New Tools for Communication-Get your Message Top of Mind!
With more than 5,000 media messages presented to most of our donors and volunteers every day, we have lots of competition to get our messages in front of those we depend on for support. One of the best ways to communicate with members, volunteers and donors is through their mobile phone. Having a way to connect by SMS while still keeping your list “opt-in” allows you to deliver information to your volunteers, members and volunteers in a way that is instant, inexpensive and effective. It is important though that this is the “preferred” method and that people can choose all of the ways they want to communicate with them.
SMS stands for “short message service” or as we often refer to it “text messaging”
SMS allows you to aquire new contacts through “short code” texting. Try the texting “compassionbydesign” to 69302 to see how this works. You will notice the opportunity to “opt-out” is included as a part of this approach. If you offer information that is valuable to a donor or volunteer, such as an update about the services you are offering, a important community need or event updates, then you have just opened a new communication channel to a new donor or community member.
Add to this the now popular SMS voting method made popular by certain musical competitions that received tens of millions of contacts and you can move your donor acquisition approach from traditional forms such as paper mail or other congested or expensive forms to an inexpensive approach that will cost you about .05 cents per new donor. Add a community sponsor that wants to send out coupons and you can expand this opportunity even more.
SMS approaches work well with a number of demographics and are much easier to manage than many of the email and internet adword approaches. If you are working with youth or “early adopters” and young adults, then SMS approaches can work very well. For older citizens get a sponsorship by a local merchant to get best acceptance. This can be set up as a special coupon that acknowledges your organization as a part of the message. Since you include an “opt-out” method as a part of every message, you have the right to continue sending out information about your oragnization in the future.
Consider an SMS approach for these purposes:
- Event and Scheduling Updates
- Youth Groups
- Community Contests and Voting
- School and Sport Groups
- Community News
- Church Updates
- Urgent member information
- Missions support updates
Using a combined management tool that allows you to communicate through email, SMS and social media, your organization can keep members and donors up to date while you effectively manage contact information. Building new donor and support is made possible through SMS number aquisition.
Try this service by texting “compassionbydesign” to 69302 to see how the service works– you will be entered to win a free Grant Teams that Win book. Get a free trial account at http://www.impact-messages.com and read more about how this tool can help you win new donors and connect to your members and supporters.
Helping People Who are Out of Work
Top Tips for People Who Want to Get A Job Now!
By Elisabeth H. Sanders-Park
If you’re looking for work, you know the market is tough. But, every month people get jobs. Here are some tips to shorten your search.
Focus. If you don’t know what you want to do, the employer won’t either. Choose a job target, then craft your marketing tools to prove you can do the job. Your target should include what want to do (title) and where you want to do it (industry). Pursuing two different jobs? Develop separate campaigns to prove you meet the unique needs for each job.
Think like the employer. They decide who gets screened out and who gets hired, so consider how they make money, and what makes someone ideal for the job you want. There are six reasons you’ll get the job — ability, presentation, dependability, motivation, attitude, and network. Figure out what the employer needs in each area and prove you’ve got it. These are also the six reasons you’ll lose the job, so catch anything that could get you screened out and deal with it before the employer notices.
Get to a decision maker. 90%+ of us are screened out before the person with the power to say ‘yes’ enters the process. So, find a side door! 50%-70% of jobs are found through networking. Get an introduced by a current employee with a great reputation, volunteer, intern or go in as a customer and prove your passion and talent, attend a job fair, and reach out to family, friends and acquaintances. No matter how you search, your job is likely to come through contact with people, not paper (or computers!). Get prepared, and get out there!
None of this is rocket science, but the job search never has been. In the end, it’s more about what you do than what you know. Job seekers today need fresh ideas and inspiration to jump start their job search. We can help
Get the book! The 6 Reasons You’ll Get the Job will help whether you were recently laid off, are just beginning your career, or have a rocky work history and some explaining to do. Get it at a bookstore starting October 5th, join the tour, or pre-order today at Barnes & Noble.com
Meet the authors! In September and October 2010, we’re coming to a city near you to jump start your job search. Attend a half-day seminar based on The 6 Reasons You’ll Get the Job to learn how to get a job now and get a free copy of the book. Come to our employment networking event to make connections and get your book signed. Prizes will be given via the website and events. Details at www.the6reasons.com
What Should I be Doing About Grants?
How do I come up with a good grant plan?
For many of us grants are either a painful memory in which we recall a long weekend and late nights writing or just a good idea that we have never tried. What is a reasonable plan for getting my organization into the grant stream? When I used to play baseball, the coach had a saying. “If you don’t swing, you will never get a hit”. That is one of the basic rules of winning grants, you must participate to win. Are their some basic steps that I should take to move us forward? Can any of that be done without unreasonable amounts of effort?
A strong grant effort includes many of the things that are found in a good baseball swing:
The appropriate stance- in baseball, a batter comes to the plate ready to swing and has the basic gear required and is included because he or she is on the roster. If you are a ministry or a non-profit then you are on the roster, and with a little training, you will have the equipment that you need to play the game. The stance for ministries and non-profits requires that they orient themselves in the right direction by knowing which pitches to swing for, and which grants are appropriate. The opposite is often true, groups swinging backwards because they have not done the basic research to find out where to swing. A good stance allows the batter to develop a rhythm that maximizes body strength. That is what grants should be for your organization, a routine that allows you to flex appropriate muscles over and over. It should feel natural if you are doing it right.
A concentrated effort- every batter knows when it is time to go to the plate. Hitting, just like running and fielding is a concentrated and focused effort. Batters bat when their turn comes. They focus on this and do it with intention and concentration. They don’t bat all the time, but it is a part of the rhythm of the game. If you don’t swing the grant bat, you are only playing one part of the game, and it will be much harder to score.
Overcoming fear- Not so switch sports, but when I used to take tennis lessons, the instructor discovered that I was afraid of being hit. Being the good teacher that he was, he decided to teach me a lesson and began to hit me over and over with served tennis balls. While I wouldn’t recommend the practice, the same is true in baseball and grants. Getting up to swing away means that you have to overcome your fear of failure. Yes you might miss…in fact you are going to miss. But will you continue to swing until you get it right?
Practice- My graduate school grant writing professors had a wise approach to grant writing. He believed, and I experienced the reality that practice does bring about improvement. If you want to get good at writing and winning grants, you have to practice. The more the write, and get feedback from colleagues and grant makers, the stronger you will get in your ability to knock it out of the park.
Home runs are good- having won my own share of grants, which now reach into the tens of millions of dollars, I must admit that hitting home runs with grants is really a lot of fun. There is nothing like that first, second and twentieth grant win to bring a smile to your face and to the face of your team mates. In my short baseball career, hitting home runs required a lot of strikes and singles along the way. And it goes like that. Hit some and miss some, but if you keep at it, you will see that ball fly over left field fence. You and your team will all benefit as well as the people you are working to serve.
<–Learn more about grant writing on a conference call this Thursday afternoon, July 16th at 5:00 p.m. Select schedule to the left to join the call.
When you hear the sucking sound…
How do you respond when you hear that sucking sound- the whistle of available resources starting to shrink or contract? It is a sound that a lot of non profits and ministries have been hearing these days. Its a function of the economy and sometimes it just plain hurts. It especially hurts when it begins to impact the people you rely on, and the plans that you have worked to develop. Our response during these times makes a difference in our mental and spiritual health and the future of our work. So what do we do?
I will try to avoid the usual platitudes as I make these suggestions, since it seems that shallow encouragement has the opposite effect.
Donors Expect us to Trim
It is a reasonable expectation from our donors and supporters. Responsible management should be expected to look for and trim waste–so do it and talk about it. Not in a way that makes you look like you were not at the steering wheel before, or that you had to down size from a caddy to a Volkswagen, but responsible management does what it needs to do when the economy shrinks.
Allow the pressure to drive you toward innovation.
When the going gets tough, the tough innovate. We take the things that we do have in our hands and we recombine them, refocus them. We might be stripped of the capacity for status quo– is that a bad thing? There is a lot of new opportunity out there for enterprising non-profits and ministries. Without giving up on your values and mission, you do need to explore new ways to get it done. Stay tuned here for some innovation ideas.
Allow the pressure to push you back to your core.
Donors and supporters all give to what matches their values. And while you might have many strengths, we only one one core of value. That is where we should live, but given the liberty to play–we often stray. Use this time to re-discover what is important to you.
Talk about the Vital Parts of Your Mission
The important thing that you do–that is what your donors care about. And they don’t want children to go hungry, youth to go to jail, elders to be without care, AIDs orphans to be left alone– get down to it. The parts of your work that you can honestly share as essential, share. The stats right now are not universally down– some groups are doing better, some are doing worse. Critical missions do matter.
<–Join a discussion about whether grants might be right for your organization on the schedule tab, July 15 at 5:00 p.m.