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Perini & Associates is a full-service public relations and marketing firm. Review ePerini for ideas, tips and research relating to all aspects of PR and marketing. When ready, give us a call and we can guide you.
Remember, we are taking public relations to new levels!
Michael B. Perini, ABC
perini & associates
I am always asked from nonprofits,”Is there any promotional tools that I can use that are FREE!” Nonprofits traditionally do not have PR or marketing budgets. Unfortunately, many see building relationships as a “cost” vs. an investment. See this blog post on ways that your nonprofit can be successful.
Below is a list of 12 tips. By free, i mean you don’t need to write a check to pay for these services. However, yes, you will have to take time to research and provide materials. So, there is a people cost that I think most of you understand, right?
You will find that these are Colorado-based, but there are similar resources in most communities, if you just take the time to look.
1. Send a Drumbeat to your network. By this I mean, talk your nonprofit up! At personal socials, networking events, and the like. Have a separate business card just for your nonprofit.
2. www.your non-profit name.com. If you don’t have a website, have a professional design one. Some web designers will even offer their services as a “in-kind” donation. The challenge for you is to keep the website current.
3. http://www.facebook.com. Facebook allows for nonprofits to set up their own page where you can tell potentially millions about your organization and managing donations.
4.-8. Use local resources. The links below all offer an event or activity calendar. All are free. You can pay for some extra features but pricing is low and not necessary until you have that PR/marketing budget approved. Search for like items in your community.
4. http://www.csindy.com/colorado/calendar/Section?oid=1064334
6. http://www.peakradar.com/event/
7. http://www.rockymountainnews.com/events/
8. http://www.zvents.com/z/colorado_springs_co
9. http://www.findwoodlandpark.com
10. Use your local newspaper. Many allow nonprofits to list events in organizational calendars Yes, put together a news release and forward it to the media in the local community.
11. Use city banners and business marquees. Many offer these services free. You need to schedule in advance and have a banner ready. A local sign shop may be willing to donate the banner as a donation.
12. http://www.youtube.com/. More than 80% of those who search on the internet are looking to find a video that relates. So, if you don’t have a video for your nonprofit produce one. Again, ask a PR or video production firm to assist. Many offer a % of their services pro-bono. You won’t know until you ask.
by Michael Perini, ABC
perini & associates
Yes, it’s 2012 already.
More than 75 percent of people who make resolutions abandon them within months.
So, let’s try a new tack. Let’s agree to make and stick to our second list of New Year’s resolutions by focusing on ideas that will help all of our public relations/marketing skills and interests. What’s good for each of us will also be good for our business, activity or issue. I would like to hear from you but try these on for size during this new year:
1. Hit the slopes! Or, the surf, or the trail or the fitness center. It’s a long year and now is the time to get yourself ready for a busy time. Being in physical shape enhances what we bring to the mental game with the client, the media or having the energy to work a community event for 12 hours — you name it!
2. Start a new hobby. It isn’t always about business. I find that I need something totally unrelated to my normal routine. What’s it for me? Skiing down a blue/black diamond slope. The planning, pace and skill are also tools I use to be successful in public relations. So, go back to #1!
3. Actually use a slide rule. Ok maybe not, unless you are an engineer! My point is to stretch yourself; get outside your comfort zone. Learn something new. Taking this step will also help you maintain the creative energy that you’ll need when working in business, or on an issue or activity.
4. Buy something. New or used. We all know where the economy is. So get out there and help your fellow businessperson. I need a new coffee pot for the office. See you at the store!
5. Go to a movie. Watching an action thriller on a big (really big) screen with speakers above and surround sound is almost an unearthly experience anymore. Yes, you can get that movie on DVD or downloaded to your computer or phone, but seeing the film in a large format is something that will make your day and should bring back to the office some really BIG ideas!
6. Take a break. Now. 15 minutes. Relax.
7. Get organized. I just love the “Container Store”. A tantalizing array of boxes, baskets, cabinets, files, hooks, for just about everything. A cluttered desk could end up being a cluttered office over time. You know where this leads!
8. Go on a real vacation. Remember, resolution #6? Try a long weekend, or more like a week or 10 days. I know this is tough. And, you have to leave or set aside your cell and computer. No calls to clients! Only in an emergency can you use these two hi-tech devices.
9. Build your network. I am not talking about adding an upgrade to your home or office wifi network. Rather, let’s work on your professional network by passing the perks (offering tickets or information to a close contact) or noticing publicity (send a copy to your contact).
10. Take an active role. Volunteer to serve on a community board. Pick a board that showcases your experience and passion. Be a doer when you make this resolution. It isn’t about filling your resumé.
11. Make regular appointments with your PR counselor. This one is for all you clients. Many times these meetings only occur during a crisis or in the “8th inning.” When the problem, program or issue is so far along that you think only a public relations expert can possibly figure a way out. That means an emergency timeline and much more $$.
12. Take on a cause you care about. The list is endless. What meets your soul? Here’s one we like, Wild Blue Animal Rescue and Sanctuary. You will feel good about helping. Your attitude will remain positive and you are very likely to keep the other 11 resolutions — all new ideas — throughout the year because of the smile and sense of accomplishment!
Have a great 2012!
by Michael Perini, ABC
periniassociates
Simply put, if you have a business, organization or advocating an issue today, you need a website. Nothing more to write. Ok, maybe some reasons to convince you!
First, in the U.S. alone, the number of internet users (approximately 77 percent of the population) and e-commerce sales ($165.4 billion in 2010, according to the US Department of Commerce) continue to rise and are expected to increase with each passing year.
Second, people just aren’t using phone books like in the past.
Third, recently all three major search engines are targeting search queries towards local even when a user doesn’t include a local modifier.
At the very least, every business, organization and issue advocate should have a professional looking and well-designed website that allows users to easily find out about them and how to avail themselves of their products and services. Later, additional ways to generate revenue on the website can be added; i.e., selling ad space, drop-shipping products, or recommending affiliate products.
Here is a list of what a website could offer. Add anything we missed, please.
Products
Services Specials
Information
Mission
Staff & Bios
History
Affiliations
Locations
Frequently Asked Questions
Instructions
Technical Support
Updates
New Products
Price Changes
Order Forms
Requests for Information
Promotions
Coupons
News Releases
Fax on Demand
Intra-Office Communications
Advertisements
E-Mail
Research
Newsgroups
Audio & Video
Maps
We can help develop a website for you that is effective.
Here are more thoughts that I have posted about website design. Click here.
Remember, the internet has become a vast resource of information. As we look toward 2012 make it your New Year’s resolution to have a website.
by Michael Perini, ABC
perini & associates
Officials at the Small Business Administration (SBA) report, “seven out of ten” new employer establishments survive at least two years and 51 percent survive at least five years.
Small business owners I know tend to blame the bank, the government or their partner.
Here are key reasons that I have heard from business owners as to why their business failed:
“The math didn’t work.”
“The owner got in his/her own way.”
“Poor accounting.”
“Insufficient marketing or promotion.”
This post will focus on marketing, which if not done correctly, will surely weigh down a business and could even sink it. How can I make this observation? Well, just ask the customers, or ex-customers would be more appropriate. In many cases, they have a better understanding than the owners of what wasn’t working. Here are questions that each small business owner needs to honestly answer with marketing and public relations:
1. Do you promote your business and your products, services and capabilities or do you keep a low profile? Small businesses often minimize the importance of promoting the business properly. In fact, many of them don’t even focus on promoting their products and services at all.
2. Do you have good branding where your business reputation precedes you (i.e your business is known to be good in something)? Or, do you have a bad reputation instead? There are small businesses that do not make use of the full-spectrum of marketing activities. For example, they choose only to advertise but ignore publicity-related activities such as product launches or issuing press releases. Another fault: Business owners try to do all the marketing themselves to save expense. You wouldn’t pull out your own teeth, would you? Get a professional to assist.
3. Do you over-promote your business by taking credit for what you didn’t do in the business arena? Or, do you over-estimate what you are capable of delivering? For those who do embark on marketing initiatives, they promote their products and services too aggressively that they end up generating ill-will among their prospective customers.
4. Are you aware of who your REAL customers are or do you just think there will always be a “revolving” door of customers? Yes, there are small businesses that forget about the importance of customer-relationship management in ensuring long-term sustainable sales. Results: They find themselves stranded with a huge revenue hole when key customers abandon them.
5. Are you over-reliant with your customers? In other words, take advantage of them? Remember, a negative image will be generated towards businesses which make false promises or claims to their prospective buyers in order to make a sale.
One of the biggest reasons why a business fails is lack of action to their written marketing plan. I can’t emphasize this enough: Marketing is an active part of your business, it is not a set and forget aspect of you business!!
In order to ensure that your business succeeds having a good handle on marketing and public relations strategies and activities is a MUST!
Don’t try to do all the work yourself. Ask a marketing and public relations consultant for assistance. Pick one that will listen to you and partner with you to drive business upward.
Finally, look at marketing and PR as an investment not as a cost. With this view you will be in a better position to succeed where your competitors will likely nosedive.
The Most Interesting Man in Woodland Park is a series of commercials airing on FOX 21, Colorado Springs, Colorado. This short video is an outtake shot during the production of the second commercial that will be seen November 1, 2011. To follow the Most Interesting Man in Woodland Park go to www.findwoodlandpark.com. The commercials are being funded by Park State Bank & Trust.
Perini & Associates is a full service public relations firm. Based at 9,000 feet in Woodland Park, Colorado but has the world as a landscape. Our company assisted in the development of this commercial to drive awareness about the value of video in engaging in conversation. To learn more visit: www.periniassociates.com
The Most Interesting Man In Woodland Park – Filming #2
Worth reading or viewing
Occasionally, I will recommend a news article, book, blog post, research or a short video clip to view relating to public relations. This “eperini Readview” references a IABC, CW Bulletin about how to conduct an internal communication, or employee survey–mbp
by Peter Hutton
Which channels or sources of information do your employees trust, and which do they treat with skepticism? How many employees read your staff newspaper, use the company intranet and attend team briefings? What do they get from these communications, and how would they improve them? How many staff are aware of your company’s vision, values and objectives? Do they buy into them, see them as realistic, and believe management lives by them?
Does your staff feel that they are listened to and that their views are valued? Is your internal communication strategy working, and how can it be improved? How engaged are your staff with the business?
It would be difficult to answer any of these questions with a high degree of confidence without undertaking an employee survey. A survey can provide powerful evidence to support your communication initiatives with senior management and give you added confidence that your efforts are paying off.
To get the most out of an internal communication survey, you need to be sure to 1) ask the right people, 2) ask the right questions and 3) interpret the findings correctly.
Asking the right people
Who is your target audience? Is it all employees or a particular group—e.g., those in a particular department or location? Having defined your target audience, it is important to get as many people to participate as possible; a low response rate means your sample is likely to be skewed to a particular type of employee, and your survey results will not fairly reflect the views of all staff. Many elements can affect the response rate, including the amount and tone of communication running up to the survey, the involvement of line management and survey champions in encouraging responses, the use of incentives, and the wording of the questionnaire.
Asking the right questions
A well-designed questionnaire will make staff feel their views matter and provide you with information that you can use confidently in making decisions. A poorly designed questionnaire will leave staff wondering why they should bother taking part and provide little, if any, use to management.
Questionnaire design requires specific skills. The kinds of questions you ask in surveys are quite different from the kinds of questions you ask in everyday conversation. Survey questions need to be precise, unambiguous, efficient in the way they capture information and, in most cases, should employ answer categories that can be used to quantify responses. Thus, most survey questions include predefined answer categories in the form of graduated scales (e.g., very satisfied, fairly satisfied, etc.) or lists from which respondents can select their answers. These are often complemented by a few open-ended questions that invite staff to answer in their own words.
Choosing the right question format is important and will vary according to the kind of information you require. Attitudes and opinions are usually measured using balanced scales. The most commonly used is the agree/disagree scale: strongly agree, tend to agree, neither agree nor disagree, tend to disagree, strongly disagree. The advantage of this type of question is that you can ask about almost any topic simply by drafting statements reflecting what a member of staff might say (i.e., ”How strongly do you agree or disagree that…?”) However, be careful not to overuse this type of question in your survey. Just presenting a number of agree/disagree statements will give you a lot of measures but not necessarily the right ones. Such statements often measure symptoms rather than underlying causes, yet it is the underlying issues you often need to understand.
In any case, this type of question is often not the best way of measuring attitudes or opinions about company communications. If you want to know how well your managers are seen to be displaying certain desired behaviors (e.g., involving their staff in key decisions, giving them feedback on their performance, etc.), it is better to use a rating scale such as “very good” to “very poor.” If you want to know how useful staff find different forms of communication like team meetings or the intranet in helping them to do their job more effectively, then a usefulness scale (e.g., “very useful” to “not at all useful”) would be more relevant.
To measure your employees’ knowledge or understanding of company information, you’ll need a different kind of question. You might simply ask staff if they have ever heard of or are aware of a number of items (e.g., the company’s code of conduct or corporate values), or you might employ a more subtle scale that distinguishes between those who know them well enough to recite them down to those who have never heard of them.
Ultimately, communication is designed to influence how people behave, and most internal communication questionnaires can benefit from including behavioral questions. Again, scales can be devised to measure how often staff attend team meetings, access the intranet, have appraisals or read the staff newsletter. These can be followed up by questions designed to understand better what benefits employees feel they derive from these vehicles or why they rarely, if ever, use them. It is important to know, for example, whether they do not access the intranet because they have no means of doing so, they have never been shown how to, or because they do not believe there is anything of value on it.
Prompt lists can be useful here, such as listing possible reasons why staff may not use the intranet and asking them to select the ones that apply in their case. The nature of list questions is that staff can express relevance or priorities. For example, you might list different channels of communication and ask which staff prefer to use for different kinds of information. Alternatively, you might list different online and off-line channels for delivering the staff newspaper and ask which they most and least prefer.
Interpreting the findings
What you read into the findings of your survey depends a great deal on having asked the right people the right questions in the first place. Unless your objectives are very simple, it is usually advisable to draw on expert advice. Often, the obvious way to ask a question is not the way that collects the most useful information. One question might take 20 seconds to answer but could produce either one or a dozen items of useful information depending on how it is constructed. It may be clear and obvious what an answer means or it may raise so many questions about its meaning as to be useless for any practical management purpose.
Peter Hutton is founder and managing director of BrandEnergy Research Ltd., based in the U.K., and author of the book What Are Your Staff Trying to Tell You?
by Michael B. Perini, ABC
perini & associates
“Can you speak the language?” We aren’t talking necessarily here about English or Spanish, though if your organization is international, then maybe so. The language I am referring to is the language of your boss, CEO, organizational leader or business client in terms that he or she understands.
In this time of increased accountability, communicating public relations strategies, programs and activities, in terms that the “4th Deck” (borrowing from a Navy term) or “Top Floor Executives” understand, is vital to helping keep a seat at the table with other decision-makers. It also often results in increased PR budgets and resources as well,if you use the correct approach when it comes to executive level language.
Here are several tips to keep in mind when discussing public relations with senior leadership.
Go to this link to get the latest issue of “ePerini”. You may also subscribe to this great resource for public relations and marketing news, tips and information. Just click on the link in the newsletter. Want to view past issues. Click here. mbp
Perini & Associates announces Commercial 1, a new series of video spots. ”The purpose of these spots is to showcase the power of video in engaging in conversation,” said Michael Perini, owner.
According to recent research of people who surf the internet, 83% of the time video is the medium most searched. ”When individuals are looking to how to do something, or how to support something, or buy something seeing a video often is the reason for making a decision,” Perini said.
“There is an art in matching visuals, music and drama to create excitement and draw viewers into taking action,” Perini said.
“pClips” is already a popular section on the website and company Facebook page. ”Adding a series of interesting commercials that can be viewed on Youtube and on television was the right step in leading by example for current clients and potential ones,” Perini said.
Elevate Films was chosen to mark all videos produced by Perini & Associates and reflects the branding campaign in Woodland Park, Colorado, heaquarters of the company.
“We would like to hear your comments about this commercial. And, any ideas you might have for others,” Perini said.