How A Pink Bowl Created Buzz

Posted on April 12, 2013 by michaelshead

Just Salad’s Pink Bowl Promotion

Just Salad gave a great example of how to create buzz with people who already love their product: Faithful Customers.

They sent out 100 skip-the-line pink bowls to faithful customers and then promoted the concept and the buzz took things from there.

A happy Customer who blogged about his pink bowl experience!

Personally I’d never heard of Just Salad, but that may have something to do with me living in a third-world-country. However, I felt myself wishing I had a pink bowl from this restaurant and I could skip lines for a fresh salad! In fact, I think the TSA should provide this sort of thing for lines at the airport! I can see it now…” Hey! You can’t cut in the line…Oh, sorry, I didn’t see your pink carry on bag. Come right on in!”

Ok, so that’s dreaming a bit. However, I think Just Salad did a great job of getting their name out there AND rewarding those who have been faithful to their business.

“For the cost of a bowl, shipping, and a free topping, $20? the small business reached thousands of customers and prospects.”

via How to Create Word of Mouth Magic | LinkedIn.

Camera+ App for iPhone

Posted on May 13, 2011 by michaelshead

Camera+ logo

Camera+ is my new favorite App for the iPhone. ($1.99)

I’ve been using the standard camera option on my iPhone 3GS. It was handy but nothing fancy and with pretty much no options or editing capabilities. Camera+ has so many options, filters and editing tools built right in that it turns your iPhone camera into a photo machine that gives you customized images that look awesome!

Summary

Fresh bean dip

Easy to use and great additional features for your iPhone camera including zoom, filters, self-timer, and more! Many options are available without paying more than the basic 99 cents. (There are additional features available for additional costs but they’re just more filters.)

Things I love about it:

Quick button response — The Camera+ App provides quick response times. When you push the shutter button…the photo is taken. What a concept!
Timer — Want a photo of yourself? Camera+ includes a self timer with audible warning. There are 5 second, 15 second and 30 second timers available.
Cropping — Get just the good stuff when you crop down the image as you desire. Options allow you to keep a variety of ratios or crop freestyle.
Borders/Frames — This option really makes your presentation look good before you post your images out to your friends. Includes a variety of options to choose from
Filters — One of my favorite things… I really like the options that are provided. From antique looks to HDR and limited depth of field , cross processing and more, this App provides a wide selection of filter effects that can be expanded (paid service).
Sharing — With Camera+ it’s easy to share your favorite images via Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, or by emailing the image size of your choice to your friends. Continue reading →

Online donation options for non-profits

Posted on March 29, 2011 by michaelshead

Several online payment services offer many useful tools for businesses and for non-profit organizations too!

As e-commerce becomes more and more common and is embraced by many as the norm. It is not time to sit back and wait for people to send checks to your organization. When it comes to fundraising, it is time to take that same ease of payments that for-profit organizations use and bring it into the non-profit world. Put online giving within easy reach of donors. Here’s a breakdown on three options for online donations.

Thanks to PayPal, Amazon.com, and other sources like Facebook’s FundRazr App non-profits have the ability to collect individual donations or even schedule ongoing gifts with tools that e-consumers are already familiar with.

PAYPAL

PayPal Donate Button

PayPal offers several options that give non-profit organizations the ability to accept donations in a simple way that consumers are already use to using PayPal accounts or credit cards. See a guide on how to setup online donations on PayPal.

FEATURES:

PayPal features include:

Configure buttons and copy HTML code for use on your website or HTML websites
Enable one-time donations at donor-determined amounts,
Schedule regular online giving at pre-determined amounts and cycles
Management of funds
Auto receipt
Optional info collection for followup

DONATION ACCEPTED:

PayPal accepts donations from people with or without PayPal accounts through:

PayPal Account transfers
Credit Card Processing

COST?

With PayPal’s fee structure you receive a discount if you verify your 501(c) 3 status. The regular rate is 2.9% + $0.30 but while the non-profit rate is just a wee bit less:

YOUR MONTHLY DONATIONS	YOUR FEE PER TRANSACTION	EXAMPLES


$0 to $100,000	2.2% + $0.30	$2.50 fee on a $100 donation
$100,000+	1.9% + $0.30	$2.20 fee on a $100 donation

AMAZON.COM

Amazon Payments Logo

Amazon.com offers a similar non-profit donation plan. Amazon’s no start-up cost option includes the ability to configure your own donation buttons (to be posted on your site or in your html e-mails). Amazon also provides flexibility to set fixed, minimum, or donor-determined donation amounts along with scheduling ongoing gifts.

Donors will have to either open an Amazon Payments account or have one already to use this service.

Amazon supports giving through:

Credit Cards (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Diners Club, and JCB).
Bank Account debits (only supported by Amazon FPS)
Amazon Payments balance (only supported by Amazon Simple Pay and Amazon FPS)

Cost?

Amazon charges no start-up fees, but neither do the other options listed here so that’s no big deal. The key is to compare per-payment charges. At Amazon they’re pretty similar to PayPal:

For credit card transactions >= $10: 2.9% + $0.30 for credit card
For transactions < $10: 5.0% + $0.05 for credit card

I couldn’t find good info on their charges for non-credit card transactions, but they provide a pretty good FAQ page.

FundRazr

FundRazr provides a unique option of embedding your giving links into Facebook and providing goal-oriented giving with on the fly followup charts so donors can see how the donation project is progressing.

I like this idea, but have found it to take some work to setup (though recent reviews say it’s easy now!). Still with the popularity of Facebook this could reach a lot of people on the social network.

Payment sources?

Credit Card
Debit Card
Paypal Account

Cost?

Recipients pay a fee of 4.9% + $0.30 on every payment. The fee includes all PayPal transaction fees. This is higher than either Amazon Payments or PayPal’s regular service, but the ability to integrate with Facebook is really attractive even at nearly 5% in fees per payment.

Conclusion

I like PayPal but it doesn’t hurt to have several options as long as they’re displayed in a user-friendly way. In unofficial numbers PayPal had more than 153 million accounts worldwide in 2008. Amazon has about 615 million and Facebook has over 500 million users. That puts Amazon in the lead with users by evaluating your audience may be a good idea if you just want to use one service instead of all three.

Keep in mind the fees involved. You’ll need to account for these as you keep up on your records since this will be a reduction in the total donation you receive when transferring the donations to your organization.

Do you have a different source that you use for online donations? What’s working well for you?

Great Website enhancing tool: Wibiya

Posted on September 14, 2010 by michaelshead

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out Wibiya’s handy toolbar (see a sample at the bottom of page here). This tool helps increase interactivity and keep people on your site longer. Plus there are revenue generating options integrated if you want to use them!

Wibiya provides a web toolbar that enables blogs and websites to integrate the most exciting services and web applications into their blog or website.

via About Wibiya.

Snapped4U — A tool for photographers to sell photos

Posted on July 22, 2010 by michaelshead

I remember seeing photographers doing this on campus when I was in college but it was before every soccer mom had a super camera. Now you can have a basic camera and a few business cards and “work the crowd” to make money doing what self timers and tripods once did. I’m curious how well this actually works and if people will pay $4 for a jpg of themselves. Will people they actually go and check the pictures out.

Here’s how it works:

You go out and shoot photos of people at some event where there are lots of people.
Send them to Snapped4U’s web site
They search for their images and hopefully buy lots of them.
You get paid (via PayPal) $3.50 per image they buy.
They get a jpg of the image e-mailed to them.

I like the idea behind this, but wish they had a print option as well. For four bucks it seems like they should get a print, but that would involve printing and shipping…unless they teamed up with Wal-Mart or Walgreens to provide digital delivery to a location near you!

Maybe the future of vacation photos will be something like this…your family is out in front of the St. Louis Arch having a picnic and some guy comes buy takes some pictures and gives you a card to Snapped4U. You get back to the hotel, check it out and buy a few copies, post them to Facebook and click on a button to have them both e-mailed to you and prints delivered to your neighborhood Walgreens Photo Center. When you get home, you drop by Walgreens and pick up your pictures to show the neighbors.

Here’s what Snapped4U says about themselves:

Snapped4U is about getting pictures of people, particularly the group shots they can’t get themselves. Watch for events like concerts, fairs, festivals, markets, and sporting events. Think of places such as parks, beaches, monuments, and scenic overlooks. Choose a venue, then go when it’s busy and work the crowd.

via Snapped4U – The Place for Photographers to Post and Sell Their Photographs.