http://www.ctxchange.org/

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.

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.

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.

This got me thinking about some of our experiences so I thought to share my response.A high level overview of the functions involved in a transpromo project are:

• business driving the why – defining the outcome, financial result
• marketing driving the what & who -  defining the offer, message & targeting
• IT providing the how – data, processing, transfer mechanism and maybe project control

As the scale and complexity of the companies shrinks – the edges of these become quite blurry and involve fewer people with less specialist skills – as the complexity of organisation grows – the edges get much much sharper and additional bands begin to appear between them (specialist data mining and segmenting teams/consultants/designers etc).

We have worked with all the areas involved in this process so we would say that external consultants can be useful at any stage – but we try to always work our way out of the project.  Once the people involved become experienced in what they want to achieve the role of the external consultant should start to reduce and the original need should for an external consultant will disappear.

The business probably has a clear idea of the outcomes they want to see and the marketing team will have an idea of how to turn this into an  the offer that appeals to their client base – but designing for a dynamic transpromo statement is very different to what most designers get involved with – so some external help at this point is useful and usual.

If they have segmented their client base already and built their customer journeys then they can probably work with their IT people to flag each customer record with a segment ID and then simply tie that to some offer collateral to be added to the statement.

This is what we recommend most of our clients do – it removes a lot of the need for constantly re-engineering the actual statements and business rules and simplifies production of the statements.  After all it is much easier to shift a clients segment ID as you learn more about them than it is to constantly tweak a statement design!

As for the marketing analytics side – that really depends on how the company operates! Our larger clients track response rates across call centres, branches, websites, IVR, SMS shortcodes, phone in numbers, offer codes etc. For smaller companies it is much simpler – watch the money!

The range and complexity of options for organisations is rapidly changing meaning that what was once impossible or too expensive for a smaller organisation is probably going to become available within 12 to 48 months in a more automated and simplified form.  Think how CRM has evolved from complex in-house implementations to simple SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings like SugarCRM and Salesforce.com.

Happy to answer questions – just email me via the contact form or leave a comment on this post.

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!

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:

1. Active – used in the last 2 years
2. Dormant – used between 2 & 7 years
3. Inactive – not accessed for over 7 years

The Inactive records are sent off-site to a secure physical storage facility and a place holder is scanned into the records system (or ECM solution depending on how the Trusts systems work) that can be used to retrieve the records. These records are highly unlikely to be recalled and are simply riding out their storage time frames.

For some hospitals it is worth scanning these Inactive records over time and I have negotiated discounted rates with back scan suppliers where they can schedule these records into their own down time over a fixed period of time.

The Dormant records are moved into on-site managed storage and are scanned either as they are requested or as they are returned depending on time constraints. This slowly ensures that the records are moving to electronic formats and targets the most active records.

The Active records are scanned immediately in bulk by a specialist back scan supplier. This is the expensive bit but it can be mitigated through prioritisation and even skipped entirely if the scanning can be handled in-house by a dedicated team.

The boundaries for the time-lines are changed depending on the scale of the medical records library and the type of patient records being held. Budget can also be taken into consideration to ensure the scale of the initial back scan operation fits within realistic budgeting rounds.

BUT the above approach can result in all the benefits of EHR being accrued much more quickly with savings being possible within 2 years or less allowing the purchase of systems to move forward much faster.

Of course the US appears to have it easy compared to the UK with their retention guidelines. Certain records in the UK have 35 year retention policies and for certain institutions they need to be preserved indefinitely! In one location we worked with they have consistent records dating back to 1865!  Now that is a back scan operation that could take a long time if tackled head on!

If you are tackling one of these projects then we wish you good luck in your journey! Or you could give us a call and we can help you speed through it stress free!

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 - I think I can stand a little of that in the current economic climate!

PS. I would go ask your accountant about this before taking this as pure truth – as with anything related to HMRC there are specific requirements that need to be met – here is the relevant tax note for those with a passion for obtuse language like me!

PPS. Got questions about increasing your profits through developing your staff, ask us – got questions about tax, ask Dean at mmi online.

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 playful.  It shows you  how to make serious points in a non-offensive and engaging manner. Bantering in this way will allow you to create quick rapport with strangers, build relationships, get repeat business, stand-up for yourself in a playful way, and generally get more fun out of life! The workshop is the result of 2 years research on some of the great international real time banterers such as Eddie Izzard and Billy Connolly and is huge fun for everyone who attends.

But don’t take our word for it….

“This workshop is a great example of a topic that contains the essence of excellence.   Christina has studied some of the greatest real time banterers in the world including Eddie Izzard. Come along and learn how to do this for yourself.” – Sue Spencer-Knight, Sue Knight Consulting

“A fun and exciting workshop! Combining mind and body; the movement an integral part, unlocking  the brain to banter! I left feeling energized, excited and playful!!!!!” – Annie Richardson, Quantum People

“We were up on our feet, moving around, laughing and bantering with each other. The energy in the room was super-charged and I was amazed at how quickly we all got into the swing of it.  If I had the chance to have another bantering session with Christina I would leap at it like a salmon” – Catherine Kerr, Business Improvement Facilitator, Prudential

“Christina has a natural and zesty way of engaging people  – helping release their inner exuberance and true potential” – RKR, Coaching for Creativity

Conference Links

Main conference website: http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/

Workshop link: http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/component/option,com_eventlist/Itemid,14/id,17/view,details/

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!).

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.