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5 Ways to Promote Your Small Business This Christmas

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Ways to Promote Your Small Business This Chirstmas

Photo by Tim Douglas from Pexels

Some of you may know that aside from blogging and copywriting, I occasionaly do some marketing work too, and back in July I shared some ways that you can market your small business. With over 400,000 new companies launching during lockdown, it seemed like a good time to share some tips and now, with Christmas approaching (SORRY for mentioning the ‘C’ word in October!) I thought I’d give you some more targeted tips for helping your business to have a prosperous Christmas:

Point of Sale

Something that I’d advise many small businesses to invest in is some bespoke Christmas displays. This is especially important if you have a physical shopfront, and although you may be worried about the cost, it’s something that you’ll be able to use year after year. Having a professional display will really elevate your Christmas promotions and will look So much more inviting that just have strands of tinsel strewn about!

Send a Card

If you’re the type of business that holds address information for your clients, there’s nothing quite like a Christmas card to spread some festive cheer (and tell them about your latest offers!). There are many approaches, from online services which will send them automatically to actually handwriting cards, which is time-consuming but gives a truly personal effect. You could even just send an e-card via email, if that’s easier.

Christmas Themed Packaging

We all know how important custom packaging is for your brand. Packaging is the only thing that reaches 100% of your customers and is the first step in creating a memorable unboxing experience. Unique Christmas packaging for your products over Christmas adds a touch of luxury and class and, if coupled with a Christmas edition product, can really help create a sense of ‘exclusivity’ around your product.

Support a Local Cause

By reaching out to those less fortunate than you, you can also create awareness of your own brand at the same time. There are loads of different ways you can support charities, and it should be something you consider doing year-round, rather than just at Christmas. You could inform customers that all proceeds made from a certain range of products goes to charity, or even host a charity event like a coffee morning or brunch and encourage customers to donate with you. Just make sure you send invites beforehand!

Reward Your Loyal Followers

Depending on your audience, you may find that your followers on social media are your most engaged customers and your best brand ambassadors. Why not thank them by having offers exclusive to social media platforms? Although digital coupons and coupon codes work best with online stores, brick-and-mortar businesses can still offer print-at-home coupons that are promoted exclusively on social media. An alternative for online businesses is to create a landing page with unique offers, and again only promote this on social media.

Charity

How We Can Best Support Children Living in Poverty

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Children remain to be one of the most vulnerable members of society today. Every day, millions of children around the world experience abuse, poverty, hunger, and injustice. There are ways you can help these children even if you are far away from them. For those looking for different ways of supporting a child who is living in poverty, below are some organisations that accept support.

Singapore Children’s Society

Established in 1952, Singapore Children’s Society is an organization that is committed to protect and nurture all children, regardless of race and religion. It values commitment, compassion and caring, professionalism, openness to change, and integrity.

Its mission is to bring relief and happiness to children in need, and its vision is to be a leading-edge organisation in promoting the well-being of the child. The organization recognizes that the needs of children are evolving, and to meet those needs, charity institutions must evolve as well. Children’s Society offers four kinds of services, namely, Children and Youth Services, Vulnerable Children, Research Advocacy, and Family Services.

In 2019, the group was able to help more than 66,000 children and families in need. Children’s Society has a total of 12 centres in Singapore. To support the Singapore Children’s Society, you can apply as a volunteer or donate. To get in touch with the group, you may send an email at info@childrensociety.org.sg or call 6273 2010.

Children’s Wishing Well

Children’s Wishing Well is a non-profit and charity organisation founded in 2002. It offers a wide range of services for children and youth belonging to impoverished families in Singapore. The organization supports educational and daily living requirements of its beneficiaries and trains them so they will be able to support themselves in the future. It’s also the aspiration of the organisation that its beneficiaries will become productive members of society someday.

Children’s Wishing Well’s signature programme is a holistic enrichment initiative that provides weekly classes by professional tutors in music, sports, speech and drama, life skills, IT, and other subjects. It even organises field trips to expose children to different experiences outside of the four walls of a school. It also has a programme called Career GPS that lets young individuals go to companies to make them aware of available career options. The organisation also reaches out to companies to ask them if they can provide mentorship and work arrangements for the youths under its care. Monthly grocery shopping is also organised to ensure that the nutritional needs of the children and youth are being met. Facilities such as reading corners, computer workstations, and robotics stations are also present in Children Wishing Well’s centres for the free use of children and youths.

There are many ways you can support Children’s Wishing Well. You can sponsor a child, give gifts to children, donate to areas of need, and contribute to disaster relief efforts of the organisation. To help, you can either work as a volunteer or sponsor a child by providing specific items or giving a monetary donation. You can send them an email at info@wishingwell.org.sg.

World Vision

Child poverty

World Vision is a well-known charity organization in Singapore and the whole world with a presence in more than 100 countries. It is dedicated to helping children, families, and communities to get out of poverty and deal with the root causes of injustice through the charity programs for child support in Singapore . Though it is a Christian group, it serves all people regardless of religion, gender, race, or ethnicity. It works following the federal model, acknowledging developed countries’ ability to support people from developing nations. The organisation also holds disaster relief operations following the International Code of Conduct for providing aid during emergencies.

World Vision’s operation in Singapore started in the 1970s after its efforts to help the boat people trying to flee Vietnam when Saigon fell to communist forces. In 1984, the World Vision’s Child Sponsorship Programme was transferred from its Hong Kong office to its centre in Singapore. The group is famous for its child sponsorship programme. For just $45 a month, anyone can sponsor a child and provide him/her with basic needs and education. Apart from sponsoring a child, you can also help the organisation by making a general donation and donating to areas of need.

To get in touch with World Vision Singapore, you may send them an email at enquiries@worldvision.org.sg.

Charity

Help Stop Companies from Robbing the Poor

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Most of my readers know that I have strong socialist values and feel really strongly about equal rights for all people. Our current government has created a culture of keeping the rich rich and the poor poor, which has perpetuated food bank usage in the UK, huge levels of homelessness and the highest levels of child poverty in hundreds of years. What you might not know is that the huge tax-dodging companies which operate in the UK have a huge effect on poverty in other countries too. Companies dodge approximately £78 billion in tax in poor countries annually, stripping them of funds for vital services. Oxfam reveal that just a third of this amount would be enough to cover the healthcare that could prevent the needless deaths of eight million mothers, babies and children. Oxfam has created a powerful video to show what’s happening:

Showing it in such stark, literal terms of patients being directly deprived may seem provocative, especially when we see the part with the baby in an incubator, but the cold, hard facts are that this is exactly what happens when companies refuse to pay their taxes.

It makes me sick that even the lowest paid workers are expected to pay income tax and tax on almost everything they buy, but companies which turn over billions in profit get let off. I can’t even begin to get my head around how unfair that is and it’s time that we started demanding that the Government make changes.

Oxfam has started a petition and is asking people to follow this link and add your name to a list of people who wants to see changes happen NOW. It will take two minutes of your time and could make a difference, not only to us here in the UK, but also to people living in enforced poverty all over the world.

Do leave me a comment below if you have anything to say about the campaign or just to let me know you’re adding your name to the petition. I’m heading there to sign my name right now.

Charity

Everyone Jump For Pudsey! #JumpForPudsey

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Pudsey bbc children in needWhen I was a kid, Pudsey and Children in Need was one of the highlights of the year – we’d get to do fun things like non-uniform days and bake sales at school to raise money for Children in Need and we’d all huddle round the telly for the night when it was shown on BBC One. Children in Need is now in it’s THIRTY SIXTH year (I know, it’s older than me!) having raised over £600 million since 1980 and this year they want us all to get a bit more active to help with the fundraising. Whether it’s leaps, launches, bounds or hops; the goal is for the UK to spring its way to one million jumps, turning jumps in to pounds. Boots is calling on people to get jumping with friends or family, at work or at home next week and in particular on Jump Day on the 26th of October.

The guys at Children in Need said “Helping to reach the one million jumps will be thousands of gymnasts from up and down the country who will be taking part in Jump for Pudsey challenges being staged in British Gymnastics registered clubs and leisure centres.  British Gymnastics has also created five easy jumps challenges for adults and children to do wherever they are, which can be found on boots.com and in the Jump Journal – available free from most Boots UK stores.

British artistic gymnast and five-time Olympic medal winner Max Whitlock is lending his support to the campaign to get as many people jumping as possible. Max says: “I think the Jump for Pudsey campaign is a brilliant idea! It’s great to have a campaign that not only raises money for such an incredible charity but also helps people keep fit whilst having fun. Even just a small amount of exercise like jumping can make a significant difference in helping people become healthier and happier. I’m sure lots of people will enjoy taking part and I know lots of gymnasts will be joining in and challenging each other to raise as much money as possible.” Many of Max’s fellow top Olympic gymnasts will also be showing their support for Jump for Pudsey by encouraging the public to get involved.”

Once you’ve done your jumps you can head over to the Boots totaliser to log all of your efforts with them and help get the total to one million! Jumping for Pudsey is such a simple and fun way to get involved, stay active, and most importantly raise money for disadvantaged kids in the UK and we’ve been getting our jump on in aid of this excellent cause, as well as roping in a whole bunch of Sausage and BB’s friends from school – take a look at some of our jumps below:

via GIPHY

pudsey1 pudsey2 pudsey3

If you need a bit of inspiration into how to get a bit of bounce in your step, British Gymnastics have put together a fabulous guide to encourage you to jump, which you can see here…

Jump for Pudsey

People are being encouraged to share their leaps with #JumpForPudsey  and make a donation of £3 by texting JUMP to 70313, or via mydonate.bt.com/events/jumpforpudsey. You can also find out more at boots.com/childreninneed.

We’d love to see your jumps too, so don’t forget to share all of your tweets, instagrams and Facebook posts with us so that we can follow along.

Charity

Impact of climate change on agriculture may be underestimated, study suggests

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climate changeIn the UK with our well-stocked supermarket shelves, it’s easy to forget that many parts of the world are affected by a lack of food. In fact, it’s estimated that nearly 800 million people across the globe don’t have access to the nourishment they need to enable them to lead healthy lives.

Children can be especially badly hit. On its website, the charity humanappeal.org.uk highlights the shocking statistic that each year, over three million children die because of malnutrition. One of the factors contributing to food shortages is extreme weather. From flooding to droughts, a range of environmental factors can affect food supplies.

New research

Research in this area generally focusses on how weather changes hit crop yields in particular areas. However, a recent study by a team from Brown and Tufts universities suggested this may underestimate the impact of climate change. Publishing their findings in the journal Nature Climate Change, the scientists stated that as well as looking at how much food can be harvested in given units of land under particular weather conditions, it’s important to examine the number of crops farmers choose to plant each growing season and how much land they cultivate.

Senior research author Leah VanWey warned that looking at crop yields alone can miss significant factors that affect overall food output. She stated that this approach omits farmers’ reactions to climate shocks. For example, farmers might respond to falling profits by reducing the amount of land they use. They may also be less inclined to grow two successive crops in the same field within a single growing season.

‘Worrisome’

Taking these factors into account, the team looked specifically at Mato Grosso, a state in Brazil that produces around a tenth of the world’s soybeans. They suggested that if current trends continue, an average temperature increase of just one degree will cause a nine to 13 per cent drop in the production of soy and corn.

Commenting on this finding, research leader Avery Cohn said: “This is worrisome given that the temperature in the study region is predicted to rise by as much as two degrees by mid-century under the range of plausible greenhouse gas emissions scenarios.”

Creating incentives

According to the researchers, one way to reduce the negative reactions of farmers to climate shocks may be to increase incentives for growing crops. For example, if governments subsidise or insure farmers for growing particular foods, this could have the effect of minimising cuts in production.

With major climate change widely predicted for the coming decades, governments and organisations around the world are searching for innovative ways to minimise the problems this could cause for food production.