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Consistency Is A Key To Successful Marketing, Like Healthy Relationships
Consistency, How do you define that? Some would say, Just every day, or regular. So, let's together define the word consistency in the sphere of marketing. Consistency is one of the practices that provide marketers success. Being consistent with high-quality marketing...
Steps for Creating an Optimized Content Publishing Schedule
If you want your business to become more visible on the Internet, you need to have a proper digital marketing strategy. This strategy has to include content marketing inevitably. For your business to gain legitimacy as a trustworthy and authoritative source in your...
Issue #11: Using Open Source Software in Your Nonprofit Organization
Welcome to Dot Org Issue #11! In this issue we focus on using open source software, a topic that has been buzzing around the nonprofit sector for years. We asked two of our colleagues to help us understand the strategic issues in using open source software. We...
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Steps for Creating an Optimized Content Publishing Schedule
If you want your business to become more visible on the Internet, you need to have a proper digital marketing strategy. This strategy has to include content marketing inevitably. For your business to gain legitimacy as a trustworthy and authoritative source in your...
Consistency Is A Key To Successful Marketing, Like Healthy Relationships
Consistency, How do you define that? Some would say, Just every day, or regular. So, let's together define the word consistency in the sphere of marketing. Consistency is one of the practices that provide marketers success. Being consistent with high-quality marketing...
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Issue #11: Using Open Source Software in Your Nonprofit Organization
Welcome to Dot Org Issue #11! In this issue we focus on using open source software, a topic that has been buzzing around the nonprofit sector for years. We asked two of our colleagues to help us understand the strategic issues in using open source software. We...
Six steps you can take to use Open Source Software to address needs in your organization
Step 1: Shared Web Hosting It is very common for small and medium-sized nonprofit organizations to purchase a Web and email hosting account from an external virtual hosting provider. These accounts cost from $10 to $40 per month. This is because external hosting (also...
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Steps for Creating an Optimized Content Publishing Schedule
If you want your business to become more visible on the Internet, you need to have a proper digital marketing strategy. This strategy has to include content marketing inevitably. For your business to gain legitimacy as a trustworthy and authoritative source in your...
Issue #11: Using Open Source Software in Your Nonprofit Organization
Welcome to Dot Org Issue #11! In this issue we focus on using open source software, a topic that has been buzzing around the nonprofit sector for years. We asked two of our colleagues to help us understand the strategic issues in using open source software. We...
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Consistency Is A Key To Successful Marketing, Like Healthy Relationships
Consistency, How do you define that? Some would say, Just every day, or regular. So, let’s together define the word consistency in the sphere of marketing.
Consistency is one of the practices that provide marketers success. Being consistent with high-quality marketing is essential for various reasons. Consistency is like a relationship. For example, think of consistently awaiting attention from your loved ones. If they miss a day, it ruins the relationship.
Let’s look at a few reasons more prominent brands have worked on consistently high-quality content and built a successful marketing plan.
1. Consent hit on the value button.
A relationship’s value is consistent. So do consumers. Brands need to put their value through content. If the message consistently hits the consumer’s mind, the consumer will know what the brand is about. The brand will lose its hold with an irregular message, even if it creates the most trendy or most rated content, just like relationships.
2. Deliver your expectations
If a relation is clear with what they should expect from each other, come when needed. This works for companies as well. The consumer will know when to come to the brand if it has reached out with the content right expectations. If the company hits the right expectation on the consumer’s mind, someday it will reach the subconscious. There is the possibility that the consumer may like the message and plans to stick around. This will help the brand plan future expectations and deliveries for the consumers.
3. Efforts are replied with sales and not with blue ticks.
The constant efforts of the marketer are seen through the content they produce. If the actions of reaching out to the brand audience are not seen, the consumer will leave the brand at the blue tick. It is essential to show effort, which can be done only through consistency and hard work. If the exemplary efforts are put in the right direction, the consumer will know your product and service. They will buy or just act as a potential lead.
4. I’ll be there for you.
The visibility of the relation is seen only if the connection is seen. Complicated? No, only if the relationship is consistently there; it grows healthier every day. That’s how it works for the brand. The brand needs to be there for the consumer every time they need it. If the brand stays offline and irregularly comes online, then there are higher chances of break up.
If we have to define consistency now, the world will say it’s a tool to grow. Constituency required planning and progress. Any marketer who wishes to reach a potential audience can work on a strategy and achieve success. So if one aims at a healthy relationship, consistency is your way out. Now relationships and marketing look similar.
Steps for Creating an Optimized Content Publishing Schedule
If you want your business to become more visible on the Internet, you need to have a proper digital marketing strategy. This strategy has to include content marketing inevitably. For your business to gain legitimacy as a trustworthy and authoritative source in your business niche, you need to create high-quality content regularly.
This content must be highly informative, research-based, and has to be presented in an engaging manner. Keep in mind that publishing content is a long-term, consistent endeavor. Hence, you will need to create a proper plan or optimized content publishing schedule for best results. This article will give you the steps to create such a schedule
Issue #11: Using Open Source Software in Your Nonprofit Organization
Welcome to Dot Org Issue #11!
In this issue we focus on using open source software, a topic that has been buzzing around the nonprofit sector for years. We asked two of our colleagues to help us understand the strategic issues in using open source software. We welcome Michelle Murrain & Katrin Verclas as guest writers. Some of the content in this issue is excerpted and adapted from a recent booklet published by the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative.
In Dot Org # 12 we’ll be featuring a collection of valuable open source software tools. We will also report on the results from our recent survey of nonprofits regarding open source software. We’ll talk about what nonprofits are using now, what they feel is working well, and what they told us they’d like to see develop in the future.
Issue#10: Conducting Online Surveys
It has been a while and we are glad to be back. In this issue we focus on conducting online surveys. More and more organizations are using online survey tools for a variety of needs. To evaluate satisfaction of clients, learn something from stakeholders, or gather data for a report – there are many reasons to look more carefully at how you can use online survey tools. In Dot Org # 10 we explore the uses of online surveys, mechanics of online survey design, and connecting the survey process to other organizational activities. We close by offering a few short case studies and a list of vendors offering online survey tools.
There are many reasons to consider using an online survey tool. For example:
• Online surveys are often easily and quickly assembled
• They are usually low cost or free
• Distribution can be very broad and quick (Assuming you have an up-to-date list of email addresses)
• Online surveys can produce high response rates since there is a direct link to your survey in your email announcement
• Survey tabulation is provided within minutes by the online survey tool
• It’s easy to share survey results with others via a direct link to the survey tool
• Online survey data checking and verification are performed immediately while the respondent is taking the survey
• Data is captured electronically so no manual data entry is necessary
• It can fit in with your marketing plan as you can often brand surveys with your logo and direct respondents to your web page when they complete the survey
Cons of online surveys:
• The survey sample may not be big enough or not accurate due to poor quality of email distribution list. Given the poor quality of many nonprofit email lists, this issue may be a big concern in the nonprofit sector.
• Most online survey tools are limited in how their appearance can be customized
• Some survey tools limit the number of responses you can have with your free subscription. With a paid subscription you may have to pay extra for each response beyond your limit.
• Usually you can’t work on developing your survey offline
• You may need a high-speed Internet connection to efficiently develop your online survey and work with the data
• Some people really don’t like them — they’re skittish about providing information online
Issues:
You will have to keep a number of things in mind as you move forward. For example:
• How will you get people to participate in the online survey? Should inducements like prizes be offered?
• As with any type of survey, it takes practice to learn how to set up questions to get the right kinds of results. You really need to think through the end results and what you are going to do with them.
• You need to streamline and focus your questions so that they are as few in number as possible. If your survey is too long, people won’t finish it.
• Deeper analysis of survey data is labor intensive, and requires certain skills, but necessary in some cases to get the full story from your data.
• How can you take advantage of your relationships to encourage participation in an online survey?
•How do you create a feedback loop between asking people to take a survey and then sharing the survey results with them?
Six steps you can take to use Open Source Software to address needs in your organization
Step 1: Shared Web Hosting
It is very common for small and medium-sized nonprofit organizations to purchase a Web and email hosting account from an external virtual hosting provider. These accounts cost from $10 to $40 per month. This is because external hosting (also called virtual hosting) requires less support and is less expensive.
There are many virtual hosting providers, and the vast majority use an open source operating system, either Linux or BSD (another Open Source UNIX variant). They use these because they are more cost effective and stable, and it is easier to administer many machines with fewer staff, than using Windows.
If you are already using a virtual host for your website, and you did not specifically ask for Windows then you are very likely using the open source operating systems Linux or BSD already, and the provider is almost certainly using Apache. You also likely have access to open source application development using the quite popular languages PHP and Perl, and the database system MySQL. Thus, you already have experience with OSS, and use it everyday, and you can check off Step 1! (Step 5 of this section will explore more on how to do it yourself).
Step 2: Open Office and Mozilla within a Windows environment
Word processing, e-mail, Web browsing, and spreadsheets are the primary software programs used by nonprofit staff members. Fortunately, the proprietary software programs typically used to perform these functions all have well-developed open source alternatives that run on Macintosh and Windows platforms in addition to Linux.
You can download and install one or both of Open Office, or Mozilla. Open Office is a full-featured office suite that can read and write Microsoft Office files (.doc, .xls, .ppt), and Mozilla is an open source program that does Web browsing, e-mail and HTML editing. Both of these software packages install easily. They are easy to try out and evaluate.
Step 3: Small desktop trial
If some of your staff primarily use only the programs mentioned in Step 2, then you could experiment by installing Linux on an extra workstation on your internal network. In addition to providing the applications mentioned in Step 2, Linux comes with many other multimedia and productivity applications.
To evaluate using Linux on the desktop, you can take an old desktop that might be gathering dust in the corner (preferably a Pentium processor of 400 MHz or better), and install a version of Linux on it. It is probably easiest to go a major computer store and buy a boxed copy of the most recent version of any Linux distribution such as SuSE, Linux-Mandrake or RedHat. You can also download a CD image of a distribution called Knoppix , which you can boot from, and not affect your hard drive.
This will give you an idea of how to use Linux on the desktop, and introduce you to a wide range of OS packages for you to test out. It is a good way to understand how Linux works. In addition, there are several ways (see list below) to use Windows software on your Linux desktop, when that is needed.
Step 4: Network file and print server on a Windows network
One of the easiest ways to use Linux in a networked environment is to use it as a file and print server, to replace or retire the Windows server that you might have serving this function (Note: a dedicated file/print server is recommended for organizations with 7 or more staff). The case studies show examples of the use of Linux for just that purpose. SAMBA allows the Linux server to share network directories (folders) so that they can be accessed by Windows clients.
Step 5: Self-hosting of Web and e-mail/e-mail lists
As mentioned above in the virtual host section, Linux is very good at Internet server functions (web and e-mail hosting, and other internet server functions). If you have a DSL connection with a static IP address (you generally have to pay more for an account like that), or a T1 or higher broadband connection, then self-hosting your website and e-mail is quite easy using Linux. You can easily use an older server machine or desktop for this function. Again, you can find or download any distribution of Linux that you like.
If you do not want to take on the responsibilities and cost of hosting your server yourself, you can get a dedicated Linux server from many hosting providers, starting at around $99/month. With this kind of server you can install any specialized OSS that you might want to use in your organization.
Unlike MS Windows servers, Linux comes with all necessary server functions in the box, and there are no per-seat licenses for anything (Windows servers do come with IIS, the Windows web server that has no additional license fees, but all additional server software, like e-mail, requires additional costs). So unlike Exchange, where you have to spend $8 (discounted) to $40 per e-mail account, Linux will allow you to have unlimited e-mail addresses at no additional licensing costs. Linux comes with Apache, the most popular Web server. There are a number of mail servers that are available, including Sendmail.org, Postfix and Exim.
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