Rita Ferrandino, Arc Capital Development partner and Chair of the Sarasota County, FL, democratic party is an official delegate to the convention as well as Executive Director of the Elementary Science Coalition.

A long-time education advocate, Rita has made many trips to Washington, D.C. to lobby for increased attention and funding for elementary science education in U.S. public schools. Rita and her business partner, Kevin Custer, are in Denver this week to “capture key elements of the Democratic Education Platform and responses/reactions from delegates, elected officials, education industry leaders and local voters.”

Rita will be posting convention news, interviews, updates in text and video on her DNC Education 2008 - Education Policy News from the Democratic National Convention blog throughout the week.

With a potential Democratic administration on the horizon, educators and education reformers will be watching how the Democrats’ educational policy agenda further develops during the course of the convention.

Kudos to Rita and her team. She will be featured tomorrow (August 26th) in a video post at the New York Times. Look for her there after you check out her blog.

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Yesterday I participated in a webinar sponsored by Target Marketing Magazine that focused on getting the most out of your emails to customers. The presenters were sharing the results of a study across four vertical markets. I learned some amazing facts such as:

1. 30% of marketers do not send an email to interested prospects within 30 days of the prospect making herself known to the company through a subscribe/send me more information process.
2.  Another 25% do not send the first email within 9 days.
3. 60% do not send welcome messages.
4. 70% collect enough information in the sign-up process to customize messages and then don’t use the information.

I don’t know about your experience, but the educational publishers I have worked with spend enormous amounts of time crafting their email communication with their customers. Although, K-12 publishing was not one of the vertical markets surveyed in this instance, it does make me wonder what kind of waste would we see in our own industry? Read the rest of this entry »

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As school districts across the country have come clean about their real graduation rates in recent years, there has been anecdotal evidence from both colleges and businesses of the need to put newly minted high school graduates through a series of remedial courses to tune up their academic skills before they can handle first year college coursework or move into the ranks of workers.

George Winship, editor of The Anderson Valley Post in California writes about how public school failure financially impacts California citizens. Read the rest of this entry »

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 In most small companies sales and marketing is the responsibility of the same person. Often the person in charge has been with the company for some time and what they know about sales and marketing has been learned on the job. Sales and marketing are joined at the hip. In fact your strategic sales plan should be an outgrowth of your strategic marketing plan. Although there are multiple marketing objectives such as investing in customer relationships, building community, establishing your company as content expert in your field, etc., the fundamental purpose of marketing is (drum roll, please) to create sales opportunities.

It is amazing to me how many companies operate without full understanding of the answers to the following questions. So what are the key questions that should be answered for successful sales and marketing to occur?

1. Who is the customer?
2. What problem does our product solve for the customer?
3. How do we reach the customer? Read the rest of this entry »

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photo credit: kobakou

This past week I was privileged to spend a few days with a client and their customer evangelists at the company’s annual User’s Conference. More than most companies who usually pay only lip service to listening to their customers, this company actually walks that talk. The result is a unique partnership between a company and it’s user community.

There was a tangible feeling of shared ownership in the product as well as the relationships between company and users. The users were there to learn more about the product and to give their input into the company’s strategic goals and objectives.

Not only did the company listen, but they created multiple opportunities (formal and non-formal) to listen to the advice of their customers and to thank them. What is remarkable is that the company is so open to having difficult as well as positive conversations with their customers. They really want to know when they get things right and when they get things wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

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