce new products to specific individuals at launch and generate repeat exposure to the offerings across all of the communication channels providing a coherent message to each individual client.
I will share more about this client and their experiences as they launch and move through the initial phases of their project – we hope to share some of the designs they will be using on their statements with you after their main launch early next year.
How do companies organise transpromo campaigns?
I came across an interesting question regarding Transpromo in a LinkedIn group – Susan Needham from NZ Post was particularly interested in how different sized clients organise their transpromo campaigns and whether it is usual for external consultancies get involved in this process.
This got me thinking about some of our experiences so I thought to share my response. (more…)
e-statements part 2 – mining the possibilities
So your e-statement project is complete! You have gone to market with the ultimate in transpromo statements including:
- high quality imagery that is precisely matched to each client
- integrated messaging that links back to your core website marketing metrics
- near real-time response rate monitoring
- the ability to minutely tweak offerings to ensure they are performing at their absolute peak
- is that a yes I hear? (more…)
e-statements part 1 – getting customers to give up paper!
We want to share some of our observations from our client engagements that focus on e-statements. The topics we will cover over the next few posts are based on our experiences of areas where our clients had been missing golden opportunities to improve their results or reduce their costs.
We hope our observations help you find areas where you can make improvements, extract additional savings or simply increase your results! (more…)
Passionate, Ingenious, Sustainable, Enabling – meet our values and find out about yourself!
We had new business cards printed a few weeks ago based on our values. Being known for thinking outside the box our CEO, Christina, turned them into a mini-personality profile tool. It is a bit of fun more than anything else but if you meet us in person ask us to give you the full on version of this personality profile!
Our values are very simple:
We have been using these cards at networking and business events over the last few weeks and we are already seeing some interesting trends appear. So we wanted to expand our horizons and offer everyone the chance to meet our values online. So we have added an online version of our business cards to this website:
Meet our values – a bit of fun
If you would like to take part in some informal research please click on the link at the end of the values page once you have made your choices and let us know your job title. In return we will send you more information on the theory behind the cards and share the informal findings once we have gathered enough information to generate a meaningful report!
Mentoring Podcast 7 of 7 – Being a Role Model
CGA & CYC Podcast 7 – Being a Role Model
This is the final podcast in this series and covers the challenges of being a role model. We hpoe you have enjoyed them as much as we have enjoyed making them!
A summary of the sections are:
Topic 1 – A leadership story
Topic 2 – Who or what is a role model
Topic 3 – Raising your standards
Topic 4 – Exercise for personal development
We hope you enjoy it!
These podcasts are Copyright CGA Management & North Yorkshire County Council / Connecting Youth Culture
Mentoring Podcast 6 of 7 – Discovering your Mentoring Style
CGA & CYC Podcast 6 – Discovering your Mentoring Style
This podcast covers understanding your mentoring style.
A summary of the sections are:
Topic 1 – What do you mean by mentoring style
Topic 2 – What is your mentoring style
Topic 3 – The potential for growth and problems
Topic 4 – Exercise for personal development
We hope you enjoy it!
These podcasts are Copyright CGA Management & North Yorkshire County Council / Connecting Youth Culture
Mentoring Podcast 5 of 7 – Giving Advice without Resistance
CGA & CYC Podcast 5 – Giving Advice without Resistance
This podcast covers giving advice without getting resistance and matches the content in your workbook that starts on page 32.
A summary of the sections are:
Topic 1 – Why do people resist advice
Topic 2 – The change cycle
Topic 3 – Tips for giving advice
Topic 4 – Exercise for personal development
We hope you enjoy it!
These podcasts are Copyright CGA Management & North Yorkshire County Council / Connecting Youth Culture