KWC is a boutique consultancy focused on providing their clients with a personalised approach to achieving and maximising their philanthropic and engagement goals. It offers the following services:

• Fundraising and Campaigns
• Alumni and Stakeholder engagement
• Coaching and Skills Development
• CSR Strategy
• Philanthrophic Advising

The site is built using WordPress adopting an off the shelf theme with functionality provided via standard plugins to deliver rich and engaging user experience. Web hosting, domain registration and domain email service is incorporated in this service.

Please get in touch if you would like to find out more.

The post Karen Cairney’s new KWC Consulting website appeared first on Sproul-Digital.

Image courtesy of Sarah Wilson @BeaHorn254

Harlaw Hydro delivers a fixed return for investors and with profits invested into the village Balerno in Edinburgh. I have been involved in two phases of this work. The first to support community crowd funding then, once the hydro was in place and went into operation,  provide real time generation data online.

Phase 1:

The original website to develop Harlaw Hydro digital project was to support community outreach program and social engagement to deliver investors and investment. Using a combination of the website and social media the digital channel supported a hugely succesful crowd funding campaign.  Harlaw Hydro overreached its initial funding requirement and became the first ever fully equity funded project of its kind.

Phase 2:

The second phase of the project moved away from digital outreach and into delivering digital service once the hydro was up and running.

‘We want to be able to deliver live generation data online’.

The first question to overcome was ‘Could it be done’ followed quickly by ‘How could it be done’. 

Given the infrastructure, we needed to understand how we would connect to the generator to extract the data then how to present the data on the website in real time. It took a bit of time to work out all of the above, sourcing the technical skills mix to deliver what was required and time to implement the solution.

Today (1 September 2015) is the official launch of Harlaw Hydro and I’m delighted that the real time Power Meter beta is in place. To our knowledge this is a unique solution and presents the information in an easy to understand format whilst also being responsive to different screen sizes & mobile devices. And although there was development time required to interface and extract the data the visual aspects have been delivered through available WordPress plugins.

The model we have used is scalable so if you have a similar project you need support with please get in touch.

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“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action”.

I would like to think that this does not represent a significant shift change in behavior to many marketeers as I suspect most marketing professionals will have been trying to achieve this for many years. I think the difference now however is the opportunity offered by digital has increased the opportunity to do this more effectively and across niche areas. In its simplest form content marketing is the recognition that marketing needs to align with consumer behavior and more importantly digital consumption.

NewsCred have provided the following presentation that outlines the key aspects of content marketing.

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The social web is an opportunity for you to lift off and develop a highly effective personal digital brand – your personal brand should emphasise who you are, what you do and, when you get it right, what you are going to do next.

At present we have access to an ever evolving rich web ecosystem which provides a fantastic opportunity to greatly enhance your accessibility and visibility. And the nature of much of the technology means that achieving this is very much within your gift.

If you can take the time to understand how this works and identity how this will work for you there are considerable benefits available and value to create.

The benefits an effective personal brand will achieve will include:

• A rich seem of clients you want
• Improved partnerships and networks
• Points of difference and market niche
• Recognition and prestige
• Higher perceived value
• Stronger reputation

Where to start

The challenge is that the social web provides a vast range of opportunities. Your challenge is to identify what you want to achieve and let your objectives define the channels you optimise for.

When considering your personal brand and how you manage this online it is important to ask yourself the following questions:

1. What am I try to achieve?
2. How am I perceived?
3. How do I want to be perceived?
4. What do I want to be associated with?
5. Who do I wish to engage and why?
6. How much effort can I dedicate to this?
7. Who am I trying to influence?
8. What are they looking for and how can I help them?
9. How much time and money do I want to invest?
10. What benefit to me will it deliver?

Once you have answered these ten questions you should have a useful framework to develop your personal digital brand.

What to start with

A useful place to start is a personal website or blog (often these terms can be interchangeable so don’t get hung up on terminology) as whatever else you are going to do this is likely to provide framework to support your other activity. Other key recommendations for getting started include:

• Content – valuable content allows you to earn trust and if you understand how it is being used allows you to evolve moving forward
• Make sure your content is focused on your readers
• Don’t forget email – it is still the default tool of business
• Focus on points of difference and a niche offering
• A bad design or lack of attention to detail will undermine your proposition
• Become part of the conversation, listen, contribute and help others
• Share your insights and opinion
• Remember the importance of Googling and being found by search engines
• Target terms and services that you want to be found for and from where
• Think mobile – make sure your solution doesn’t present barriers to mobiles & other devices
• LinkedIn – make the most of it
• Follow others, connect, contribute and help
• Measure your progress and channel your learning back to help you improve

What next

Hopefully the hints and tips above are a useful starting point but please get in touch if you require further information. Over the next quarter I hope to follow up this blog with some options on what can be achieved for different budget levels. Please follow the Sproul-Digital blog for more information.

And some additional contextual advice and guidance on personal branding can be found via the following links:

• 5 key ways to building your personal brand, Huffington Post
• Building your personal brand, PWC
• The definitive guide to building your personal brand, Forbes

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Our events are free to attend and at the time although the services looked very similar at the front end I found constraints around the back end in services and flexibility with Eventzilla.

However, for some of our animation workshops this year we moved from free online reservation (our cinema model) to taking online payment (our workshop model) and that’s where these services start to make their money as they charge a percentage to facilitate this.

I did further investigation of the two services and am pleased to report that many of the issues and frustrations I had with Eventzilla previously have been rectified and overall the service has been improved – in my view they have closed the gap considerably.

That said, I still elected to go with Eventbrite for our paid for online tickets – although it is marginally more expensive the process is simpler and it can get set up more quickly. So on this occasion we elected to stick with Eventbrite plus they’ve created a nice little online booking widget on the twenty-fourteen wordpress theme which allows online booking to be embedded as a feature on the website which is a rather nice touch!

Visit the Balerno Village Screen website to see how it works.

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‘This is Edinburgh’ is its new city centre campaign  www.thisisedinburgh.org.uk  #thisisedinburgh. The campaign is designed to attract families and shoppers back into the city centre. Running for the next two years, it is projected that the £1 million campaign will stimulate an additional £50 million spend within the city centre over that time. 

The adverts are good although I don’t necessarily identify with Girls in Town as shopping and dining isn’t often top of my to do list. That said, the films are a useful reminder of what is on offer in Edinburgh city centre.

However, if you’ve never been to Edinburgh before and what to get a snapshot of what makes it one of the world’s most beautiful cities you should watch the film musical ‘Sunhine on Leith‘ – the trailer for the film below gives a taster of what’s on offer.

The Edinburgh vistas are fantastic and all using the music and lyrics from the brilliant Proclaimers – the only thing I’d say is missing is a rendition of the song Sunshine on Leith courtesy of the fans of Hibs (and I’m not even a Hibee).

Taken all together it reinforces what a fantastic city Edinburgh is to live in with so so much to offer.

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On Saturday the venture was picked up in the Scotsman:

‘SCOTLAND’S first community-run hydro-electric energy plant is set to be made a reality after its backers managed to raise the entire funding using an innovative new crowd-funding scheme‘.

In 12 weeks Harlaw Hydro has raised £333,000 from over 200 community shareholders.

Social media especially Twitter @harlaw_hydro has performed a key role in raising awareness of this investment opportunity whilst the website has delivered an effective transaction service whilst also telling the story of this innovative project.

Simple yet very effective. Visit the Harlaw Hydro website for more information.

The post Harlaw Hydro crowd-funding success appeared first on Sproul-Digital.

• Site design, set up and hosting
• Content management
• Information architecture and content development
• Domain transfer, set up and email set up
• Social media set up and integration including Twitter targetting and engagement of community stakeholders
• Training and handover to client

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• Domain sourcing and registration
• Site design
• Implement site design on a content management system
• Ensure site is mobile optimised
• Set up three email accounts on the domain
• Content development
• Content managment training and handover
• Social media review and discussion of ‘social’ possibilites for marketing your business
• Content audit for search engine optimisation
• Advice on how to develop site for Google local search on mobile.

Please get in touch if you would like to find out more.

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