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.
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…)
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!
Scanning Medical Records – tackling the paper mountain
I spotted this article in a news site talking about Electronic Health Records (EHR) and paper medical records and it prompted me to think about some of the work we have been doing with the NHS in the UK.
We have been designing EHR scanning and archiving systems for the last couple of years and the approach I have been helping NHS hospitals to embrace is simple. First we define 3 categories of records: (more…)
Pay tax or give staff new skills?
This is something that keeps falling off our mental check list so we thought to mention it on our blog.
If your company pays tax then you can offset 100% off the cost of any training focused on developing your business against your taxable profits. Isn’t that a nice thought!
This popped up as we were working out a large staff development programme to run over the next few months with a new client. It is costing our client around £19,000 – which after the various tax calculations will cancel out half of her tax bill for her business.
The result – she gets staff who are motivated, skilled and focused on improving her business and she pays half the tax this year!
The only loser in this is the tax man (more…)
CGA presenting ‘The Art Of Banter’ at the NLP Conference
Christina will be presenting ‘The Art of Banter’ at the upcoming NLP Conference in London on the 14th of November between 18:00 and 19:30 – we look forward to seeing you there!
Christina created The Art of Banter while completing her Master Practitioner qualification with Sue Knight and has since been back to deliver it twice for Sue at Alumni meetings in 2007 & 2008.
The Art of Banter is a unique and fun workshop that combines mind and body; and will have you on your feet moving around feeling energised, excited and (more…)
The most enterprising place in Europe – Scarborough!
We opened an office in Scarborough, North Yorkshire just over a year ago. As a company our clients are spread all over the UK and the United Arab Emirates so we decided it was about time that we branched out from London.
Andy has family ties back in Scarborough so we came up and had a look around and decided that having an office within 10 minutes walk of the beach sounded like a fantastic idea.
So we kept the office in London and opened up our first branch office and we love it! Since then Scarborough has won the Most Enterprising Town in the UK and now it has taken the European award as well!
It is mostly down to the fantastic work that the people over at Electric Angel have done designing the bid and nursing it through the various stages – but what a result! Congratulations Adrian & Rebecca!
We will share more of our experiences of working & living in Scarborough in the blog as we move along (ask us about our walking meetings down on the beach each Monday morning – we get so much done before we hit the office!).
Welcome to our blog
Here at CGA we get involved in lots of work for new and old clients that never seems to quite reach our website – so we wanted a place to share some of our thoughts and stories from the work that we do.
This will also be a place where we can talk about the research we get involved with or share some of the our wackier thoughts as we go about our usual work.
We hope it educates, entertains and cheers you up by turns and we would love to hear from you if any of our musings raise a twinge of recognition.
We hope to meet with you soon!
Andy, Christina & David.