Why Your Company Should Consider Becoming a 1% For The Planet Member

We’re taking a cue from our good friends over at Manoverboard, a fellow B Corp agency in Winnipeg, Canada, who recently wrote about why becoming a 1% for the Planet member is important to them. One of our first philanthropy acts of 2018 was to join the ranks of companies committed to earmarking 1% of their top-line revenue (not profit) to specific environmental organizations each year.

1% for the Planet is a Vermont-based nonprofit started by the folks at Patagonia, another B Corp. Member companies donate 1% of their annual revenue to a list of vetted environmental nonprofits and can the organizations they want to support. This is critical philanthropy work at a time when it is really needed.

As noted on the 1% website:

“If we don’t act now, the viability of our planet and our quality of life — to say nothing of the health of our economy — face an existential threat. … Currently, only 3% of philanthropic giving in the U.S. goes to environmental causes; and only 3% of this giving comes from the business community.”

We believe in the urgency of solving this massive problem so much that we changed the legal structure of our company to better support people and planet alongside profit. Mightybytes has been a Certified B Corp since 2011 and an Illinois Benefit Corporation since January 2013.

Certified B Corporations like Mightybytes meet the highest standards of positive impact on society and the environment.

Related: Interview with Rick Alexander: Everything You Need to Know About Benefit Corporations and Legal Structures

As a Benefit Corporation, we are required by law to provide a “public benefit” to society alongside the standard business goal of generating profit. No easy feat. We are also required to publish annual benefit reports that outline exactly how we made good on that legal commitment; our latest was just released.

Why is this important? Being legally committed to long-term gain for people and planet while also operating as a for-profit company requires a sustainable financial foundation upon which we can build successful philanthropic efforts. Without profit, we cannot achieve our philanthropic goals. For us, being a 1% for the Planet member is not only imperative because of the sorry state of our planet, but it’s also important to the long-term survival of our company.

Streamlining Philanthropy

As a B Corp and digital agency, Mightybytes works to benefit society through collaborations with fellow B Corps, civic agencies, associations, and nonprofits.

When we became a B Corp, Mightybytes began offering discounts to nonprofits and mission-aligned organizations that wanted to work with us. It felt good to support other social enterprises and use our skills for world-changing social impact and environmental justice projects. Over time, unfortunately, that came at great cost to the company.

Challenges With Discounts

We ran into a few recurring problems with these discounts, which negatively impacted our ability to operate sustainably and profitably:

  • It often was challenging to manage our hard costs on these projects.
  • It was tough to correlate the altruistic intentions of our discounts to budget discussions as projects wound down. This led to many difficult conversations.
  • In some cases, we offered discounts to companies that claimed they wanted to become B Corps but ultimately never did.
  • Most importantly, these projects were rarely profitable.

If the above were true for a project or two, we could weather the consequences, no problem. In 2016, however, over 70% of our work came from mission-aligned nonprofits, B Corps, and other social enterprises.

While we’re proud of this fact, as noted above, very little of that work was actually profitable. We were teetering on the verge of philanthropy run amok. Plus, through products and services like Ecograder, green web hosting, and sustainable design, we’re on a mission to make the web a greener place, which also requires financial resources.

Given all this, it’s easy to see why our good-intentioned project discounts posed a long-term challenge for the company. They weren’t directly tied to Mightybytes’ ability to generate a sustainable profit. We had to rethink how we work with mission-aligned organizations.

Mapping Philanthropy to Profitability

These were really tough decisions to make. Some of the nonprofits that we worked with had challenges making even the discounted project budgets work. While we loved and believed in their missions, it wasn’t a smart business decision to hamstring our financial prosperity in the name of their cause, which happened in a few unfortunate cases. When a plane is going down, there’s a reason you put on your own air mask first before helping someone else.

With our 1% for the Planet membership, philanthropy becomes a company-wide conversation that isn’t directly tied to any one project. The philanthropy conversation dovetails with those about overall profitability so everyone understands that our ability to make donations is directly tied to our ability to operate sustainably and profitably. Whether we make $10,000 in a year or $10 million, 1% of that is coming directly off the top to support environmental nonprofits.

Environmental Nonprofits We’re Supporting

We were thrilled to find out that the annual B Corp certification fee applies to our 1% for the Planet membership. We can always get on board with supporting B Lab and their global community of people using business as a force for good in the world. We made a commitment to help two other inspiring organizations as well:

Climate Ride

Climate Ride produces multi-day charity endurance events that raise money for organizations working toward a better future. Their beneficiaries focus on climate change, education, sustainability, renewable energy, and active transportation advocacy.

To date, Climate Ride has granted nearly $5 million to U.S. nonprofits that are working on these causes. Over $750,000 of this money was granted in 2017 alone. In this manner, they are a multiplier organization: A donation to Climate Ride in turn supports the more than 100 local and national organizations that are their beneficiaries. Plus, Climate Ride inspires everyday people to push themselves and their communities to make change happen. We love that.

In 2011, we built the Climate Ride website. From 2012 through 2017, we gave our pals at Climate Ride a $10,000 annual grant in pro bono services. We’re proud of this work and we know Climate Ride appreciated it. But, like the discounts mentioned above, there were a few problems:

That $10,000 just isn’t enough to really dig deep into many of the marketing challenges common to a young, growing nonprofit. Thus, our commitment essentially meant making ongoing site and maintenance updates, not the strategic digital marketing work we’re best at.
As noted above, our pro bono service grant wasn’t tied to any company profitability goals, so we were on the hook to do this work each year whether we could afford to or not. In 2016, this was a challenge for us.

By donating to Climate Ride through our 1% for the Planet membership, the organization can now put a portion of our gross revenues to whatever needs it may have in the form of cold, hard cash.

Alliance for the Great Lakes

This Chicago-based conservation and advocacy organization does critical work right in our own backyard. The alliance fights to protect the planet’s largest source of freshwater, the Great Lakes, which is a primary source of drinking water for 35 million people. The Alliance for the Great Lakes engages tens of thousands of people each year through advocacy campaigns, volunteering and beach cleanups, education, and ongoing research.

Through the 25-year-old Adopt-a-Beach program, Alliance for the Great Lakes volunteers have cleaned thousands of pounds of litter from shorelines.

Supporting the alliance’s work is important to us for many reasons:

  • The alliance’s efforts directly impact our daily lives as Chicagoans.
  • The alliance works on important issues like invasive species, toxic algal blooms, oil and chemical spills, microbeads, plastics, climate change issues, and a multitude of other things critical to the health and well-being of people who live around the lakes.
  • The alliance promotes the sustainable recreational use of the American Midwest’s greatest natural resource.
  • We love working with the alliance.

Philanthropy Evolves

Our team is researching whether it is viable to support a third organization as well, one that focuses on the health, economic, and social impacts of a changing planet. The terms of the 1% for the Planet membership give Mightybytes a great deal of flexibility to evolve this program as the year progresses.

As an agile-focused organization, Mightybytes is always evolving and improving its practices and processes, so this is not to say the company will never offer discounts or pro bono services again. Currently, Mightybytes offers project estimating and grant planning workshops to help nonprofits better prepare for digital projects.

By bringing Mightybytes in early, our nonprofit partners can work with our employees to get consensus on process, tech specs, and other high-level requirements in an open, transparent, and mutually beneficial environment that supports executing projects cheaper and faster.

In the meantime, Mightybytes is happy to support these great organizations and thrilled to join the ranks of 1% for the Planet businesses around the world.

31 Dr. Muhammad Yunus Quotes to Inspire You to Greatness!

We love Dr. Muhammad Yunus around here so much – he really is the Godfather of Social Enterprise. His insights, lessons, and tips are timeless. That’s why we had to share our best Muhammad Yunus quotes with you today!

Get inspired. Get out there and change the world.

On Technology

While technology is important, it’s what we do with it that truly matters.

—

We prepare our students for jobs and careers, but we don’t teach them to think as individuals about what kind of world they would create.

—

Our financial institutions have created a worldwide system of apartheid without anyone being horrified by it. If you don’t have collateral, you are not credit worthy. To the banks, you are not accepted on our side of the world. (From, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism.)

—

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.

—

Health care can be made more affordable for the poor without requiring major new scientific developments, just the smart application of current technologies. We have seen a $25 incubator and diagnostic instruments that are built tough, cheap, and reusable for the developing world.

—

Unprecedented technological capabilities combined with unlimited human creativity have given us tremendous power to take on intractable problems like poverty, unemployment, disease, and environmental degradation. Our challenge is to translate this extraordinary potential into meaningful change.

Listen to our exclusive interview with Nobel Peace Prize winner and Issue 13 cover story, Dr. Muhammad Yunus.

Subscribe to this show on  iTunes  |  Stitcher  |  Soundcloud

On Women and Equality

Soon we saw that money going to women brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men. So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a result, now 96% of our four million borrowers in Grameen Bank are women.
—

When a destitute mother starts earning an income, her dreams of success invariably center around her children. A woman’s second priority is the household. She wants to buy utensils, build a stronger roof, or find a bed for herself and her family. A man has an entirely different set of priorities. When a destitute father earns extra income, he focuses more attention on himself. Thus money entering a household through a woman brings more benefits to the family as a whole. (From Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty)

—

UN studies conducted in more than forty developing countries show that the birth rate falls as women gain equality… I believe income-earning opportunities that empower poor women … will have more impact on curbing population growth that the current system of “encouraging” family planning practices through intimidation tactics. Family planning should be left to the family. (From Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty.)

—

In Bangladesh, if a woman, even a rich woman, wants to borrow money from a bank, the manager will ask her, ‘Did you discuss this with your husband?’ And if she answers, ‘Yes,’ the manager will say, ‘Is he supportive of your proposal?’ If the answer is still, ‘Yes,’ he will say, ‘Would you please bring your husband along so that we can discuss it with him?’ But no manager would ever ask a prospective male borrower whether he has discussed the idea of a loan. (From Banker To The Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty.)

On Poverty

Once poverty is gone, we’ll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They’ll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society – how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation, and despair. (From Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism)

—

People.. were poor not because they were stupid or lazy. They worked all day long, doing complex physical tasks. They were poor because the financial institution in the country did not help them widen their economic base. (From Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty.)

—

Poverty is unnecessary.

—

I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social systems that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make up that system; the policies that we pursue.”

—

Even today we don’t pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor worked harder, they wouldn’t be poor.” (From, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty.)

—

On Social Business

I think, social business is the most logical thing to do. If we had done that, we could reduce all the problems we have.

—

The current financial crisis makes it very clears that the system that we have isn’t really working, and this is the right time for us to undo things and build them in a new way.

—

Whenever I see a problem, I immediately go and create a company. That’s what I did all my life.

—

All people are entrepreneurs, but many don’t have the opportunity to find that out.

—

All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves we were all self-employed . . . finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where human history began . . . As civilization came we suppressed it. We became labor because they stamped us, ‘You are labor.’ We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.

—

I’m encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.

—

The challenge I set before anyone who condemns private-sector business is this: If you are a socially conscious person, why don’t you run your business in a way that will help achieve social objectives?

—

Business money is limitless.

—

Capitalism has been interpreted as an exclusively profit-centric human engagement. Some have been saying to bring people and planet into the picture. This can be a good change, but it is still not fully operationalized. Are you putting people, planet and profit at the same level?

On Humanity

Human beings are extremely creative and resilient, especially when they are operating within an institutional framework that encourages and supports their actions.

—

Each of us has much more hidden inside us than we have had a chance to explore. Unless we create an environment that enables us to discover the limits of our potential, we will never know what we have inside of us.

—

If we can imagine something, there is a good chance that it will happen. If we don’t imagine it, there is almost no chance of it happening. (From A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions.)

—

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on.

(From Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism)

—

I try to kind of enlightened my frustration and agony by coming to the conclusion that I may not be useful as an economist but I m still a basic human being.

—

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.

—

Capitalism has been interpreted as an exclusively profit-centric human engagement. Some have been saying to bring people and planet into the picture. This can be a good change, but it is still not fully operationalized. Are you putting people, planet and profit at the same level?

Further read:

23 Self Improvement Tips for Social Entrepreneurs

Can Kindness Make You a Better Boss?

The answer is, unequivocally, “yes.” Data abounds to show that kindness works at work, and here’s why.

Did you know that emotions are contagious? They flow from the most powerful person in the room. So, if you are the boss, that’s probably you! If you want a productive and happy workplace, then you must create it.

Kind bosses have been shown to increase morale, decrease absenteeism and retain employees longer. Kind bosses may even prolong the lives of their employees by decreasing their stress levels which improve cardiovascular health.

Human brains (as well as the brains of other primates) have cells called mirror neurons. Mirror neurons do exactly what their name implies, and they go a long way to explain much of human behavior. Mirror neurons fire both when a person performs an action and when they observe an action being performed by another.

Kindness, It’s Not That Tough to Do

So when the boss enters the room with a big smile and says, “Happy Monday, everyone!”, he or she will see smiles all around. Alternatively, if you are in a low mood, you’ll bring others down with you. You may have noticed then when you see a commercial for someone eating delicious looking food, you feel hungry and when they’re drinking a coke…need I say more?

When you see someone injured, your mirror neurons for pain get triggered and you feel empathy. For most of us, working out in a group is much easier than exercising alone. You can thank your mirror neurons for that.

As you can see, mirror neurons come into play throughout our day. By understanding how your brain works and how you are impacting others, you can choose behaviors to positively impact those around you both at work and in your personal life. So if you want to create a kind workplace, it’s just this simple. Be kind. Say kind things. Do kind acts.

Being kind doesn’t mean you have to be a pushover. To the contrary! To quote my esteemed colleague, David Loewenstein, Ph.D., “I am a marshmallow on the outside with a backbone of steel.”

So treat your employees with kindness, but at the same time let them know you have high expectations. As, a leader, you must consistently have that backbone. It should be composed of integrity, honesty, and a clear vision for your company.

How can companies help build leaders?

Adam Grant, Ph.D. at the Wharton School of Business in his groundbreaking book, Give and Take, shows how companies can win across many metrics by hiring and supporting more employees who are givers (as opposed to takers).

 

 

Harvard Business School’s Amy Cuddy and her research partners have also shown that leaders who project warmth – even before establishing their competence – are more effective than those who lead with their toughness and skill. As a result, the employees feel more loyal and committed and are more likely to go out of their way to be helpful and friendly to other employees.

Research on “paying it forward” shows that when you work with people who help you, you will be more likely to help others (and not necessarily just those who helped you).

Jonathan Haidt, Ph.D. at New York University Stern School of Business shows in his research that when leaders are self-sacrificing, their employees experience being moved and inspired. This phenomenon, Dr. Haidt calls “moral elevation” and it is triggered by viewing acts of uncommon goodness.

What does kindness look like for a leader?

So just what does kindness look like for a leader?

  • Greet employees in a positive way.
  • Praise good work.
  • Pay attention to team morale and work to enhance it.
  • Focus more on solving problems than on who or what’s to blame.
  • Treat everyone with respect.
  • Care for and be interested in employees’ daily lives.
  • Show compassion and concern when employees are struggling.
  • Use and encourage open, honest and direct communication.

In short, kindness works. I hope I have inspired you to try it.

If you’d like to check out Dr. Ritvo’s latest book for a deep dive you can find it here:

You might also enjoy:

Is The Regenerative Economy The Future of Capitalism?

This article was originally written by Bill Kramer and published on Next Billion.

Eight men are as wealthy as the poorest half of the world, according to Oxfam. If you have worked on poverty issues at all, you know the general outlines of inequality. Nevertheless, it still has the power to shock the conscience.

We can highlight a few of the facts in the Oxfam briefing paper, “An Economy for the 99%”, published in January.

The report deserves your attention:

  • Today, the top one percent owns more wealth than everyone else combined;
  • In the U.S., the bottom half of the population has seen zero income growth while the top
    one percent has seen a 300 percent increase over the past 30 years, according to Thomas
    Piketty;
  • Intergenerational transfer of wealth by just 500 rich people over the next 20 years, $2.1 trillion is more than the GDP of India with its 1.3 billion people.

How did we get here? And, one a related note, how do we get out of this unsupportable situation? These are unquestionably critical and pressing questions for those of us “in the business,” but it’s fair to say that they should be equally important to everyone, for the accelerating pace of inequality and poverty increases crime and instability, fosters social unrest, and severely hampers efforts to reverse course.

So, let’s address the first question. The Oxfam briefing paper, as well as many other observers, lays the responsibility directly at the feet of an ideology, neoliberalism, which has provided the energy and justification for economic policies whose results are now on display. Neoliberalism (and Keynesianism) is a relatively new phenomenon. It emerged largely from the ashes of World War II, as the victorious capitalist states, relying on the recommendations of a small group of neoclassical economists who put their faith in corporate capitalism to rebuild the devastated economies of Europe (and to a lesser extent, Asia) in the face of a perceived communist Soviet threat and, just a few years later, a similar threat in the People’s Republic of China. Neoliberalism got a huge boost
in the U.S. in the 1970s through the economists at the University of Chicago, starting with Milton Friedman.

Some of the principal tenets of neoliberalism include:

  • The goal of the economy and business is to generate financial wealth;
  • The freedom of the individual (person or corporation) is the primary societal
    value;
  • The government should be small, limited to protecting individuals and corporations
    and their private property;
  • If we just let the free market sort things out, all will be well.

One of the fundamental, but usually unacknowledged assumptions of neoliberalism is that man is selfish and that the markets are an efficient way in which to channel that basic human trait. The pursuit of profit is a handy and useful stand-in for such selfish behavior. It’s a simple and neat narrative: “Hey, we were made this way, so go with it.” While there is no doubt that self-interested behavior is common, considerable research points in the opposite direction. The old narrative was based on assumptions that scientists now reject.

Psychologists, evolutionary biologists, and anthropologists and others find that we seek to meet our needs. But more than that, people seek goodness, connection and caring; we desire to be rewarded for meaningful contributions with a decent living but are not primarily motivated by acquiring wealth.

Our capacity for—indeed, need for—social behavior in the community begins to point us to an alternative philosophy, one that goes beyond the raw, monomaniacal pursuit of profit, one that measures human progress in ways other than GDP. The Oxfam report puts it this way: “We need to measure human progress using the many alternative measures available.

These new measures should fully account for the unpaid work of women worldwide. They must reflect not just the scale of human activity but how income and wealth are distributed. They must be closely linked to sustainability, helping to build a better world today and for future generations. This will enable us to measure the true progress of our societies.” Good sentiments. But where to start turning words into action?

As it happens, there are a number of folks focused on just that, and I am working with some of them. One is L. Hunter Lovins, founder of Natural Capitalism Solutions. With Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins, Hunter was the co-author of “Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution,” which has sold more than 2 million copies since its 1999 publication. That book imagined an economy
in which the biological realities of the natural capital—resources and living systems—were fully valued. It staked out a vision of a sustainable economy and the industrial revolution it could power. The conclusions of the Oxfam report owe a good deal to the natural capital framework.

Entrepreneurs and academics, inspired by “Natural Capitalism” and other foundational works, have been cultivating their own vineyards—the financial system, systems theory, ecological systems, and more—to better understand the dynamics of a new economy.

These empirical studies and theoretical frameworks are coming together under the general umbrella of “regenerative future” studies. The regenerative future is a world in which, when natural systems are fully understood and valued macroeconomically (by companies) and macroeconomically (at the national and global level), we will be in a position not just to sustain ecosystems and everything that is dependent on them, but, in fact, to begin to restore them to optimal health and productivity.

Each actor in this new realm, from his or her own perspective, is seeking to understand the inter-relationships of many disciplines that previously were considered separate and to bring them together in ways both academically stringent and real-world practice.

John Fullerton, for example, after a career on Wall Street with Morgan Stanley, has turned his mind to what he calls “regenerative capitalism.” He has created the Capital Institute to carry out the work of translating his years of investment experience into a holistic approach to a more sustainable future, without turning his back on the capitalist system.

Or take a look at the work of Robert Costanza, the “father” of ecological economics, a trans-disciplinary approach which is, in his words, “a bridge across not only ecology and economics but also psychology, anthropology, archaeology, and history … necessary to get a more integrated picture of how humans have interacted with their environment in the past and how they might interact in the future … an attempt to look at humans embedded in their ecological life-support system, not separate from the environment.”

An Oxfam senior researcher for many years, Kate Raworth, now working independently (a “renegade economist,” she calls herself), has been developing “Doughnut Economics,” the deep empirical study of planetary boundaries, which she describes this way: “Humanity’s 21st century challenge is to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet. In other words, to ensure that no one falls short on life’s essential needs (from food and housing to health care and political voice) while ensuring that collectively we do not overshoot our pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, on which we fundamentally depend. The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries is a playfully serious approach to framing that challenge, and it acts as a compass for human progress this century.”

Many more could be added to this short list. But the point is made: Serious, practical and smart people are working today on an alternative approach to neoliberal ideology and policies. I find this work to be a compelling complement to the work that Al Hammond, Rob Katz, and I, along with other colleagues, did at the World Resources Institute as we tried to better understand low-income communities and their relationship to their own, and broader, economies. We looked through the lens of business engagement with poor communities.

Regenerative economics is a significant extension, focused not on business models but on systems and frameworks and the necessity for new, non-neoliberal narratives.

For myself, I am totally in synch with this idea, attributed to the novelist William Gibson: The future is already here; it’s just badly distributed. What we need to do now is find, aggregate, and communicate the positive future that is already happening.

Ontraport vs ActiveCampaign: Find the Best Solution for Your Business

Ontraport vs ActiveCampaign, which is the best marketing automation solution for your business based on their differences?

An Ontraport vs ActiveCampaign comparison attracts a sizable chunk of similarities and differences. But it is in the differences that the two marketing automation software suites really tell they are not made equal—at least as far as your business needs go.

Whether you are a blogger with informational products to sell or an e-commerce business with affiliates under an affiliate management tool, this review of ActiveCampaign vs Ontraport comparison aims to help you choose the best choice for your specific needs.

So without much storying, why don’t we compare Ontraport to ActiveCampaign in a battle of the best marketing automation solutions in the market right now?

Ontraport vs ActiveCampaign: Target Audience

Ontraport and ActiveCampaign were established in 2006 and 2003, respectively. That means they have been around for a stretch, proving they must be doing something right to persist thus far in a now-crowded market of basic, intermediary and advanced sales CRM, email marketing and marketing automation providers.

But while ActiveCampaign’s features and focus are targeted at the small to medium business segment, Ontraport is in good with an established business that’s been around for a while and needs the ton of advanced marketing automation the vendor provides—beyond basic email marketing solutions that the likes of Aweber, MailChimp, and Constant Contact can handle.

To spearhead their target audiences’ intents, both have affordable pricing packages that new and small businesses can find attractive and practical enough to sign up for. ActiveCampaign’s basic plan will start you out at $9/month while Ontraport welcomes you to their fold for $29/month. Find more pricing information below in the pricing section of this Ontraport vs ActiveCampaign review.

Differences in Business Essential Features and Benefits

Having said that, Ontraport takes its targeting up to a whole staircase by appealing to businesses in e-commerce, affiliate marketing and those with huge contact databases in their CRM.

E-commerce Features

Ontraport integrates e-commerce into its tagging system. What that does is it empowers you to have an e-commerce management area where you can create product listings, integrate them into your listings, as well as track sales. This could be a deal maker or deal breaker for you—or not if e-commerce and shopping carts are not as integral to your business.

With the Ontraport e-commerce features (which are supported by the premium pricing plan), you can easily track crucial e-commerce metrics and utilize resourceful tools such as:

  • Order processing
  • Payment processing (built-in)
  • Credit-card decline follow-ups
  • One-click upsells
  • Follow up on abandoned carts
  • Power free trials, subscriptions and coupon codes, as well as
  • Help compute your taxes based on the payment processing tool built into Ontraport

ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, does not support e-commerce features like these. But they do offer follow-ups on abandoned carts and shopping cart integration. However, you will need to integrate with a third-party app such as Zapier to seamlessly add-on the likes of Woocommerce, Stripe, BigCommerce, Shopify, and payments processing apps such as PayPal.

In fact, Ontraport even blows Infusionsoft out of the water here. For example, while Infusionsoft will allow you to view payment details like who has or has not paid, it does not offer payment processing in-built.

Ontraport has the feature built-in (although the actual funds’ transfers are handled differently). Nonetheless, you can still integrate a third-party payment processing app of your choice such as PayPal.

Check out Ontraport — risk-free for 90 days here!

All-in-One Marketing Automation Software

The similarities between Ontraport and Infusionsoft run much deeper than with ActiveCampaign, too. You will find Ontraport hosts a ton of advanced sales CRM, email and marketing automation features that make it function as an all-in-one marketing automation service—pretty similar to the “completeness” of Infusionsoft but without as much bloatware and user experience woes.

Ontraport goes further to provide membership site tools and postcard marketing that are excellent for businesses with a membership-style platform and who want to boost engagement and monetization of their growing audience/membership. In this regard Ontraport offers more than the WordPress Plugin that ActiveCampaign offers and adds on multiple membership levels support, member management and page-by-page content encryption—all of these are automated to save you time and boost your customers’ user experiences.

Another thing…

Ontraport also includes a Predictive Intelligence feature to their offer. What that does is allow you to virtually tinker with different campaign inputs to get a forecast of the kind of results you could expect if you implemented your campaign with the new changes.

It is a handy tool that can help you get the big picture. But you might not find it super helpful since business does operate differently in “reality”. It is still a handy feature to have, though.

Tagging

Again, like Infusionsoft, Ontraport allows users to group tagged contacts in an orderly, organized manner, which ActiveCampaign does not. With ActiveCampaign you have to manually search a contact by name using the inbuilt search tool in their CRM’s top right corner.

Yet if you have hundreds of contacts you will find Ontraport’s organized tags much easier to work with and save time.

Quick Comparision ActiveCampaign vs Ontraport:

ActiveCampaign Ontraport
Marketing automation Publish Ontrapages
Smart auto responders Publish Ontraforms
Built-in integrations with over 200 external services Publish Ontraport Marketplace
Drag and drop email designer Webforms
Track your contacts onsite and in  your apps WordPress Integration
Campaign, contact, as well as list reporting Membership sites
Track your contacts onsite and in your apps Facebook Integration
Campaign, contact, as well as list reportings Split testing
made, where your contacts live or travel Marketing automation,
Add live ecommerce data and even videos to your emails Email marketing
SMS marketing 2-way SMS messaging
Free phone, live chat, as well as email support Postcard marketing
Send newsletters Partner programs
CRM and sales automation Marketing tracking and analytics
Help with finding contacts based on age, gender, and location PURLs
Advanced segmentation and targeting Order forms
Automated series Trials, subscriptions, coupons and payment plans
Dynamic (as well as conditional) email content One-click upsells
Social media monitoring, as well as reaction automations, Lead management and scoring
Free email templates Task management
Build custom forms for you landing pages Abandoned cart follow-up
Free one-on-one training Powerful CRM
  Business Automation
  Custom Objects
  Metrics Dashboard
  Ontraport Mobile
  Secure open API
  Ontraport projects
  Award-winning customer service

Credit: Finances Online

Affiliate Management Tool

To complete the highlighting Ontraport e-commerce features, Ontraport works with partners to provide a seamless affiliate management tool for its referral program support feature.

You can get automated partner tracking, payments, referral-tracking links, and partner management from Ontraport’s Partner Center. You can even get promo tools for promotions and receive earnings reports to see how you and your partnerships are bearing fruits.

This is a feature that ActiveCampaign is conspicuously missing unless you integrated it with AffiliateWP.

What else ActiveCampaign is missing is an in-built landing page creator, which Ontraport does come with and more. The latter avails a landing page template marketplace where you can find the tools to personalize your landing pages so you can peak your leads’ interest to encourage increased conversion.

So if you sell online and have (or plan to have) an affiliate program running, Ontraport might have what you need to help you engage leads, tag to segment them based on their interactions with your site, follow them up, and engage them further to inspire them to convert to buyers than you would with ActiveCampaign.

Set Up and Ease of Use

While both Ontraport and ActiveCampaign are easy to set and run with little training, ActiveCampaign is decidedly the easier platform to get up and running on. This could very well be because Ontraport packs more features that might add up to extra learning curve time.

However, Ontraport is way dimmer compared to the complexity that Infusionsoft presents to many of its new users. With both, you get a visual, drag-and-drop sequence builder to help automate your email marketing process. However, if you are keen on striking email images and templates, Constant Contact packs more impressive email templates to help create more eye-catching emails.

Yet, while Ontraport packs a stack of resourceful features for all businesses, not being able to view these stats right from one page can wreck a little havoc as you try to figure out where to get that information.

For example:

With Ontraport, you can tell at what stage of your funnel your leads are converting to customers, where they are unsubscribing, whether they are receiving and opening your emails, as well as how much money you are making and how much you owe in taxes. Finding where all these information is stacked could be the slap in the butt, though.

That might mean you will need to hire an Ontraport specialist to consult with and from whom to learn how Ontraport works. Does that sound like a “hidden charge” to you?

Still on “hidden charges”, to gain a similar level of built-in Ontraport functionality with ActiveCampaign, you would need to turn to third-party applications integration—at a surcharge.

ActiveCampaign vs Ontraport: Support

Both marketing automation providers and Infusionsoft alternatives offer excellent customer support via multiple channels. If you are stuck, you can reach either via a certified online community consulting, phone, live chat and email on top of arranged online training—although ActiveCampaign offers phone support to Enterprise Plan members only.

Ontraport, like Infusionsoft, offers to train users in real-time coaching sessions on top of the helpful articles, “normal” training, phone, email and live chat options—for a fee. They also have a “Deliverability Consulting” offer where they claim to offer handy advice on how to optimize your email marketing deliverability to increase your email marketing ROI.

Tracking & Reporting

One of the sleekest tracking features of ActiveCampaign is that it starts to track customer behavior on your site immediately you set up your account—not after a customer completes an action such as subscribing to your newsletter to buying your product (which is what you’d find while using Infusionsoft).

In fact, after you are all set up, ActiveCampaign goes back in time to track and log your leads’ interactions with your site, helping you understand how they got to where they are on your funnel and what exactly they might be looking for so you can help them solve their problem.

With both Ontraport and ActiveCampaign you can implement site tracking on the go and mobile traffic, but ActiveCampaign goes further to track where your leads have been so you can learn their interests and craft your marketing material to appeal to those interests.

Overall though, both sales CRM, email marketing, and marketing automation platforms display detailed reports in visually-attractive pages, making it easy for users to interpret the dash data and inform marketing decisions.

Ontraport Pricing vs ActiveCampaign Pricing

As mentioned before, both ActiveCampaign and Ontraport keep their pricing models targeted at their target markets. Neither marketing automation vendor demands any setup fees to onboard customers—unlike the sub $1,000 setup fee Infusionsoft users have to part with.

However, while Ontraport pricing starts at $79 per month, ActiveCampaign offers the more affordable subscription at $9 per month. With ActiveCampaign, however, the fees add up as you grow your contact list—this is precisely why it has a 5-tier pricing model.

Ontraport pricing

ActiveCampaign pricing

 

If you prefer to test out the different marketing automation services before signing on the dotted line to warrant a long-term commitment, ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day trial period. Ontraport, on the flip side, makes ActiveCampaign’s trial period seem like a joke because they offer a 90-day money back guarantee—a 60-day jump over Constant Contact, too.

This is a good thing for businesses still deciding whether Ontraport is the best marketing automation software, sales CRM, and email marketing provider for their marketing needs in 2018.

But as you gain more contacts, you’ll notice that the pricing almost levels out at above 100,000 contacts, by which time your business would have graduated to an enterprise—where Ontraport’s bevy of features can actually shine brightest.

ActiveCampaign vs Ontraport: Who wins?

While both Ontraport and ActiveCampaign offer advanced sales CRM, marketing automation, and email marketing tools, they are not made equal.

The more advanced (and numerous) features of Ontraport make it an ideal marketing automation platform for medium-to-enterprise business users. ActiveCampaign, in contrast, primarily offers an ideal marketing software solution for solopreneurs and small-to-medium businesses.

In fact, many small business users would find it easier to start out with ActiveCampaign due to its user-friendliness, affordability, resourceful customer support and enough marketing automation features and benefits to last for a stretch of time.

But established businesses in need of an advanced marketing automation provider, with far fewer complexities than Infusionsoft, would find Ontraport to be a top-notch solution they can grow and scale with for the long haul and at an affordable monthly charge.

Therefore to choose the best marketing automation software in the Ontraport vs ActiveCampaign debate, you would do best to consider both the short-term and long-term needs of your business. If you have the tech-savviness to handle Ontraport, you can start out with it when you foresee your business growing past 10,000 contacts. Or you can opt to start out with ActiveCampaign’s enchanting UI and ease of use until you can outgrow it.

My final recommendation: 

If I had to choose, right this moment on which of these is best, I would have to say Ontraport.

Here’s why:

Advanced marketing features — Ontraport.

Affordability and Value — Activecampaign is cheaper to start, but Ontraport comes out on top as you scale and grow.

Ability to scale beyond 10K users — Ontraport.

Integrations and ease of use — Activecampaign is more user-friendly.

Overall winner — Ontraport

Check out Ontraport — risk-free for 90 days here!

What You Need to Know About True Corporate Responsibility And The Role of Trust

This article was written by Sam Ford for Change Creator Magazine.

Creating Sustainable Change

The business world is driven by frameworks. By concepts. By new ideas with pithy titles, whose core concepts can be stated in an executive summary. By metaphors.

The people who author them may make their living writing books, giving talks, and doing the consulting that surrounds it — to attempt to change the way people see their professional lives and see their concept become part of business parlance.

The greater business consulting industry that surrounds this infrastructure grabs onto some of these concepts and attempts to translate them into wider business practice. With case studies. With benchmarking. With trademarked names and proprietary methodologies. And “change agents” within organizations sign up to do the yeoman’s work of trying to adapt old systems to begin utilizing new ways of thinking.

These interventions can be important work. These frameworks may, in many cases, introduce useful ideas. But the business world loves a good metaphor so much that we’ll very quickly stretch it far past its usefulness, to the point it does more harm than good. And we love a good business phrase so much that we’ll quickly turn it into a buzzword.

Soon, it’s been taken far past the boundaries of its original meaning, and well-intentioned consultants and “change agents” risk finding themselves looking for nails for their hammers, or suddenly imagining everything is a hammer, or
imagining that everyone needs a hammer. (I think my metaphor just outlived its own usefulness.)

As a business consultant myself, I know how this goes. I risk contributing to the pollution. I might even profit from it in the short term. But how can concepts and metaphors have power without becoming over-utilized buzzwords? We must insist on, first, understanding the depth with which a concept adds to our meaning, and the degree of elasticity it has. And we must realize that every ecosystem is unique and that frameworks imported in won’t naturally fit wholesale.

Striking these balances is crucial for those striving to be meaningful “Change Creators.”

And one of the people who has most shaped my thinking on this — on seeing the power for change within capitalism to make it more responsible, to make it regenerative — is Carol Sanford.

Carol Sanford: “The Responsible Entrepreneur” | Talks at Google

True Corporate Responsibility

I first met Carol in 2010, in the most unexpected of places: the comments section of Fast Company. I’d been writing about why people in marketing, and in business leadership, were often conducting practices that were against their own long-term business interests, for the sake of short-term gain.

Soon, I learned about Carol’s history of doing deep, systemic consulting with businesses, ranging from Fortune 500 leadership to early-stage entrepreneurs. Her frameworks challenged accepted corporate lore and buzzwords. They demanded that people ponder how language and metaphors matter deeply and that the systems we use for understanding things shape (and distort) what’s possible. But they also dared say that it’s in the best interest of the capitalist to act and behave responsibly, not just responsibly and socially conscious as a fad or as a byproduct.

She didn’t just come armed with theories. She was prepared to demonstrate how it had worked when it was really given a try. When it wasn’t a surface-level retrofit to the system that already exists. When it wasn’t just adopted wholesale from the outside. And when it was holistic, and past this quarter, in its way of
thinking.

If you want to get a glimpse at how Carol thinks, listen to her conversation with Adam Force here at Change Creator from late last year.

In The Responsible Business, Carol’s 2011 book (for which — full disclosure — I wrote a blurb for the back cover), she lays out a premise she calls the pentad: that truly responsible businesses are responsible to their customers, their co-creators, the earth, the communities they’re part of, and their shareholders…but, crucially, in that order.

It’s been a way of thinking that has guided my work ever since, in part because it provides a framing for something that seems like we should have known all along. Perhaps it’s, as Robert Penn Warren once said of Dixon Wecter’s

The Hero in America, “This, however, is what we always say about even—about especially—the most original and important books after they have appeared. Once written, they always seem so obvious and inevitable.”

Since that time, Carol has built on that thinking in her argument for regenerative organizations. This approach is focused on how living systems work, how they regenerate themselves in an evolutionary way that keeps them viable — and how that sort of logic can help shape organizational design and growth.

As Carol says in her interview with Adam, thinking in a socially connected and regenerative way is partially about finding our way back to the core of what comes naturally to our species, and divesting ourselves from toxic practices that have gotten in our way.

It’s also about helping organizations engage in long-term thinking. Carol’s work has focused on sustainability — not only in the environmental sense, but in the organizational sense. How do you keep companies fixed on what makes the most long-term sense, on what’s in the best interests of the organization beyond this quarter or fiscal year?

This takes us back to the pentad, and the argument that working toward long-term goals is ultimately in the best interests of shareholders, or at least shareholders that truly are invested in your company. Carol puts strong emphasis that this is about a core logic that must be adopted uniquely for every organization, not produced at mass scale. This is about enacting true change.

Negative ROI

With that in mind, and inspired heavily by Carol’s work, here’s the change that I’m spending my time advocating for these days. When organizations think about the strategies for communication and for engagement with the various
stakeholders about whom they care, how do they consider negative ROI?

When it is used, the phrase “negative ROI” typically refers literally to the fact that a project lost money. But I’m adapting the phrase to emphasize another, even more fundamental problem with how organizations typically think about their return on investment.

How do organizations account for whether/how their investment might have had negative consequences that are hard to see, and how do those negative effects (to reputation and the relationship to key stakeholders) account
in the final equation of whether an initiative was successful?

If your measures of success don’t account for the potential negative effects of your actions, then you may count as a success an initiative which has significantly damaged your organization. If you don’t count negative ROI, then any thinking about long-term reputation might seem like a cost center in the equation you use to track the success of a particular initiative.

Consider this example, for instance, from the publishing industry. For commercial publishers, ROI typically will ultimately translate back to advertising dollars earned. An investment in stories, and the marketing of those stories, drive audience acquisition. Those audiences are sorted, counted, and sold to advertisers. The ROI will look at how much a story, or set of stories, and their promotion cost, relative to how much revenue they brought in.

Let’s say a particular story drove a large number of clicks/visits and thus brought in a significant amount of advertising revenue, relative to what the piece cost. But, what if that successful story drew much of its audience because of a clickbait headline? What if the predominant image promoting the article was built around a cultural stereotype heavily offensive to some audience members? What if the article actually had little to do with how it was positioned on social media?

In a “classic” calculation of ROI, that wouldn’t matter. With “negative ROI” calculated, too, however, organizations would have to ponder the potential damage from the number of people who were annoyed by the clickbait headline, the number of shares of the article that were from people who were outraged by the offensive stereotype, or the number of people who vowed never too be fooled again when they realized the article they were led to had little to do with the headline they clicked in their Facebook feed.

Here’s another example, built on some research I did a few years back with Peppercomm and The Economist Group. In our survey of business executives’ opinions about content they received from companies, 71 percent said they didn’t like content they received from B2B brands because it “seemed more like a sales pitch than valuable information.” Meanwhile, 70 percent of B2B marketers we surveyed said that they measured the success of their content marketing by tracking it back to “calls from customers and prospects.” In a classic calculation of ROI, the cost of the content is weighed against the new business which could be directly tied back to it. In that case, it’s no wonder that a company might include a strong sales pitch in their content, if direct sales is how ROI would be calculated.

Conversely, a calculation that also includes “negative ROI” would have to account for, or at least acknowledge, whether some audiences were turned off by the content. The accretion and erosion of trust.

In some cases, of course, businesses are not so worried about negative ROI. A partisan news site might be totally fine with turning off audiences outside the circle of people they’re trying to reach. That Nigerian prince is okay if 99.5 percent of their audience knows they are a scam artist, as long as they find enough people to dupe in their email blast; he’s not worried about his long-term reputation.

Negative ROI is also difficult for many organizations to think about because the effects cannot be easily quantified. It’s simple to calculate money spent. It’s simple to calculate money made. If you can draw a direct line between
the two, or even imagine a direct line between the two, then the math can be done quickly. But, just because the math is easy, it doesn’t mean your calculation is accurate.

However, the biggest challenge for calculating for negative ROI is that the effects are seldom immediate. Rather, we have to think about reputation, and trust, in terms of a gradual accretion or erosion.

Brand trust, and reputation is earned slowly. Customers don’t typically develop immediate devotion. The consistency of your product or service, the resonance your marketing and communications might have over time, and the quality of your customer’s interactions with you all ultimately shape the trust you have in a brand. Each new experience with your brand is a chance to accrue a bit more trust and loyalty.

A startup is well aware of how much work it takes to build a following. As they build up those layers of trust, though, it’s easy to quit focusing on the accretion process so closely. Brands take loyal customers for granted. They frequently focus more on the continued acquisition and less on maintenance. And, thus, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that every interaction is also a potential occasion for eroding some of that trust accrued.

One of the main reasons erosion is hard to notice is because its effects are seldom seen over the course of one business quarter. Sure, there’s occasionally a major crisis that may cause sales or stock price to plummet. But
the erosion process is typically much more gradual than that. It would take a longitudinal focus to see these trends. And companies seldom have the patience for that.

Actionable Steps and Takeaways: Four Tips for Tracking Sustainable Change and True Responsibility

If you are fortunate enough to build or work for an organization that has accrued enough trust and positive reputation to be successful, consider yourself a steward of that reputation. And, if you’re building a new organization from the ground up, how do you build it in a way that adheres to the concept of building a regenerative business, and so that you are making your decisions in a way that prioritizes your various stakeholders appropriately?

1. Think as Teams, Not Individuals. Humans Are Social Creatures.

Organizations are comprised of collaborative relationships, both within the company and around the company. As you build and maintain your logic and metrics, and your plans for growth, do so in a way that looks at the collaborative potential for your team, rather than individual goals.

2. Keep Your Priorities Straight.

Carol Sanford’s pentad is immensely useful in its stability. Are you prioritizing all your stakeholders? And are you
keeping those priorities in the right order? An environmentally friendly product that doesn’t solve customers’ problems won’t be viable in the market. A decision for the immediate benefit of your shareholders that has tremendous negative impact on your employees and co-creators will adversely affect shareholders who have a long-term commitment to the company.

3. Find Ways to Keep Track of Negative ROI.

Even if it can’t be qualified, find ways to include a check on negative ROI for your company investments.
Despite the allure of its simplicity, the equation is never as simple as money spent versus money earned.

4. Keep Stock of Your Accrual of Trust.

Build methods to check in on your reputational health on a regular basis. Taking your reputation for granted
will bring you long-term pain, even if you don’t feel it immediately.

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How This Hybrid Business Model is Tackling Food Security

Some people start businesses to get rich. Others see it as a way to fulfill their passions. But for an increasing number of entrepreneurs, business is a vessel to impact lives and do something meaningful.

Jacquie Berglund is a seasoned social entrepreneur. Her B-Corp beer company, FINNEGANS, was the first to donate 100 percent of its profits to charity and it is now linked to all manner of good causes. Like so many like-minded entrepreneurs, Jacquie is redefining business and what it means to be successful.

What It Takes to Be a Social Entrepreneur

Despite not growing up in an entrepreneurial-minded family, Jacquie Berglund had an instinctive feeling that she would become a business owner. Furthermore, she had a deep yearning to help improve the lives of those in need.

After observing her parents struggle through life as “working poor,” Jacquie became sensitive to the needs of people in similar situations. She was frustrated that despite the U.S. being one of the richest nations on the planet, a large portion of the population fell into the category of working poor.

Witnessing what her parents went through and knowing that so many other people experienced even worse hardships was one of the main factors behind Jacquie’s ambition to start a company. But, unlike so many entrepreneurs hailing from humble beginnings, Jacquie’s reasons for starting a business were far from self-serving.

If there is one trait that all social entrepreneurs have in common it is an innate desire to make the world a better place, or at least some aspect of it. For Jacquie, poverty was the number one concern.

Combining Passion with Profits and Success

Businesses represent aspirations of the owner. For some it is achieving maximum profits, for others, it is about realizing a lifelong passion. A few seek to combine the owner’s passion for a good cause with natural business practices of profit maximization and success.

A benefit corporation, which is a relatively new concept, allows entrepreneurs to legally and simply integrate their charitable goals with business operations. It means that they do not have to choose between a non-profit and a for-profit entity. In other words, a benefit corporation enables the best of both worlds.

There are several different ways to describe a benefit corporation, but the following, from CTBC, sums it up most succinctly:

“The benefit corporation is designed to accommodate a growing number of entrepreneurs and investors seeking a form of business that allows them to pursue an expanded mission that embraces societal good along with profits.”

That category of business was the perfect fit for Jacquie Berglund’s beer company – the company that would become her primary tool for to impact lives.

Business and Charities, the Perfect Match

FINNEGANS, Jacquie’s now thriving beer company, started out as Kieran’s Irish Ale – a charity beer born when both Jacquie and a previous employer, Kieran Folliard, sat down to determine a “giving strategy.”

With the idea of promoting a beer for charity fresh in her mind, Jacquie heard a presentation from Billy Shore of Share Our Strength. Amongst other things, Billy spoke about his for-profit consulting firm that was used to support his non-profit venture. That revelation sparked an idea within Jacquie. She would start making beer and direct the profits towards the good causes with which she was increasingly passionate.

Alcohol and good causes are seldom in association with each other. But FINNEGANS is a good example of how any business idea can be used to combine with charitable causes. Since 2007, FINNEGANS has experienced 30 percent annual growth. The brand is now present in some 1,500 restaurants and bars throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, North Dakota and Iowa.

That growth has had a direct impact on the charities, local communities, and causes that FINNEGANS serves. Jacquie’s boldness and vision that led to the marrying of the two ideas – beer and charity – has had a positive effect on the lives of thousands of people.

How FINNEGANS Does It (The Hybrid Model)

FINNEGANS Inc. is the for-profit arm of Jacquie Berglund’s brand. Through that company, profits are filtered to its non-profit counterpart, FINNEGANS Community Fund. The fund is used to acquire fresh produce for people in need, provide accommodation and support for the homeless and at-risk youth, and support a host of other causes.

Jacquie was the sole employee of the company from 2000, when the company started, until 2009 when she could finally take on four additional members of staff. If not for her determination, persistence and a small team of devoted volunteers FINNEGANS might not have gotten to where it is today.

Beer is not the only thing fueling FINNEGANS’ mission. Jacquie spearheads several other fundraising initiatives, including the recently launched Reverse Food Truck where food trucks are sent to cities.

Instead of delivering food, however, these trucks collect non-perishable foods for the food shelves as well as cash and credit card donations. This initiative is another world’s first for FINNEGANS,

Jacquie refers to the FINNEGANS quest as “turning beer into food.” But budding social entrepreneurs can use the concept to funnel any business idea into serving a good cause – turning cupcakes into clothing is a social business idea just waiting to be exploited.

Related: 11 Impact Business Models New Entrepreneurs Need to Know About! [Update 2018]

The Next Chapter

The story of FINNEGANS and Jacquie’s mission to alleviate poverty does not end here. There are bigger, bolder plans on the horizon. Currently, the final touches are being applied to what Jacquie is calling a “Brewtel.”

The Brewtel is a large brewery with hotel and conference rooms – “a kind of Willy Wonka factory for beer”, as Jacquie puts it. It will be a hub for the FINNEGANS brand and a place from which to spread the brand’s story to a wider audience.

There are also plans to start FINNovation Labs; an incubator for social entrepreneurs that will provide training, funding and launch support.

What are You Passionate About?

The FINNEGANS journey has been long and arduous. But Jacquie possesses amazing courage and stick-to-itiveness. She says that every social entrepreneur will face unique sets of challenges that will test their character.

One of the biggest challenges of operating in this space is getting access to financing. But, Jacquie hopes to see a shift in focus by the financial institutes shortly. That seems likely to occur as more social business’ become successful. Until then, social entrepreneurs will have to become “professional bootstrappers” like Jacquie.

She started FINNEGANS with only a dream and $500 in her bank account. With such constraints, you need to be extremely passionate and persistent to achieve your goals. Only a high level of passion and strong character will enable you to stick to the task when things inevitably become challenging.

Jacquie says that the first step towards setting up a social business is to figure out how you will fund the venture long term. Sustainability is especially important for social businesses. The groups and causes that you will serve often grow heavily dependent on the services, which if not sustained, could cause devastation.

It is also vitally important that you surround yourself with people that know you and can support you in many different ways. Jacquie herself had a “fantastic support network” from the outset. Without which, she says, it would have been almost impossible to have had success with FINNEGANS.

Social entrepreneurs, like Jacquie Berglund, are tackling the world’s biggest issues by building successful businesses. It is a relatively new and novel concept, but one deserving of attention. If you have a strong passion for a cause as well as a knack for business, you might just make a great social entrepreneur and end up changing the world.

You might also be interested in hearing directly from Jacquie Berglund in our exclusive interview – Interview with Jacquie Berglund: How This Hybrid Business Model is Turning Beer Into Food

ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact: Which is Best? [2021 Comparison]

Find out the differences between ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact to help you decide which one is the best email marketing platform for you.

ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact: The Comparison

While Constant Contact vs ActiveCampaign are great email automation solutions, they are not made equal. To decide which is the best email marketing services provider between ActiveCampaign and Constant Contact, it is important to understand where one excels and the other doesn’t.

And if the difference works best for your specific business, then you would have your ideal marketing and email automation software.

In this post, we focus on the differences that make either choice a great option for your business no matter its size and industry.

  1. ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact: Target Audience

Both online marketing solutions market their services to businesses of all sizes, from freelancers to enterprise clients.

But when it comes to actual use, it is clear ActiveCampaign is a more sophisticated marketing automation tool compared to the principal email marketing service offered by Constant Contact—which it refers to as “email automation”, meaning a sweet spot between all-out marketing automation and superb email marketing service provision.

In fact, ActiveCampaign would be a better-used tool in the hands of a business that has both the time and starting knowledge of operating a marketing automation software suite. On the other hand, Constant Contact is quite easy to get started on mainly because there are fewer tools to learn. CC is clearly an email marketing tool rather than an all-inclusive marketing automation tool such as Infusionsoft, HubSpot, and ActiveCampaign.

So if you plan on using a marketing software service for a scaling business, ActiveCampaign might be a better option while Constant Content could be better for freelancers and small businesses learning the loops of email marketing before engaging in all-out internet marketing campaigns that could use wide-ranging marketing automation solutions.

  1. Set Up and Ease of Use

Constant Content was built for ease of use. Its uncluttered dashboard screams that out loud, which augers well with its target audience.

In fact, as we’ve discussed before, CC is a good option to start with for a business that needs to learn the ins and outs of email marketing before getting to a full-on marketing automation tool that might be a tad too complex to start out with.

Constant Content offers a ton of email templates to help you set up a campaign in no time—much more generous than ActiveCampaign. You likely won’t be needing any special training to use them, either. You even get an image editor with a chunk of stock images and image editing options inbuilt, so you can inject visual delight to your emails and encourage engagement and conversion with contacts.

To create your subscriber list, you can import your contacts from other CRM tools for small businesses including Gmail and Outlook contacts hassle-free. Akin to ActiveCampaign, you can upload them as a CSV/XLS/TXT/XLSX file, copy/paste and/or manually enter contacts in your database.

Yet, ActiveCampaign takes it further by automatically searching for and adding to your list the social media contacts of the people that interact with your website, especially when they sign up for your newsletter, email, subscriber list or make a purchase outright.

This can be resourceful when you need to understand more about your target audience so you can fine-tune your marketing messaging to address their needs and book more business.

  1. Differences in Business Essential Features and Benefits

One of the best things about both is that they integrate with over 700 third-party apps. If you find a function missing with your subscription, you can easily supplement it by using a third-party app such as Zapier. You can also embed essential applications such as Woocommerce and Shopify form ecommerce users.

However, if you host events and need an email marketing service that will help you register event attendees, Constant Contact has a splendid tool for this. It allows you to easily create events, spread the word around and then capture interested people’s details. It will even create a separate list for an event, different from your mail email list.

That is important because you can target that group with only the content that is relevant to your event and nothing else. That way you can ideally increase attendance for the event by encouraging curiosity, likes, shares, and registration.

In the Plus package, you also get a survey and donations-enabling tools integrated with your emails, in case you need them. It recently added Action Blocks to power polls, where recipients no longer need to leave their email inbox to fill out a poll on a web page. They can do that within with one click.

ActiveCampaign does not offer a similar tool. What it does offer, though, is the ability to segment your contacts and tag them. But with Constant Contact segmenting and tagging gets better. As opposed to ActiveCampaign, with CC (and in a similar fashion to Infusionsoft) you can organize tags so you have it easy when segmenting hundreds of contacts.

However, since CC is not a comprehensive marketing automation tool, it has limited autoresponder capabilities. For example, you would not be able to customize your emails based on what action/trigger a lead engages in such as clicking a link in the body of an email—which you can with ActiveCampaign.

Still, Constant Content has a remarkably developed email builder than ActiveCampaign, hence if creating beautiful emails in a breeze is your main concern, CC would probably make the best option.

Constant Contact Features ActiveCampaign Features
Contact management Marketing automation
List-building tools Smart autoresponders
Tracking and reporting Built-in integrations with over 200 external services
Social media sharing tools Drag and drop email designer
Image library Track your contacts onsite and in your apps
Many apps and integrations Campaign, contact, as well as list reporting
Automation Track where your contacts live or travel
Facebook fan promotion Add live ecommerce data even videos to your emails
Events registration and management SMS marketing tools
Opens and click tracking Free phone, live chat, email support
Deliverability CRM and sales automation
Mobile email marketing Advanced segmentation and targeting
Email templates Dynamic email content
  Social media monitoring
  Free email templates

Credit: Finances Online

  1. ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact: Support Options

To match its more complex marketing automation tools, ActiveCampaign offers optional training to businesses or freelancers that want to get a head-start with their sales and marketing automation software. Additionally, you can reach them via live chat and email support channels.

However, you are going to need to subscribe to the Enterprise package to get phone support, but you can get satisfactory live support when subscribed to their Lite package.

Constant Contact also offers phone support in addition to email, live chat and ticketing system support in case you need hand-holding to learn how to use powerful email marketing software for your small business. They also have a decent collection of DIY, how to articles on their site for your information—including information buttons next to certain menu options to explain what they are.

What’s special though, is they will sometimes call you back after a chat to ensure you got what you wanted and are doing alright.

  1. Reporting

Under the Reports tab, you’ll find one of the best features of Constant Contact. You get to view how your contacts are engaging with your emails. You’ll see email opens, clicks, subscriptions and unsubscribe rates on one, easy to understand page. Clicking on “Refresh” will even have you looking at real-time statistics. You can also get performance reports from social media channels you have linked as well.

Moreover, you get a bar graph that shows you your email open rates and a chart that helps you compare performance across several marketing drives. Still, you can use up to five emails to compare performance side by side.

Another jewel in the email marketing service’s crown is its uncanny capability to surpass through Gmail’s stringent spam filter. It is one of the few services that manage to not have your emails junked in the spam folder, where supposed recipients are likely to ignore your messages—and make your marketing efforts suck.

ActiveCampaign takes reporting to another level, though.

In addition to charts and bar graphs, you also get advanced lead scoring. With this feature, the reports you get are automatically used in Event Tracking to create personalized follow-up campaigns to further nurture and qualify a lead based on the actions they take on your online platforms or mobile app.

  1. Tracking

You can set up your Constant Content account to follow up on new contacts after certain they take certain actions or when it’s their birthday. A unique feature of CC is when your contacts unsubscribe from your newsletter, you still get to keep them in your contacts but no more emails will be sent to them. That way, you can decide whether to get back to them after some time or manually delete them from your list if not.

However, tracking is clearly an ActiveCampaign zone. Powerful tracking features you’ll get here include Event Tracking, Site Tracking, Advanced Lead Scoring, and advanced email split-testing. Site tracking empowers you to know where your contacts spend the most time, when, and where they travel.

You can then use that data to create even more personalized marketing messages based on what your contacts’ interests are. Still, ActiveCampaign allows you to schedule email blasts to reach your contacts at the same time of day or night all across the globe. So if you want all emails to reach them at 1 PM to encourage open rates during lunch break, you can have the messages delivered at your contact’s 1 PM despite time zone differences—even if the software has to delay some deliveries to hit the contact’s inbox during their 1 PM.

With lead scoring, you can set unlimited criteria that different leads need to meet before your sales team can reach out to them with an offer. All these make up the powerful sales CRM and marketing automation tools ActiveCampaign offers.

  1. ActiveCampaign Pricing Vs Constant Contact Pricing

While you only get 14 days to have a run with ActiveCampaign, you’ll have a whole 60 days to test-drive Constant Content.

Not only that, you get a 30-day, money back guarantee offer from the latter, which is unheard of in the industry—and is great news for all size businesses looking to find the best email automation service provider in the market now by utilizing a full-version package for a while.

Nevertheless, both email automation solutions provide scalable pricing models, so you can start out and grow with your choice—instead of later wanting to migrate your plumped up CRM to a suitable email marketing platform for your growing business.

Here are shots of pricing packages offered by both:

 

ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact: Conclusion

Both email automation services are ideal for freelancers, small business, and even medium enterprise clients. Both do not have a setup fee like Infusionsoft. Yet are also affordable to start out and scale with.

But while ActiveCampaign offers a powerful combination of sales CRM, email marketing, and marketing automation technology, Constant Content has focused on excelling in email marketing services—where it does a great job, too. On one hand, new businesses might find the “all-in-one” aspect of ActiveCampaign a bit overwhelming. On the other hand, businesses looking to scale their digital marketing drives, are likely to outgrow what Constant Contact currently offers.

Depending on your specific business marketing goals, you can then decide which, between advanced marketing automation and powerful email marketing services, will work in your best interests.

The Best Alternatives to Instapage You Have to Know About

Instapage is an awesome tool that helps in the creation of highly optimized and customizable websites. Useful for businesses and individuals, this is one online resource that many have definitely benefited from.

Instapage is a powerful landing page software that provides post-click optimization for all digital and advertising campaigns. With enterprise capabilities, landing page templates, real-time team collaboration, Instablocks™, integration with your marketing automation app, and an easy-to-use builder, Instapage is a great choice for many but what if you are looking for an alternative (maybe one that you’ll love even more).

While Instapage is an excellent choice for many, there are alternatives to Instapage that you might love even more. Here, we’ve rounded out the best Instapage alternatives to get you started:

Hubspot

HubSpot

Hubspot provides a landing page builder as well as a wide array of other services. Thanks to features such as drag-and-drop and for development, creating a webpage on this platform will be as easy as possible. You get a dashboard that provides features such as personalization token and smart content, all of which make it easy for users to show various types of content based on their specific requirements.

Pricing

Hubspot makes the following plans available to customers:

  • The Free Plan, which goes for absolutely no fee
  • The Starter Plan, which goes for $50 a month
  • The Basic Plan, which goes for $200 a month
  • The Professional Plan, which goes for $800 a month
  • The Enterprise Plan, which goes for $2,400 a month

Try Hubspot for a free trial for 30 days! Click here to start! 

Wix

Without a doubt, Wix us one of the most popular cloud-based website development platforms. It serves over a million users all over the world and has been receiving a wide array of accolades in the past few years.

With Wix, it is possible for individuals and small businesses to easily build aesthetically appealing and professional websites that will also not in any way impugn their creativity with coding expertise. Wix is essentially a free service, but it is also possible for users to choose to enhance their experience and output by making a subscription to the premium plans offered by Wix, of which one of them is completely devoted to serving online retailers and e-commerce providers.

The rationale behind the creation of Wix is a pretty simple one; they believe that with the right building software, a developer should be able to create just about anything. With their Editor, Code, or Artificial Design Intelligence Model, it is possible (easy, in fact) for you to build a nice hub for your content, and you can also build just about anything; from a simple profile web page to robust and highly multifaceted retail store.

It is important to know that you don’t especially need to have any technical or coding skills to work on this platform. You just need a few simple modifications and edits, and the drag-and-drop functionality will be able to help you design your ideal website.

The feature that makes Wix really distinct from other popular site builders is the fat that is has a very high level of personalization. All its templates are open, and all you need to do is provide simple branding, customization, and modifications. With all that, you will be able to build your app just as you’ve always imagined it to be. These websites are also flexible and scalable, and they can work in situations of heavy traffic and highly complex.

In addition to all that, Wix is also a fully-feared and mobile-optimized builder that provides all its services for free. In order to grasp the basic operations, all you need to do is create an account and if you’re looking to take advantage of its shopping cart and e-commerce functionalities, just switch to any of its premium plans.

Pricing

Wix makes a wide array of plans available to customers, all of which have varying amounts of features

  • There is the free plan
  • The Connect Domain Plan costs $4.50 a month
  • The Combo Plan costs $8.50 a month
  • The Unlimited Plan costs $12.50 a month
  • The eCommerce Plan costs $16.50 a month
  • The VIP Plan costs $24,50 a month

Pagewiz

Pagewiz was ideally designed or professional marketers, affiliates and business owners who will like to launch their websites from scratch. It helps you to build user-friendly webpages in a matter of minutes, and all pages are also accompanied by A//B testing capability in order to make for automation and conversion maximization.

Pricing

The plans for Pagewiz include:

  • The Basic Plan, which goes for $29 a month
  • The Standard Plan, which goes for $49 a month
  • The Plus Plan, which goes for $99 a month
  • The Pro Plan, which goes for $199 a month

1&1 MyWebsite

1&1 MyWebsite is a website building platform that was created to help serve the needs of freelancers and business that are looking to establish a presence on the online landscape, regardless of their size offer scale. It is an internet product that was developed by 1&1 Internet Ltd.; a long-time provider of web hosting services.

1&1 MyWebsite is an online solution that makes use of ready-made templates and drag-and-drop functionalities to provide users with the ability to make and design websites of their choices within a few clicks. N provides an intuitive and simple site creation experience that will also enhance creativity and ingenuity. All in all, 1&1 MyWebsite will give you the ability to create and launch a fully functional website in no time, complete with all the information and elements that you will need in order to match the website with your business or brand.

1&1 MyWebsite comes with all the features that you will require in order to build your website easily and quickly. A few of its most prominent features include a website editor, a wide array of ready-made templates, and multi-language support (for those who will like to build websites that will deserve purposes over more than one country).

In addition, it also makes marketing tools available, including but not limited to site analytics tools and SEO functionalities. All of these will help you to come up with unique and targeted content and they’ll help improve the ranking of your website. The online platform also includes Email and domain addresses for you as well as 24/7 support.

A few benefits of 1&1 MyWebsite include:

  • Speed and accuracy: Thanks to a wide array of templates, catalogues, and useful tools that have already been loaded on the platform, all you have to do is pick and design your website and in no tie, you’ll be ready to go.
  • Photo editor: An online photo editor gives you the ability to change the properties of photos that are on your site.
  • Multilingual capabilities: If you’ll like for people in far countries and continents to have access to your website as well, 1&1 MyWebsite provides multilingual support as well.
  • Optimized for mobile devices: As opposed to managing a website that can only be accessed with a computer, 1&1 MyWebsite provides websites that are responsive and work on mobile as well.

Pricing

The plans on 1&1 MyWebsite are pretty flexible, and you’ll definitely be able to get one that will work to fit into your business and budget requirements.

  • The Basic Plan costs $0.99 for the first month, then $9.99 per month from then on
  • The Personal Plan goes for $2.99 for the first 2 months, then $6.99 from then on
  • The Plus Plan goes for $9.99 a month for the first 3 months, then $19.99 from then on
  • The Bundled Plan offers the features of the Plus Plan as well as a fully functional ranking coach for search engine optimization and advertising. It goes for $19.99 for the first 12 months, then $29.99 from then on.

Unbounce

Unbounce was created with a simple purpose; helping to create landing pages that will enhance users marketing efforts. Page building experiences have been revolutionized lately, and Unbounce has been a major driving force behind that.

A few of Unbounce’s major features include:

  • The Unbounce Builder: A drag-and-drop builder that provides text replacement and convertables and is also mobile-accessible.
  • Unbounce Convertables: These convertables make it easy for you to target landing page visitors, set custom templates, and integrate with basically anything.
  • Templates: There are over 100 custom templates on Unbounce, and you can either chose one or start building one from scratch by yourself.
  • Conversion Tools: There are unlimited A/B testing tries, lead generation tools, conversion optimization tools, and many more on Unbounce.
  • Unbounce can also be easily integrated with google analytics and Email marketing tools like Hubspot, MailChimp, WordPress, Marketo, and much more.

Pricing

Unbounce provides three packages, and you can make payments on a monthly or annually basis.

  • The Essential Package allows you to create 75 landing pages and 8 convertables for $99 a month
  • The Premium Package charges $199 a month, and you can build 10 landing pages, 16 convertables, and you also get sub-accounts and better conversion rate tools.
  • The Enterprise Package starts at $499 a month and on it, you get all the features of both previous packages as well as a Success Manager and Launch Specialist that will help you to maximize your ROI. This package also provides the opportunity to build over 375 landing pages and at least 40 convertables.

Shopify

Shopify is an award-winning e-commerce retailer. It provides a wide array of features and tools that make it easy for individuals and businesses to build and operate online retail services as well as sell products. Shopify is packed with the right features, it provides tools that are specifically designed for servicing online retail, and its influence is represented by the fact that it is used by well over 120,000 stores all over the world.

The platform has been branded by experts and businesses as one of the best e-commerce solutions available online in this age. The Shopify Advanced version has especially gotten a lot of praise.

Shopify provides a myriad of benefits for people and businesses that will like to set up their online stores. Some of its benefits include:

  • A store that is easy to set up and is very beautiful and responsive. The platform has a long list of professional themes, and you can choose from any one of them in order to provide your store with a corporate look.
  • Shopify will also boost your store. Essentially, you won’t have to worry about any of the technical aspects of running and operating the store. Your servers are updated and secure with the latest software.
  • You also get customer support round the clock
  • Abandoned carts are automatically recovered
  • Easily and  quickly import catalogs (even the largest ones)
  • Shopify Advanced can provide you with been more nifty templates
  • You get a wide array of marketing features and reports that are easy to use
  • You run your payment gateway and control you’re the money coming in.

Features of Shopify

Shopify has many of the features that you’ll need to set up an online store.

  • Fully customizable online store, website — including blog
  • Unlimited bandwidth, product inventory, customer data
  • Sell on new sales channels like Pinterest and Amazon to increase your market potential
  • Accept credit cards instantly with Shopify Payments
  • Save time and moeny with discounted shipping rates
  • Great customer support — 24/7 access

Pricing

Just as it is with just about any other alternative to Instapage, Shopify has various pricing tiers. These are:

  • Shopify Lite, which goes for $9 a month
  • The Basic Shopify Plan, which goes for $29 a month
  • The Shopify Plan, which goes for $79 a month
  • The Advanced Shopify Plan, which goes for $299 a month

Try out Shopify free for 14 days — click here!

4 Tips to Achieve Your Goals Using The Resources You Already Have

If you’ve struggled for years to have sufficiency in the following aspects of life; time, enough money to start a business, maybe you complain about the government not doing enough, or lack of family support then you’ll need to understand one truth about life. You probably came here looking for tips to achieve your goals — we’ll get to that.

For now, I really want you to know this:

Nothing will ever be enough, nothing will ever be sufficient unless you do one thing right…

“Place Value On What You Already Have“

That’s the only way you can put to good use what you have.

If you think time will increase to 30 hours per day so that you can have enough time to work on something, or that your earnings will magically increase overnight so that you can fund an idea you have and launch in grand style.

Well, your dreams may never come true.

Maximize the results you desire by doing this one thing.

Learn to start using the little you have to maximize the results you desire.

As the world advances, our days get busier and we have less time or your finances may suffer but those things will never change in your favor simply because you simply wish it or pray for it.

You’ll have to keep pushing against the wind.

You’ll have to learn how to use the little you have to your advantage — Because if you think about it, every other person who is doing great and achieving so much doesn’t have extra hours added to their day, nor did many of them have sufficient funding. Their success was dependent on how they were able to use the resources they had at the time.

I used to think that if I earned more money then my time will be freed up and that I would be able to make time for other important things in my life such as family, health, and spiritual well-being.

I was wrong!

I worked hard and increased my income within a few years. I bought myself some cool gadgets, acquired luxuries and traveled to great places.

But it had a seriously negative impact on my health, relationships (both family and friends) and also drew me away from building my spiritual life.

And if you talk to individuals who are now minimalist, they’ll likely tell you the same thing – that happiness doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from accomplishing those small things that give us a chance to spend quality time with our loved ones and take good care of ourselves.

I have found that sometimes the more you want and accomplish, the more cluttered your life may gradually become. Before you realize how deep you’ve gone down a rabbit hole chasing more luxuries and “stuff”, you may find that you’ve broken a lot of relationships, damaged your health, and even your state of happiness.

This is not to discourage you to dream big or aim higher.

While you are aspiring for great things, it’s important to be mindful of how you go about it.

Nothing will ever be enough, but you can make the best of what you have in order to get the results you want.

In order to make that a reality for you, I’ll share a few practical tips that helped me utilize what I already had and propelled me towards my goals in no time and still maintain that life balance we all strive for.

1. Prioritize.

Nothing beats the fact that you take into consideration what matters most in your life and cut out what doesn’t.

Prioritizing what matters and what doesn’t in your life will help you determine the principal reason(s) why you are doing this and helps you stay aligned with it.

When you prioritize, it helps you set principles, this way you can stick to a game plan rather than sacrificing your happiness along the line.

2. Find your tribe.

We just can’t go it alone, try to mingle with people, find your tribe, get as much help as you can get so that you can ease the burden and cut down the amount of time you spend on what you are working on.

Before now, I’ll have a stretch of sleepless nights, because I thought I was the only one who could get it right. I saw myself as the only capable person, it had a serious effect on my health. I spent approximately 30 days in the hospital bed. (I almost died)

When I left the hospital and came back to check on how far I’d gone, I noticed I was still the same place I started off. Nothing was practically done. I learned my lesson, I had to get more hands. I realized there is great power in collective efforts.

3. Use what you already have. (Even if it’s not much.)

There’s always this feeling of displeasure in our little treasure. We feel what we have isn’t enough to begin the journey, or sometimes we don’t even realize that it’s more than enough to finish off.

Mostly in relation to money, we just want to make it BIG and start out big. But that’s not a very great way to accomplish anything ever. Put what you have in and ride out. Most things can be bootstrapped.

If you just get out and start doing something, you could be surprised at how much you can accomplish without a lot of money. You can start a blog for very little money. You can start an online store, or even start a consulting business. There are many ways to bootstrap and get going.

Do an inventory of the resources you actually have:

  • Your network
  • Your friends and family
  • Your online network
  • Free online resources and course
  • Books (You can learn a lot about business from books!)
  • Local business resources (many of free)
  • Online business resources

Here are two books to get you started:

 

4. Practice gratitude. (Always)

Gratitude is the best way to keep our hopes alive, it helps us to be grateful for where we are, what we have and don’t have (yet) while we hope to accomplish them as we work towards our ultimate goal(s).

Gratitude will let you appreciate the people in your life who contribute to your growth (whether they spill negative or positive energy). Being grateful shows that you have a deep insight that no one else understands. It just brings out the brighter side of you and energizes your soul.

I’ve had more accomplishments since I started doing these things, it has helped me live a better life that is meaningful to me and those I care about. it has helped me understand what it means to truly place value on what we have, who we are and stay focused until success is finally achieved.

Some Final Thoughts

By doing an inventory of the resources you actually have, you will find that you are far ahead of the game. Look around at your life. Who can help you? Surround yourself with those that propel your ideas and help you achieve greatness.

There is a lot of advice out there to help you grow a business, even start a business, but here is my advice to you:

Start.

Be thankful for where you are today.

Keep going!

Write down your goals every day. Be clear and specific. Start where you are and keep going.

 

 

23 Self Improvement Tips for Social Entrepreneurs

How to Create a Powerful Pitch in One Sentence

This article was originally posted at https://lunarmobiscuit.com

The more I work with entrepreneurs, the more I realize how the skills required to succeed as an entrepreneur are not taught in schools. One of those skills is brevity.

Specifically, we are are not taught how to edit our thoughts down in size. We are rewarded in school for writing multi-page essays and papers, providing as many details as we can fit into the assigned length.

Out in the real world, where time is precious, whoever you expect to read what you write instead wants you to use as few words as possible, conveying your ideas in as little space consuming as little time as necessary.

To demonstrate, all of the above can be summarized as: be clear and concise.

The misquote from Pascal too often comes to mind as I repeat my lesson on saying more with fewer words.

“If I had more time, I’d have written a shorter letter.”

(The actual quote translates to, “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter,” which ironically says the same message in more words.)

The obvious question is then how to accomplish this untaught goal. The answer is rather simple, but as Pascal warns, will take you some time.

  1. Begin by summarizing your thought into a single paragraph. Keep that paragraph to just 3 or 4 sentences at most. Keep only the key details most important to convey your thoughts, and leave the other details for later conversations.
  2. Reread what you have written, removing anything that seems redundant or superfluous. Rewrite any sentence if you have a better, more concise way to say the same ideas.
  3. Repeat #2 until you are happy with the result.
  4. For many people, 1-3 is difficult, but #4 is harder still, as now your challenge is to summarize that paragraph into a single sentence.
  5. Reread that sentence, and word-by-word eliminate any that are unnecessary, paring that sentence down to the minimum needed to convey your idea.

For a company pitch, follow steps 1-5 to explain what problem you are solving in a single sentence, then repeat steps 1-5 to explain your solution in a separate sentence. That then creates a two-sentence pitch, which you should be able to speak aloud in 20-30 seconds.

At that point I usually then challenge the entrepreneurs I’m training to step 6, editing that pitch down to a single sentence.

The result of all this effort is a pitch that not only conveys all the important information but most importantly creates a pitch that starts conversations.

Too often entrepreneurs forget (or have never understood) that the whole point of a pitch isn’t to answer every question, it is to begin a conversation where the audience can get the details important to them and the answers to their questions.

The same is true for sales, where the point is to get a potential customers’ specific questions answered, to get as quickly as possible to a close.

Less truly is more in these cases. Try it for yourself and you’ll see how much more powerful your communications become the shorter they get.

Related: This is How to Raise Seed Funding – Advice from Investors at SOCAP

 

Interview with Muhammad Yunus: Taking Small Steps for Big Social Business Impact

Exclusive interview with Nobel Peace Prize winner and Issue 13 cover story, Dr. Muhammad Yunus.

In this interview, we talk with Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dr. Muhammad Yunus who is the Godfather of Social Business tackling poverty head-on. Discover his secrets to success, advice to new Change Creators, and what the future holds.

He is known as the “Banker to the Poor.”

“Poverty does not belong in civilize human society. Its proper place is in a museum.” ~Yunus

Dr. Yunus established the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983, fueled by the belief that credit is a fundamental human right. His objective was to help poor people escape from poverty by providing loans on terms suitable to them and by teaching them a few sound financial principles so they could help themselves.

From Dr. Yunus’ personal loan of small amounts of money to destitute basket weavers in Bangladesh in the mid-70s, the Grameen Bank has advanced to the forefront of a burgeoning world movement toward eradicating poverty through microlending. Replicas of the Grameen Bank model operate in more than 100 countries worldwide.

Dr. Yunus is the recipient of numerous international awards for his ideas and endeavors, including the Mohamed Shabdeen Award for Science (1993), Sri Lanka; Humanitarian Award (1993), CARE, USA; World Food Prize (1994), World Food Prize Foundation, USA; Independence Day Award (1987), Bangladesh’s highest award; King Hussein Humanitarian Leadership Award (2000), King Hussien Foundation, Jordan; Volvo Environment Prize (2003), Volvo Environment Prize Foundation, Sweden; Nikkei Asia Prize for Regional Growth (2004), Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan; Franklin D. Roosevelt Freedom Award (2006), Roosevelt Institute of The Netherlands; and the Seoul Peace Prize (2006), Seoul Peace Prize Cultural Foundation, Seoul, Korea. He is also a member of the board of the United Nations Foundation.

It was truly and honor to speak with Dr. Yunus and ask him pressing questions about social business and the future of the economy.

In this interview, we ask questions such as…

  1. What was the inspiration for your new book, A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions?
  2. What causes people to have self-doubting beliefs when considering entrepreneurship?
  3. Where does someone who takes a micro-loan get their insights to learn how to start a business?
  4. Is the money system the ultimate old road that we have to change?
  5. Is there ever a place in the future for a different economy that does not use money?
  6. If you’re addressing problems like plastic pollution or deforestation is there always a way to make money?
  7. As more people start social businesses do you see common characteristics between great leaders?
  8. Will automation help spike social business?

Plus so much more amazing discussion!

10 Minute Funnels vs Clickfunnels: The Battle of the Funnel Marketing Tools 2021!

As you know 10-minute Funnels vs Clickfunnels are funnel building applications and before we jump into comparison lets quickly go through what Funnel builders are actually for…

What are Funnel Builders anyway?

You need a funnel builder if you are looking at “upping your game” on lead generation/Conversion or sales. Funnel builders help you to quickly devise funnels for varied needs… think of opt-in (build mailing list), webinar, membership site, e-commerce (create upsells/down-sells) or even create sales or membership pages.

Funnels are mostly used with paid traffic to test and optimize conversions quickly. They not just let you create awesome funnels but also let you track stats and do split testing. Funnel builders may well be used along with websites or independently…  Some people find the ease of creating web pages so appealing on these funnel creation applications they prefer to develop their whole website on them.

The option of inclusive web hosting and absolutely no hassles to maintain server is particularly appealing. Add to that powerful option of webpage editing it becomes a no-brainer solution.

If you are someone trying to finalize on funnel building software I am sure you would want to know how 10 Minute Funnels compares with Click funnels.

But before we go there how about taking a flashback?

Flashback: A Time Before Online Funnels?!?

There was a time when the term “Funnel” was not so well understood as it is today. The only landing page builder was Optimisepress or you could do it manually. If you didn’t know Optimisepress is a plugin for WordPress websites and is operated from the website backend(Admin Interface). The issue with this method is that you need a domain and a hosting plan first…Then only you can move to building funnels or landing pages. A lot of people are actually using Optimizepress effectively to this day.

Then Leadpages came to the fore. Unlike Optimise press Leadpages is a hosted solution… Where you wouldn’t need domain or hosting of your own to begin using landing pages. The concept of a website editor outside your own website was largely unknown and a welcome feature. Now you could have your website or landing pages online without worrying much about load speed or management of the hosting server.

When Leadpages came in they provided you with a fantastic interface to build leadpages and its functionality was driven to make this a great user experience. However, we have to note that this is the time when understanding what “converts” and the significance of building funnels was still in infancy.

As the time went by the concept of “Sales funnels” began to show up and people realized that they had to build an awesome customer experience through a series of sales pages/order forms/Upsells/Downsells to take the real advantage of unending internet traffic.

This emerging opportunity was cashed in by applications like Clickfunnels or 10-minute funnels… These applications took the aspect of lead generation, conversion/sales to a whole new level. More and more people started to bank upon the accepted wisdom of “what worked” and were eager to experiment.

Fast Forward Today! The World of Online Funnels Awaits!

Now businesses started focussing on the “Funnels that convert” instead of landing pages as an entity. This helped everyone to have a bigger picture and see the entire process of lead gen and conversion as a flow.

This called in for new challenges and expectations rose on what people need to see in there interface and dashboards…Along with what they would be willing to pay!

And that brings us to the comparison of two major players in the Funnel building space:

Clickfunnels vs 10-Minute Funnels: The Comparison

Let’s look at what comes out when these are pitched against each other as a solution to funnel building.

At a high level, a funnel builder like Clickfunnels and 10-minute funnels let you accomplish the same task of building great opt-ins/sales funnels. The difference mainly lies in the interface and what you get with the package.

Both applications essentially provide you the functions of Funnel building with easy options to create and modify funnels and pages, funnel templates, integrate applications like autoresponders and payment systems at the click of a button. You don’t have to touch any codes to accomplish a advanced customization. This helps you to engineer the customer experience at the most granular level.

Pricing — How Do These Compare?

Clickfunnels and 10-minute funnels are competing at the same price point for their primary offer.

You get started at $97: Both are priced at $97 for their basic offer but the packages are different…

Clickfunnels and 10-minute funnels both give you a package that put limits… 20 funnels, 100 pages, and 20,000 visitors.

These limits can be removed if you upgrade your plans which is $297 for Clickfunnels and $197 for 10-minute funnels. However, the upgrade with Clickfunnels gets you the added benefit of using an inbuilt affiliate program or interface through which you may add and track your own affiliates. And also an Autoresponder solution with advanced functionality.

Thus Clickfunnels is a solution to go for if you want to ramp up quickly to a well-rounded business that also utilizes the aspect of affiliate marketing and an inbuilt autoresponder solution.

You also have different trial offers. While you can try a free trial with Clickfunnels for the first 14 days you got to pay $1 to try 10-minute funnels for the same period.

Look and Feel: The Interface Comparison

Clickfunnels has a feel of layered functionality where you can click and learn more about something… While 10-minute funnel provides you with “drag and drop” functionality and almost mimics a process builder. This brings in intuitive process flow orientation and lets you see all your funnel steps as a self-explanatory map. This is a great way to convert your ideas into quick workable funnels.

Clickfunnels does have full funnel visibility but not in process map mode.

Ease of Use

10-minute Funnels was built further on the functionalities Clickfunnels provided. It has redefined the way funnels are created and modified. Imagine just connecting the lines to make or modify a funnel flow. The best part is you can just pick up one of the pre-built marketing funnel campaigns and just modify any of the pages instantly… This is very helpful to creatively formulate the experience you want to provide your audience. It is quick and extremely effective. 

The editor windows of both the applications are significantly different too. While Clickfunnels opens new side windows to edit a page.(Click to go deeper) The 10-minute funnels very interactively highlight all the items that you may edit on a left panel. We can say without any hesitation that 10-minute Funnels provides a much more intuitive way to create and edit funnels.

10 Minute Funnels vs Clickfunnels: Which is Best?

Using a funnel builder software like Clickfunnels or 10-minute funnels you create funnels like a pro. Both are great applications and will significantly reduce the guesswork. Now you can create funnels that really convert… The effort is to make sure you succeed and both the applications.

In the end, what to use… Clickfunnels or 10 minutes funnel is your personal call and you should choose what suits you best… However, there are a couple of aspects that are needed to be highlighted.

  • Clickfunnels is much widely accepted funnel builder and largely dominates the funnel building market. It is seen not just as funnel builder but also a Business Suite that takes care of online business aspects of affiliates and autoresponder (upgrade priced at $297).
  • Clickfunnels is a bit older in the market than 10-minute funnels and has a lot of people who will actually swear by it. While there is no dearth of success stories with either application.
  • Clickfunnels has much longer standing and a much wider customer base. If you are looking at an accepted industry norm Clickfunnels wins the race by a mile.

  • 10 minutes funnel is relatively new and incorporates “intuitive process flow” styled graphical interface that lets drag and drop functionalities. This is a modern approach to building funnels and is much appreciated by progressive businesses who want to use the latest… 10-minute funnels definitely scores on the usability angel and lets you embrace the best practices of funnel building in a very subtle manner.
  • 10 minutes funnel may safely be your best bet if you are trying to focus on “sales funnel space” and clear that you don’t really need a native affiliate or autoresponder solution. (You always have the option to go with third-party options anyways…)
  • You can use the 10 minutes funnel solution without any restrictions for $197 monthly. This means you can build as many funnels or web pages you want. (Without the need of web hosting or maintenance of servers at your end)

Clickfunnels vs Website: Do I Need Both to Build Leads?

Businesses need to promote themselves, be in front of their eyes (target market) at the right place and right time. Being online for acquiring customers today is nobodies guess. If you have been in this for some time, you must have asked yourself this obvious question. Clickfunnels vs website: do I need both?

Which is better, a Website or Clickfunnels? Do I even need a website anymore?

Websites are seen by many as a natural choice when getting online. Websites help businesses have a dedicated address to be found online and interact with the customers. Just like a physical address… the website is your online address (www.yourbusiness.com).

You dress up your website with pleasant “get up” in terms of look and feel, introduce your business, its products, and services and even give pointers for people to buy and try out your offerings.

Websites by definition are generally 6-10 related pages, contain clear navigation links and the intent is to tell you as much as possible about the business including products and services. Websites may be designed on coding elements on HTML/Java/JavaScript/PHP etc. or by using a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress.

So how does this differ from pages created with Clickfunnels?

Clickfunnels at the core does contain a “web editor” with which you can create or edit pages within Clickfunnels on the fly. This makes creating web pages so simple that many people actually go and develop a complete website on Clickfunnels. But then that’s not what Clickfunnels is actually intended for…

Clickfunnels is a funnel creation application. Funnels are generally characterized as a lead generation and conversion tool. Helping you create landing pages (also called squeeze page) which capture leads and sell your products or services online.

As you might have figured Websites and Clickfunnels do have a range of similarities and dissimilarities. In this article, we will attempt an in-depth comparison so as to fully understand how these compare as a utility for customer acquisition.

Now even before we do this comparison lets understand something that shall put our entire discussion into a perspective. Check out the free 14-day trial offered by Clickfunnels too!

Let’s talk about Traffic… We can categorize traffic into two main types:

Inbound and Outbound Traffic

Inbound traffic is generated when people visit your website while actively searching for pertinent information mostly on a search engine like Google. They search a term on Search Engine and land on your website by clicking a result that appeared mostly in the first 10 pages. This happens as your webpage was optimized /relevant to that keyword in the eyes of Search Engine.

This is the organic mode of traffic generation and involves SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Websites are ideal for ranking on search engines as they support many of the requirements that enable search engines to understand relevance, quality, and usefulness of the content created.

Outbound traffic, on the other hand, is traffic that is generated mostly through paid advertising and may involve PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising on advertising networks like Google Adwords, Facebook ads, Twitter or Linkedin.

Paid traffic is greatly different from organic traffic as the visitors are directed to your website from an ad that is put in front of a prospect via targeting methods available on Advertising networks. In this scenario, the focus is on acquiring leads or possible sales that over a period help you recoup the advertising cost.

Simply put you will use a Website or Clickfunnels based on the traffic you want to leverage…

A website, in the long run, should allow you to create content that helps you rank on the search engines and generate organic traffic. Clickfunnels on the other side is a tool that will help you convert paid traffic and focus on ROI.

That being said you may use one in the place of other if you want to… But then you should ideally use an application for the purpose it is designed for. Let’s look at specific characteristics of these two options compare and how best you can use them.

Clickfunnels vs website: The comparison

1. Domain

Your website would essentially have a unique domain that you booked for your website example www.yourbusiness.com.

This will not be that case with Cickfunnels…here you will share the same domain and your landing pages will resolve on a subdomain like www.yourbusiness.clickfunnels.com.

It’s also worth mentioning that you can make the Clickfunnel pages appear in your website domain like www.yourbusiness.com/myclickfunnelpage but then you will have limited options to optimize that page for SEO.

The advantage of having unique domain name is that you can brand your domain. Develop focused content aligned with your SEO strategy. This shall help you engage with your website visitors, generate inquiries and even sell your products or services online.

Now if you are looking at capitalizing paid traffic and getting too aggressive with your online promotions. (It also depends on what type of products or services you are promoting) being on Clickfunnels subdomain is a real advantage as your actual domain is protected. This makes Clickfunnels a great choice for testing new landing page design concepts, products or services.

2. Landing Pages

While you can always get conversions from a website. It’s been proven landing pages help you convert better.

Clickfunnels gives you a design option that is focussed to convert visitors. Doing the same thing on the website shall take a lot of time and may even have big technical constraints.

Websites are not effective at getting conversions as they are generally designed to keep the visitor glued (allow them to move from one webpage to another find more and more interesting stuff to lower bounce rates)

Clickfunnel Landing pages, on the other hand, are CTA (Call to action) oriented and have one single focus on capturing leads or converting them.

A landing page or any funnel pages unlike website page carry minimal distractions and are designed to “squeeze” the visitor into sharing more information or completing the sales process.

3. Online Marketing Funnels

While it may be difficult to design funnels on a website… Clickfunnels is created for the very purpose. You can create advanced sales funnels literally on a click of a button.

The biggest advantage is with Clickfunnels you don’t have tie every end of your conversion funnel… it’s done automatically.

Talk of Autoresponders, Payment Systems, Upsells or Down sells all is inbuilt within Clickfunnels and all you got to do is configure them once.

Clickfunnels gives you multiple templates and funnels that you can utilize at the click of a button. Not just that it packs almost all the features you might need to setup, test and optimize sales funnels. You can also try Clickfunnels free for 14 days!

4. A/B Split Testing and Full Funnel Conversion View

AB split testing involves creating two versions of the same page and running traffic to see which converts better.

Clickfunnels makes this extremely easy along with providing analytics to decide the winner. Doing split testing on websites is possible but extremely cumbersome.

Clickfunnels also lets you have full funnel conversion view at one place. This allows a lot of clarity on sequence and ability to select/edit and develop a consistent experience for the visitor all through the funnel.

5. Change of Funnel Order on the Fly

Clickfunnels lets you change the funnel order on the fly. This is almost magical as you can change different funnel steps with a few clicks. Add or remove types of pages within the funnel sequence. This is a very advanced feature. Imagine a graphical user interface to do all the work for you at the code level!

Changing funnel order on a website is extremely cumbersome (even if you created a funnel) as it would involve code changes on every page and would be a nightmare for troubleshooting.

6. Easy Page or Funnel Replication/Sharing of Funnels

Again on Clickfunnels, you can replicate a funnel or page with a click of a button…and not just that you can share the whole funnel with another user.

This is unimaginable on a website.

One thing to appreciate is both the options (Website and Clickfunnels) ultimately help you to build “webpages”. CMS Application like WordPress greatly reduces the code level intervention needed to build websites. You may use plugins that greatly enhance website features. But an application like Clickfunnels takes this to entirely new level.

Now that you know how the Website and Clickfunnels compare…The other question that a lot of people ask is…

Do I need both?

And the short answer is Yes!

A website, when used with Clickfunnels, can get you best of both the worlds. It can help you leverage testing done on paid traffic and get the same benefits from organic traffic. A lot of successful businesses do that…

But at the end, you need to make the call based on your current needs. Ask yourself what type of traffic you are looking at generating.

You can start with Website first if you want to drive organic traffic and capitalize on free traffic from search engines.

Start with Clickfunnels if you want to test product/services in your target market and start earning revenue right away. Drive paid traffic and then expand based on what you find viable in your testing.

Goodluck! Now go ahead and make the right choice.

From Story to Startup: The Power of Your Network

Right now, you are probably at the story stage of your journey. That’s alright. We all start somewhere. But what if you want to go from story to startup — How do you tap into the power of your network?

This is my truth. My story how I decided to take my idea, my passion and move into startup mode. It all starts with you.

Inspired by Thankyou’s impact and achievements in a well established bottled water market, I had nothing to lose.

Two years ago the team at Thankyou led by Daniel Flynn released a little book called Chapter One. If you haven’t read it yet, what have you been waiting for? You see, when inspiration hits, sometimes you just need to run with it and keep running.

While the release of Chapter One marks the beginning of my story, it’s the networks that I’ve uncovered along the way that has taken me from story to startup.

To provide a little more context, I had been working for a health charity for a while and was actively seeking partnerships with the corporate sector. At the time I had a particular interest in health insurance and found a news article in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) just days before taking some time out.

It was supposed to be a holiday but I was excited to read what Daniel had to say, plus I still had the content of the AFR article rolling around in my head. Ten days later I had a full slide deck capturing my thoughts, preliminary market research and mapping out a social enterprise model for a health insurance comparison service to give 100% of its profits back to health charities.

What is Chapter One?

“CHAPTER ONE is a story of epic proportions by Thankyou co-founder Daniel Flynn. The social enterprise exists to give 100% of profits to help end global poverty through the sale of their consumer products. Thankyou was started back in 2008 by a group of three Australian kids from Melbourne with zero business experience and the shared belief that we all have the power to change stuff. Their journey is a bumpy and entertaining ride of gut-wrenching decisions, wild mistakes and daring moves into business, marketing, social enterprise and beyond.

Chapter One is more than a book. It’s an invitation, addressed to you. To inspire you to challenge what you know and remind you that crazy ideas can become a reality. It’s also an opportunity to be a part of something big. Something that could change the course of history.” (From About the Book, Thankyou.)

“I had an idea. But what next? Was I just another guy with another idea wanting to enter an established market?”

CARE TO COMPARE was born. I began taking my partner and friends through the slide deck while on holiday. Of course, they thought it was a great idea. Although they were biased, it was the beginning of understanding the power of my network which has helped take me from story to startup.

What can you do to move your story to a startup? That is the question. I find that no matter what you do, building your network is one of the most vital and important parts of your success formula.

5 networks that can help move you from story to startup

1. Family and Friends

Your immediate network begins at home. Family and friends are the first and perhaps the easiest people to share your ideas with. The danger here is not knowing the difference between supportive family and friends and potential customers. Family and friends can help with:

  • Early validation – perhaps they’ve used a similar product or service or experienced a similar issue that leads them to an ‘I’d use that’ moment.
  • Potential barriers – maybe there is an existing product or service that you haven’t come across or a similar product/service in a foreign market?

2. Colleagues

Your colleagues are a great source to test ideas in a safe environment. After all, it’s just an idea right so you’re not leaving your job the next day. Like family and friends, your colleagues will quickly help validate or highlight barriers for you to consider. Ultimately, they’ll extend your network with potential referrals.

3. Referrals

Referrals are like gold, bitcoin, or whatever currency you like to deal in. It’s the first sign your idea has legs. Enough merit that someone wants to connect you with someone you don’t even know. While a referral may not immediately help progress your idea, don’t give up. Another referral might be the key to taking that idea a step closer to reality. Referrals without reward are good business practice.

4. Like-minded community

At some point, you’ll find yourself connecting with a like-minded community. Take time to learn from this community and understand how you can support each other. Through a couple of referrals, I met the community manager for Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK). A like-minded community, RHoK unlocked the idea and gave me the confidence to talk the industry.

5. Your Industry

If you’re fortunate, you might find yourself working in the industry you’re looking to launch your business. Perhaps you’ve established some connections with industry through the earlier mentioned networks. Industry can be your customer, provider or both. When you understand the role of your industry it can form your idea and point of difference even further.

Is it a showstopper?

Networks are powerful. They can help identify any showstoppers and suggest alternative pathways forward. Best of all, when they believe in your vision they’ll want you to take it as far as you can to StartSomeGood.

Is it a pivot?

The best way to know if you need to pivot or not is to talk to your network. Share with them your business ideas. Pitch them your ideas. Build relationships and don’t be afraid to get advice. The more you get out there, the more you’ll know if it’s time for you to pivot, or if you should stay put and keep going.

Taking your idea from story to startup means not only tapping into your network but knowing when to listen. Trust your gut, yes, but listen to those around you too.

Interview with Anne Miltenburg: How Her New Branding For Good Guide Can Help Your Business

Exclusive interview with impact branding expert and founder of The Brandling, Anne Miltenburg.

Subscribe to this show on  iTunes  |  Stitcher  |  Soundcloud

Anne Miltenburg is a branding for social change expert. We have interviewed her a couple times now because we love her work and she has a lot to offer you in the area of branding. This interview is based on the third edition of her book – Brand the Change: The Branding Guide for social entrepreneurs, disruptors, not-for-profits and corporate troublemakers.

The book is a step by step guide to building your brand, plus 23 tools and exercises, 14 case studies of successful change making brands and 7 guest essays.

Today, the Brandling combines the power of tools, training and tribe to support change makers in building the brand they deserve.

The company was founded on one simple truth. Great ideas for change are evenly distributed. Knowledge and quality resources on branding are not. They asked themselves: how can a family starting a fair trade lemonade factory in Sierra Leone, get access to the same branding knowledge as a company like Coca Cola? Answering that question has taken us on a journey we would have never believed possible.

If you have not heard our first ever interview with Anne about branding you should check it out. Just click here.

Some of the questions answered in this interview…

  • Why is this book important?
  • Why did you create a third edition?
  • Who picked up your third edition?
  • Who is this for exactly? Is this information relevant for larger companies who want to reframe their strategy to have more purpose?
  • How many case studies are included and why are they so important?
  • What are some common challenges early stage companies face with branding?
  • What are some of the biggest epiphanies you’ve had through your branding work?

Plus so much more!

 

4 Ways to Turn Passion Into Profit: You Can Start Today!

Working is a necessity of life, but studies show few Americans actually enjoy what they do. Among the 100 million full-time employees in the U.S., 51 percent admit to being disengaged—in other words, not feeling connected to their job. An additional 16 percent fall into the actively disengaged category, meaning they absolutely detest their jobs and tend to bring down office morale.

Turning Your Passion Project into a Business Venture: The Basics

While some people find solace with a hobby, others turn their personal pursuits into a business venture. Embracing an entrepreneurial spirit is not for everyone, but for the right individual, it can offer freedom to do what you love, a flexible schedule (not less work, however), excitement, and a sense of accomplishment and pride.

For the same reasons, being your own boss can prove to be an effective tactic for recovery survivors, too. This is especially true if the business idea stems from something that helped them come to peace with their addiction, like art therapy, for example. More than just brushstrokes on a canvas (though there’s that, too), this alternative treatment method encompasses jewelry making, cooking, singing, dancing, sewing, woodworking, and creative writing—all of which can be translated into a business idea.

No matter where you’re at in your life, it’s never too late to consider pursuing your own endeavor. Just make sure you know what you’re into getting first.

Are You Really Ready?

Doing a hobby for the sake of pleasure is completely different than monetizing it. Before getting in too deep, ask yourself a few key questions:

  • Will I enjoy my hobby the same when I’m under pressure to complete it—quite possibly in large amounts?
  • Will I be able to handle the financial pressure to produce a profit?
  • Will I be ruining my outlet for relaxation?
  • Will I be able to deal with the good, bad, and ugly that comes from business ownership?
  • Will I be willing to wear more than one hat?

 

Getting Started: 4 Ways to Turn Passion Into Profit

 

1. Assess Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Doing something as a hobby is one thing, but is your product or service polished enough to sell to consumers? If no, then figure out a way to perfect it, or choose another outlet altogether. Alternatively, maybe you’re great at whatever you’re selling, but bad with other aspects of business like bookkeeping. Make sure you get assistance in any areas of uncertainty.

 

2. Find a Niche

While it’s not always possible to reinvent the wheel, having a niche for your business will make it stand apart from the competition. Even something subtle like packaging or an inspirational story can help, so assess every aspect of your product or service to determine its unique potential.

 

3. Create a Business Plan

 While it’s a time-consuming process, a solid business plan can unlock the doors to investment opportunities that can help you do everything from getting the business off the ground to expanding in the future. A professional plan should include: an executive summary, company description, market analysis (very important and requires thorough research), organization and management, description of service or product, a marketing and sales plan, a funding request spanning the next 3-5 years, financial projections (of great interest to investors), and an optional appendix.

 

4. Source Funding

 You’ve got your plan, and now you need the funds to start. There are several outlets to try, so it would behoove you to approach more than one source so you have funding options to compare. But forget the bank. You’re more apt to receive funding from the SBA, peer-to-peer lenders, your personal credit and savings, and crowdfunding.

Related: This Is How to Raise Seed Funding: Advice from Investors at SOCAP

You Can Do It!

Approximately 69 percent of U.S. entrepreneurs start their businesses from home, so there’s no reason why you can’t jump on that bandwagon, too. But if you want to avoid a less desirable statistic—being among the 50 percent of businesses that fail within the first four years—don’t rely on excitement alone. Ample research and a concrete plan will give you the self-confidence you need to push ahead.

 

 

Ontraport vs Aweber: Email Marketing Showdown [2021 Comparison]

For the longest time, if you were getting started in email marketing the go-to software was Aweber. All the gurus were recommending it. I’ve been using Aweber for years. Meanwhile, some interesting competitors have arisen. Although loyalty is a virtue, my first loyalty is to my business. I decided to test Aweber against an exciting new entrant to see how they compared. In direct marketing, we split test by trying to beat a “control”. I decided to use Aweber as the control and try to beat it with Ontraport.

Introducing Aweber

Let’s start with the control. How did Aweber become the most recognized brand in email marketing? It was due to its high deliverability and excellent customer support. This was at a time when many first-timers were getting involved in online marketing. When starting out, I wanted to avoid confusion and undelivered emails. I have always found Aweber to be one of the easiest autoresponder solutions on the market. It gave me control over the relevant stages of setting up an email marketing campaign. Aweber minimizes unnecessary options and presents an intuitive user interface.

Despite this, Aweber has seen declining popularity in recent years. Online marketing is becoming more sophisticated. Professionals need to keep up with savvy consumers. We need more advanced tools to keep campaigns profitable. In response to this demand, many new companies have entered the field. Email marketing evolved into marketing automation for many professionals.

Introducing Ontraport

Ontraport is an advanced automated marketing system that is way beyond email marketing capabilities. According to Ontraport, only 19% of online marketers are actually tracking their marketing efforts, which means that many of us don’t even know if what we are doing is really working, or better yet, how to fix our efforts when it’s not.

Ontraport is one of the more expensive tools to start using, but if you plan on growing your email list (and your company), it becomes a highly valuable tool that saves you money. It also replaces many of the tools that are out there, so in the long run, if you just invested in Ontraport, you will probably end up saving money over time.

For people that are just starting, or only want to build small lists, Aweber is probably the less expensive option, but Ontraport is key for those wanting to grow.

Another area that Ontraport is known for is data — data is the lifeblood of your marketing efforts. Like I said earlier, many of us don’t properly track or use or data. This can leave many prospects and sales on the table if you don’t track it. It’s all about understanding where your opportunities lie, as Ontraport explains — “Compare the performance of all of your customer and lead segments so you can find the low-hanging fruit and optimize your campaigns without guesswork to start growing your business faster.”

Key Cons of Ontraport and Aweber

Ontraport Cons

Despite my excitement over these new features, the cost of Ontraport was worrying. It starts off expensive and the jumps are massive. Aweber starts at a comfortable $19 per month with a 30-day free trial.

Ontraport doesn’t offer any sort of trial and starts at $79 per month, over four times as much as Aweber. That’s not all, the gaps between the plans are huge. There is a $218 monthly gap between the Basic and Pro plan. Aweber ascends more gradually, the biggest gap between any two Aweber plans is only $20. That is 10 times less than the gaps between Ontraport plans.

Of course, you can always test out Ontraport risk-free for 90-days, which should give you long enough to see if this tool is for you. In 90-days, you can test out many of the advanced features, run a campaign or two and get some real data to help make your decision. However, after the 90-days if you didn’t want to keep paying for Ontraport, you’d have to port the list you built up to your next platform of choice and that may, or may not be a seamless transition.

To be honest, the dramatic price difference intrigued me. What could they have that justified such high prices? A lot, it turns out. Apart from the sign-up forms and landing pages that I expected. Ontraport also allowed me to engage in multichannel marketing within the same platform. I’m not limited to email, but also have access to SMS and postcard marketing.

Check out Ontraport — risk-free for 90 days here!

Aweber Cons

As the years have passed Aweber’s technology has fallen behind. This was most obvious when I tested Ontraport’s campaign builder. It then became clear how advanced marketing automation had become in the meantime. I began to appreciate what that extra $60 per month would be doing for my business.

Ontraport uses a cool system of modular building blocks to create everything in the software. It doesn’t matter if it’s an email message, sign-up form, or landing page. By putting together these intuitive little blocks, I could create a comprehensive campaign. I appreciated the flexibility afforded by Ontraport’s modular design. Their campaign builder is a pleasure to build with. And the final result was also far more attractive compared to what I could build using Aweber.

Costs of Aweber vs Ontraport

Aweber Costs Ontraport Costs
1,000 contacts $29 1,000 contacts $79
25,000 contacts $149 25,000 contacts $297
100,000 contacts $299 100,000 contacts $597

Selected Integrations

Aweber Ontraport
Cyfe 1Shopping Cart
Dasheroo Authorize.net
Drupal ClickBank
Facebook Elavon
Geckoboard eWay
Heyo NMI
Launch Effect PayLeap
LeadPages PayPal
PayPal QuickBooks
Rafflecopter SamCart
Rainmaker Stripe
Raven USA ePay
ShortStack UltraCart
ViralSweep WooCommerce
WordPress WorldPay

Standout Features: The Pros of Aweber and Ontraport

Aweber

Although, I found the support staff at Ontraport to be excellent, for the most part. Aweber’s support is superior. At Ontraport, the quality of the telephone support was perfect. The people I spoke with were super knowledgeable and helpful. The email and live chat operatives were a little more disappointing. Particularly when it came to in-depth product knowledge.

When I compare this to my experiences emailing Aweber for support, they fell short. It’s possible that this is not a fair comparison because Ontraport is a far more complex product. It may be more difficult to train enough knowledgeable representatives. It can’t be easy keeping up with all the nuances of a complex, evolving software platform.

Ontraport

While using Ontraport, I found myself spending most of my time in the campaign builder. That is where all the fun is for a stat junkie like myself. I’m impressed by the campaign builder’s clear visual representation of my marketing system. This gives me a clear visualization of my subscriber stats at various stages of my process. This information provided context to select from a range of template campaigns. These templates sped up my learning as I was getting used to the Ontraport platform. Ontraport can be overwhelming at times but they have made an effort to enhance usability. The ready-made campaigns include a very handy checklist. This gave me more confidence that nothing was amiss before activating a campaign.

Ontraport seems committed to improving the user experience. Yet, there remains a steep learning curve for beginners. Certain pages offered zero contextual help. I found these occasional roadblocks frustrating. And speaking of frustration, certain pages are slow to load and refresh. I noticed a few other bugs that disappointed me as I continued to build campaigns.

Check out Ontraport — risk-free for 90 days here!

Aside from the lag on certain pages, I also experienced some bugginess in the landing page editor. I had problems uploading images sometimes. If I wasn’t careful I would hover over the sample photos by accident. And by the time my cursor made it to the submit button, I would find myself inserting the wrong image into a block. It may seem like a minor point to you. But this meant putting more care into a procedure that on Aweber I had embedded into muscle memory. All those extra seconds add up over the course of the year so this was a little bit annoying to me.

Comparison: Who Wins?

Moving from Aweber to Ontraport was an eye-opening experience. There is much to love about Ontraport. The features that stood out to me include the flexibility of campaign triggers. Ontraport allowed me to run many marketing flows in parallel. It’s hard to overstate the depth of personalization this affords. But such powerful features come with overwhelming complexity. This is somewhat mitigated by two free on-boarding calls. I received these after signing up and they were a huge help. Beyond that, there is an excellent Facebook group full of very helpful and patient people.

All these positives almost made me forget the price. Almost. It is still a very expensive solution. If you are starting out and deciding between Aweber and Ontraport, I would tell you to start with Aweber. Automating bad strategy is destructive.

Are you are an experienced marketer with positive cash flow? In that case, things are different. Ontraport is the superior platform for maximizing the return on your marketing budget. This is especially true if you are using Facebook to drive traffic. Check out Ontraport — risk-free for 90 days here!

If I had to choose the top one overall for most companies:

I would definitely choose Ontraport. If you want to scale your efforts and your profits at any time, Ontraport is the best choice by far. The advanced marketing opportunities, analytics and more is simply bar none other marketing automation tools.

Sendy vs. Aweber: Which Email Marketing Tool Wins?

When it comes to email marketing campaigns, the tools that you use are of utmost importance. Now, if only it could be easy to know exactly what email marketing tool or software would work best for you business, right?! That’s why I did the hard work for you and am bringing you my findings here! I compare and contrast Aweber vs. Sendy here, which email marketing tool comes out on top? Keep reading to find out!

Introduction to Aweber

One of the main reasons I use Aweber is that it’s so cost-effective. At least this was the main benefit in the beginning when my list consisted of a couple dozen people. Over the years I have built a database of over 23,000 subscribers. This has taken me from paying $228 per year to paying Aweber $1,788 last year. That is a hefty bill and so I started looking around to find a more cost-effective option. I have standards, I did not want to save money by giving up essential features.

Introduction to Sendy

On paper, a software called Sendy appeared to fit the bill and so I decided to test it out and see how much money I could save. A piece of software called Sendy caught my attention as a viable option so I decided to test it out. Think of Sendy as a self-hosted Aweber. And because it is self-hosted, I would be liberated from fixed monthly fees. The software only cost  $59 which, to be honest, made me suspicious. I was certain I would be making major functionality trade-offs.

Who is this for?

Aweber: For Newbies

I am aware that many marketers have jumped the Aweber ship due to a lack of revolutionary updates. I continued to use the service because it provided a positive return on investment. Also, I did not have the time to test every new autoresponder that came onto the market.

Aweber has always been five-star on the only two things that a high-volume mailer like me cares about. High deliverability and excellent customer support. It was not broken and I had no interest in fixing it. Having said that, if there is money to save, I will work to rescue it. But if you are new to online marketing, then Aweber should still be your preferred option.

Sendy: For People with Large Lists

Before I talk more about Sendy, I have to mention the coolest thing about SES. Because I chose to install Sendy for free on Amazon EC2, I got 62,000 monthly email sends free for the first year. Any emails above this free limit cost $0.10 per 1,000 emails. In a normal month, I was emailing my list of around 23,000 people once a week. This works out to about 92,000 emails sent each month. 62,000 emails were getting sent for free. I only paid for about 30,000 messages each month. This cost me $3 per month or $36 for the whole year.

That is correct, I reduced my email sending bill from $1,788 last year to a projected $95 for my first year using Sendy. Even paying full price, 92,000 emails per month would only cost me $110.40 per year in mailing costs. And full price EC2 hosting costs $30.66 for the year. So at full price, Sendy is saving me $1,693 in year one and $1,646.94 in later years.

Cons

Problems with Aweber

Although I embarked on this test to save money, there are a few things that had started to bother me about Aweber. The first is actually connected to money as well. If someone subscribes to more than one of my lists, Aweber would count that person as many people. Even worse, when someone unsubscribes they remain on my list and count towards my quota. Each month I would spend more time pruning duplicates and unsubscribes from my lists. I always hated that part of my work.

The other thing that began to bug me was the increasingly ugly templates. It’s not that the Aweber templates became more ugly. It’s that they stayed the same while everything else online became more attractive. Of course, I had long ago stopped using these templates but in principle, I was still paying for access to them. Paying for those ugly templates was bothering me.

Problems with Sendy

As it turned out, I wouldn’t be free from all monthly payments, but I’d get close. I had to pair Sendy with an Amazon SES account. SES stands for ‘simple email service’ and the name is quite appropriate. It was easy to set up even for a non-technical person such as myself. After logging into my AWS management console, I found SES and verified my main sending email. That was it, the SES account was ready to send emails.

Costs

Aweber Costs Sendy (Amazon SES) Costs
4 emails to 500 contacts $19 4 emails to 500 contacts $0.21
4 emails to 2,500 contacts $29 4 emails to 2,500 contacts $1
4 emails to 5,000 contacts $49 4 emails to 5,000 contacts $2
4 emails to 10,000 contacts $69 4 emails to 10,000 contacts $4
4 emails to 25,000 contacts $149 4 emails to 25,000 contacts $10

Selected Integrations

My first concern is that Sendy plays nice with my other software. I am most concerned about WordPress integration and Magento integration. I discovered that Sendy integrates on a deep level with WordPress. They have a great WordPress plugin. This allows me to create decent looking subscribe forms that match my site’s theme. The plugin also validates emails on the WordPress side. This prevents incorrect subscriber information going to Sendy. It also includes a captcha feature to prevent my database filling up with spam addresses.

Besides the official WordPress plugin, Sendy also integrates with about 20 other plugins. This provides a lot of flexibility in connecting subscriber information. Here’s how it stacks up against Aweber:

Aweber Sendy
Cyfe Drupal
Dasheroo GetSiteControl
Drupal Joomla
Facebook LemonFresh
Geckoboard Magento
Heyo Ninja Forms
Launch Effect Prestashop
LeadPages SumoMe
PayPal WHMCS
Rafflecopter Woocommerce
Rainmaker WordPress
Raven Wufoo
ShortStack Zapier
ViralSweep xenForo

How well does Sendy replicate Aweber?

Reporting

I log into my Sendy admin panel and I’m impressed at the level of information available to me. On the left, I could check my SES quota and keep track of the minimal/nonexistent costs my email campaigns.

The reporting is comparable to Aweber’s quality. I can see the results of each email campaign with a decent looking graphical interface. The report has all the basic metrics I would expect from email marketing software:

  • Open Rates
  • Link Clicks
  • Bounces
  • Not Opened
  • Unsubscribes

There was no metric I wanted that I could not find in Sendy’s reports.

Migrating contacts

Migrating was very easy. After exporting my list from Aweber, I was able to upload my list to Sendy. For future subscribers, I downloaded the Sendy plugin for WordPress. Here I was again pleasantly surprised because the forms I could create were clean and modern. More so than those available on Aweber.

E-commerce

I also need integration for e-commerce and Sendy integrates very well with a lot of e-commerce software. The main integrations include Magento, WooCommerce, and PrestaShop. There is no direct support for Shopify or BigCommerce. But, since my goal is to cut my fixed monthly costs, this didn’t matter much to me. If these other services are important to you then Sendy works well with Zapier. This skeleton key integration calms all my concerns about current and future integrations. Zapier is very reliable.

List management

With Aweber, I always hated having to manually prune duplicate subscribers and unsubscribes. With Sendy, the software handles unsubscribes in real time. And since there are no list limits, duplicates do not matter. This was a pleasant surprise because it is rare that a tool saves me both money and time.


Email List Growth Blueprint

All the above is fine as far as it goes. But for Sendy to be a replacement for my Aweber account, I needed the three bases of email marketing covered:

  1. List management,
  2. Segmentation,
  3. Autoresponder function.

Sendy replicates the autoresponder functionality of Aweber. This allows me to continue sending automated drip campaigns to my subscribers. I also have the option to schedule one-off emails when I have a special or seasonal campaign to send out. I also don’t miss any functionality when it comes to list management:

  • Thank you emails
  • Mass imports
  • Custom confirmation pages
  • Custom fields
  • Choice of single or double opt-in
  • Mass deleting of subscribers
  • Goodbye emails

Sendy ticks the final box by allowing me to send emails to specific segments of my list. This is a must-have feature because segmentation has a positive effect on engagement. Sendy allows me to segment based on a wide range of conditions. As with Aweber, I am able to decide to either include or exclude a segment from any given campaign.

Sendy vs. Aweber: Who Wins?

When comparing Sendy vs. Aweber there are two things to consider. Your comfort with Amazon cloud services and the size of your list. If you are an absolute email marketing beginner, I recommend that you start with Aweber. This allows you to learn the basics in a stable, high support environment with fewer variables. But as your subscriber list grows, your cost per campaign will balloon. This is especially true if you are a responsible mailer and only deliver at most one or two emails per week. If you are a more experienced mailer, with a list of 2,500 or more, then you can save significant money by making the switch from Aweber to Sendy.

Check out the latest offers on Aweber now! 

Check out the latest offers on Sendy now!