Financial Sustainability

If you're wondering why there hasn't been much posting activity for the past week or so, it's not because I've hit writer's block. The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity, between deadlines at work and trying everything possible to ward off insolvency for one of the charities I'm involved with. I'll put up some of the things we've learnt once things ease up. Hopefully find out this week if my efforts have come to anything.

The credit crunch is playing its part here, and safe bets suddenly look like big risks when there's no margin for error. The real challenge has been trying to create viable commercial revenue streams for a charity that traditionally hasn't had any. A lot of lateral thinking later, we might be getting somewhere. The difficulties lie in financial modeling for a space that hasn't really got much else to use as reference.

Moving a charity from being grant dependent to becoming financially sustainable requires more than just identifying revenue streams. It requires a change of focus and ways of working. It requires new management skills, and new engagement skills. Dealing with corporations is a whole different exercise to dealing with government or third sector bodies. Lots of challenges but exciting nevertheless. Where there's a will there's a way... and in this case there definitely is a will!!

Watch this space for an overview of what I'm learning about the realities of financial sustainability and business remodelling in the third sector...

Life After The Credit Crunch

Here's a presentation with some great observations on life after the credit crunch, collated by Ines Seidel.

Life After the Crunch

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social life)

In summary, there's the things we already know like there are more fears, and people are cutting down and shopping more frugally, but what I really like is that she has drawn out some personal things like the fact that people are discovering family as they look for more free things to do, and kids are learning to accept no for an answer.

For fashion retailers however, there's a great point in here about the need for clothing that will survive trends and frequent use over the next couple of years.

Customer-centric Innovation

Great presentation on customer-centric innovation. The drivers for this are that traditional innovation is broken and the nature of competition is changing. Think left-wing rather than direct.

Customer Centric Retail Innovation - Bucharest May 29, 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: horizon centricity)

Your Essential Guide To Social Media

As a business you still probably don't care about Social Media. Your marketing department is still churning out brochures and adverts and telling you that this is all far future stuff. Only kids mess around with the internet. If so, they're killing your business. The UK alone has 17.1 million active internet users in the 16-54 age bracket - that's your primary consumer base. Worse still, Universal McCann research shows that 1 million of them have shared an opinion about a brand or product within their social networks. Trusted opinions are the number 1 factor in the purchasing decision-making process. Do you have any idea what they're saying about you, let alone any clue about how to manage that conversation?

Well for starters, you really need some idea about what Social Media is, and while I put together something simple that's specific to businesses, here's a decent guide.

The Essential Guide to Social Media - Upload a Document to Scribd

Developing Knowledge Sharing Communities For Businesses

One of the biggest problems facing most organisations is a combination of poor internal information sharing mechanisms and a lack of a collaboration culture. Since both are key foundations of innovation, this issue has serious consequences for organisational growth and success.

In my experience I've found that this problem is tackled one of two ways...

1. Primarily through chucking technology at it - usually some kind of intranet with out of the box functionality, and
2. Occasionally through culture change programmes.

There is often a belief amongst those implementing culture and business change that the change is technology independent. Conversely a lot of user experience professionals believe that behavioural issues can simply be addressed by making sure the interface and functionality of systems are compelling. Fact is that in this context, neither works without the other.

Driving highly collaborative and social sharing behaviours is pointless if the mechanisms for capturing and disseminating collective knowledge do not exist satisfactorily; and it is similarly pointless providing document sharing capability without a culture that encourages and rewards participating and interaction.

My advice is to develop and evolve your technology and culture together, with technology just preceding culture change activity in order to facilitate the human journey from hoarding documents and content, to sharing, to evolving it, to interacting socially around it.

I've created a 3 step Knowledge Management maturity model to show you how you might set this up for your business by increasing the richness of technological and social interaction over time.

1. Information Management - The journey starts with Information Management through using fixed and free tags along with decent search capability to surface content. Fixed tagging helps structure content. Encouraging free tagging begins to make people feel they can interact with the content, which sets them up nicely for the next stage.
2. Knowledge Management - Adding rating and commenting begins to allow qualitative evolution of information, which is essentially the core of knowledge management and also embeds the rudiments of inter-personal interaction around knowledge that facilitates off-line niche or special interest interaction.
3. Social Interaction - Finally adding presence information and real time discussion (chat) capability combined with offline community days begins to drive widespread and cross-functional social interaction around information and knowledge sharing, which is really where you want to be as an organisation.

Hope it helps!

6 Deepening Consumer and Retail Industry Trends For 2008 into 2009

Let’s start with a quick look at some of the key trends in consumer behaviour and the retail industry. I’ll pick out 3 each.

3 Deepening Trends in Consumer Behaviour:

1. Customers are becoming more demanding – the Web 2.0 revolution has provided a forum for sharing opinions to the point where consumers really do call the shots. They expect choice and convenience or will go elsewhere.
2. Social Media online is exploding – and is becoming a key vehicle for both strategic marketing and customer engagement.
3. Premium products and services still sell well and Green is becoming iconic – many of the less price sensitive consumers are still highly style and status conscious, and consumers are going to increasingly great lengths to boycott brands that have poor eco-credentials

Ok, so that’s 3 consumer trends. How about the Retail Industry in general?

3 Deepening Trends in the Retail Industry:

1. The credit crunch is getting worse – and negatively impacting retailer profits
2. The e-channel is still growing fast – online spending in July for example reached £4.8 billion, up 80% on last year to a new all-time high. Retailers are expecting a major shift to online this Christmas.
3. The leaders are merging channels – and providing seamless brand and customer experiences across them all. Consumers in return are becoming rapidly less tolerant of pricing, availability or service differentials online and offline.

(Originally posted by me on the Charteris Business Blog)

Cross-Channel Retailing - ARC Retail Presentation 2008

I attended the ARC Retail Conference this morning and gave a breakfast briefing with some of my Charteris colleagues on Cross-Channel Retailing - see slides below.

It covers 3 critical challenges that retailers are facing right now and how they could start to address them by developing low cost, high benefit customer propositions through leveraging the channel assets they already have. Here's the slides. If you want to know more just drop me an email and we'll be more than happy to have a chat.

Cross-Channel Retailing: Leveraging Multi-Channel Assets V1

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: multi-channel retail)