Simplify Your Internet Bill Format for Nonprofit Seamlessly

Internet bill format for Nonprofit

i'm john hanna for citytv.net and we have alan pressel joining us from los angeles california thanks for joining us sir my pleasure john so alan tell us a little bit about your background well i've been in management consulting pretty much my whole career after getting an mba from ucla and studying at the london school of economics and brandeis university i worked for arthur anderson which of course uh is now defunct but uh after that started uh as an entrepreneur i created uh co-created a company called icube out of cambridge massachusetts which basically helped fortune 500 companies create strategic software applications and convert the applications that they already had into new platforms such as the internet nice so let's talk about that for a minute here just wanted to get sense of uh how that was able to be acquired and marketed so we're looking at what you did that went well well one of the things that went well was we bootstrapped the organization we didn't get any financing until our initial public offering in 1998 so for um about six years prior to that uh we basically made sure that our revenues preceded our expenses we made sure to sign contracts with companies uh and and get a certain deposit from them before we incurred any expense in delivering those those projects uh we worked with northrop grumman with the royal dutch navy with mcdonald douglas with some of the largest corporations and government agencies in the world and created sophisticated software applications to meet their strategic needs nice see that's another thing um most of the companies would actually be out there uh with debt you know so it's kind of tough to manage whenever your company has more debt than actually the money coming in so it's a little bit of money management and and um the management of the company itself right yes indeed and we were also uh able to create some very sophisticated technology to automate a lot of the process for example with icube we created what we called re-architecting software to take uh software that companies had usually spent millions or tens of millions of dollars on and therefore had a large investment in but they were on old platforms might be mainframe it might be client server and basically to re-architect or migrate them into the new technologies ultimately the the internet uh after i cubed went public i actually created another company which is my current company called originally called charity finders it was created in 2000 to help non-profits to use the internet effectively uh we've recently rebranded as powersite123 and so we've for the last seven years or so worked with both nonprofits and for-profits to really help them create world-class interactive websites to do that just like with iq we created some very sophisticated technology it's a website platform that enables us to easily build and then our clients to easily maintain a world-class interactive website and social media there you go see that's the thing um another thing about um websites i mean you know there is this notion that um you build it they will come you know it's like you know you put out your website how did you uh accomplish the uh getting the word out of your new company now the uh the powersite123 well it's a great point that if you build that they will come as is actually not true in the website and social media world in fact there are a lot of things that one can do that we've done and that we encourage our clients to do to drive people to you online john in the old world companies like ours and our clients would have to go out and find their own clients and employees and board members and event attendees partners resellers and other constituents but today increasingly those people are trying to find you online so there's now a new area called inbound marketing which is designed to help people find you online to me there are three important goals of inbound marketing one is to maximize the number of leads that are the number of people that find you online second is to maximize the quality of those leads because otherwise you're going to get a lot of power kickers and third is to maximize what's called your conversion rate your conversion rate is the percentage of your online visitors that become converted into clients or event attendees or whatever it is that you want them to do most organizations that i meet with have a conversion rate that's pretty close to zero so that's bad news but the good news is there's a lot of room for improvement there's a lot of ways to accomplish those three goals inbound marketing usually is comprised of a combination of search engine optimization which of course is using techniques within your website to boost your search engine standing and therefore get more traffic to and business through your website it also includes search engine marketing which are techniques outside of your website that can also boost your search understanding it involves pay-per-click which is basically buying your way to the top go for non-profits there are ways of doing that for free it also involves creating compelling relevant content on the web whether that be through blogging tweeting facebook posts newsletters articles white papers and other thought pieces and even doing interviews like like this so those techniques combined with your social media combined with your website really comprise inbound marketing those are what we those have been what we have done to drive traffic to and create clients for our our business online and they're also interestingly the exact same techniques that we use with our clients to help them drive more business online as well okay now we're gonna wrap up with the uh part one of a two-part uh interview with you um we're gonna be talking about the internet management for non-profits the book that you call authored um and and the point is that it's not just going to be for non-profits right they can use these strategies we're going to be talking in the second part um that they can adapt to for-profit companies right that's exactly right john all right awesome so um where can people find you so that way we can wrap up this uh part one uh they can find us online at .powersite123.com that's powersitesitee1 alrighty this concludes part one of the two-part interview with alan pressa and i'm john hanna for cdtb.net