10x your productivity with AI tools from Potential.com

Potential.com, renowned pioneer in global empowerment and innovation platforms, takes a giant leap forward with the unveiling of its AI Business Toolbox. This revolutionary ensemble marries human intellect with artificial intelligence to supercharge productivity and efficiency by a staggering 10x.

Our newest creation embodies the concept of Augmented Intelligence, a synergistic partnership between human innovation and AI capabilities. This ensures employees, entrepreneurs, and communities remain in the driver’s seat, fueling change and amplifying their impact. 

“The essence of our AI Business Toolbox transcends technology. Its core purpose lies in human empowerment,” affirms Shadi Banna, CEO of Potential.com. “We aim to simplify tasks, provide valuable insights, and enhance collaboration, empowering everyone to achieve more. As individuals prosper, so do businesses and communities.”

The AI Business Toolbox from Potential.com debuts with 25 pioneering tools across diverse business operations:
– Sales and Marketing Automation: Refine your outreach.
– Strategy and Business Model Generation: Engineer robust growth blueprints.
– Hiring and Talent Development Tools: Discover and cultivate top-tier talent.
– Custom AI Coaches and Mentors: Obtain tailored insights and guidance.

These tools aim to foster collaboration, sharpen decision-making, and abolish inefficiencies, enabling workers to concentrate on strategic tasks and deliver enhanced value to their organizations.

New AI tools join our suite weekly, providing organizations the flexibility to customize tools in alignment with their unique business processes. To ensure data confidentiality, organizations can opt to host these tools locally.

Step into a new era of work with our AI Business Toolbox. Empower your workforce, supercharge productivity, and unlock unprecedented potential in your business.

Potential.com cordially invites you to a free trial of the AI Business Toolbox to witness its transformative impact firsthand. 

For more information, please visit ai.potential.com. 

About Potential.com: 

As an award-winning global EdTech social enterprise, Potential.com harnesses the power of AI to collaborate with organizations in driving socio-economic empowerment initiatives, including sustainability, job creation, and entrepreneurship development. 

Governments and top-tier brands worldwide trust Potential.com’s groundbreaking AI-powered empowerment SaaS platform to launch tailored programs that aid their citizens and customers in launching start-ups, growing businesses, or advancing their careers. 

The post Potential.com Revolutionizes Work with AI Business Toolbox: Unleashing the Future Today appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

Productivity tools can be utilized to your needs and increase your online productivity. In this article, we will be giving you guidelines of how to start using these tools to your own benefit. 

See also: Productivity skills: How to be more productive

Any individual or enterprise should learn how to have an increase in their productivity, professionalism and more flexible usage of applications as well as a safe backup and easy access to data. 

Productivity Tools to Help You Organise Yourself

Do you often lose track of tasks? Do you tend to forget important meetings and events? Is it a hassle to keep track of those sticky notes and papers? You can finally stop worrying. The following applications can be used to make your life easier. 

Here are some applications that were made to help you become more organized. 

1. ClickUp: ClickUp is an organization app that offers a comprehensive suite of productivity tools, allowing users to manage tasks, projects, goals, and notes all in one place, streamlining workflows and increasing efficiency.
2. Evernote: Evernote is an advanced note-taking platform that can help in creating notebooks specific to the category of the notes. As well as tagging the notes accordingly for easier access. One huge benefit of Evernote is its flexibility in organizing to-do lists and assigning reminders and alarms to them. Another huge advantage of Evernote is its synchronization through all devices which helps you access your notes from almost any platform or through the web. A non-expensive addition to the Evernote set is the Moleskine custom-made notebook to easily scan your to-do lists and notes and then convert them to Evernote data. 
3. WunderList: WunderList works similarly to Evernote, except that it handles To-do lists and reminders in a way that is slightly different. Its sharing and comment section functionalities make it the perfect platform for assigning a task list to team members and hearing their opinions or progress. 
4. OneNote: OneNote is a free Microsoft platform that uses the concept of a notebook, where your notebooks can be renamed after subjects or categories according to your needs. An advantage that OneNote has in many touch-enabled devices, is the sketching functionality, where you can use a touch pen to take down notes and keep them in your handwriting or convert them to computer font. 
5. IFTTT: IFTTT stands for IF THIS THEN THAT, this application helps in creating automated tasks that work without your need to open the app or supervise it. For example, setting an alarming notification on a specific day, or writing a conditional command to post a specific update on your social media. 

Organizing has never been an easier task with these applications and productivity tools.  

Productivity Tools to Help You Stay Focused

In today’s fast-paced and digitally connected world, productivity tools and apps have become essential companions to help individuals stay focused and accomplish more in their daily lives. These innovative solutions provide a range of features designed to enhance concentration, efficiency, and task management.

One popular tool is the Pomodoro Technique, implemented through apps like Strict Workflow, Forest, or Focus@Will, which encourage users to work in short, dedicated bursts of intense focus, followed by brief breaks. These apps utilize timers, soothing background sounds, or even virtual trees growing as a visual representation of progress, all aimed at reducing distractions and boosting productivity.

For individuals seeking to tame their digital clutter and maintain laser-like focus, tools such as Stayfocusd, Freedom, or Cold Turkey provide website and app blockers, helping to eliminate distractions by temporarily restricting access to social media, gaming sites, or other time-wasting platforms.

Essential Google Tools You Should Know About

Google Workspace, formerly known as G Suite, is a powerful suite of productivity tools offered by Google that has revolutionized the way individuals and teams work together. Google Drive is also perfect for storing all your data without worrying about backing them up or losing them due to an unexpected shutdown. 

1. Google Docs: Google Docs is a document writing application that automatically saves your content while working through your document. Google Docs has almost all the functionalities needed for a Word document and even more, can be added using free third-party add-ons that can customize your documents evermore. One advantage of Google Docs is that a group of people can edit or comment simultaneously in real-time, which can be a great platform for those teams and groups that communicate online and need a writing platform to present ideas. 
2. Google Sheets: Google Sheets can be one of the most organized sheet platforms. It has the same advantage as all the other Google Office suite programs. It is highly portable, stored on a cloud and multiple users’ collaboration has never been easier. You can also export the data to an Excel spreadsheet for maximum compatibility on most platforms. 
3. Google Slides: Google Slides has a very simple user interface in contrast to PowerPoint. Google Slides also function more like Apple Mac’s Keynote interface, which is known for creating visually appealing slides. All other functionalities of Google office suite are also available for slides as well as improved web publishing and sharing functionalities. 

Using Google Workspace would significantly increase productivity, especially in teams. 

Productivity Tools for Marketing and Advertising

As individuals, corporates, and SMEs, Social Media has become a part of the daily routine and a vital pillar of successful marketing and advertising campaigns. Many social media platforms offer paid services to advertise your business or products. In this course, you will learn about methods to utilize social media platforms without paying any fees. 

Marketing and Advertising can be improved using the following: 

Social Media: On social media platforms, there are several keys to increasing social profiles: 

1. Creative Content Writing: Writing the usual and common posts may attract a small set of a possibly huge audience. Therefore, writing content that may be interactive, engaging and concise may increase your followers’ interest. 
2. Graphical Visualization: Visual aids are the key to your audiences’ hearts. Visual aids are used in presentations, conferences, speeches and many more. They help the audience grasp more quickly on the content being advertised or presented. 
3. Knowing your audience: Depending on your type of business, your audience will differ. Therefore, it is recommended to identify the audience that you’re targeting. This helps in identifying the type of advertisement that shall be used. 

Search engine optimization (SEO): SEOs are tools that help in putting websites and blogs on the top of the search engine lists. SEO applications such as Google AdWords help in easily pushing your website forward to the top of the list, but unfortunately, it is not free. Therefore, using keywords in the coding of your website or blog would help in advertising your website without any costs. 

Utilizing and taking advantage of free social media and SEO tools as productivity tools are a must to help you become more productive. The tools offered by Smallpdf Templates library will simplify your work life and help you keep it more organized, which can also be added here. But they will also help you stay more competitive on the market, by discovering and using the hundreds of professional, free-of-cost templates created to speed up work.
You can select from the wide range of business templates, personal reference letters, and standard or printable invoice template that will assist you in doing things in a simpler, faster, smarter way, no matter if it’s for your professional or personal life.

Productivity Tools to Help You Collect Data

ScrapingBee

Looking to gain an edge over your online competitors? Tired of spending countless hours on lead generation, endlessly copying and pasting contact details? Or perhaps you want a deeper understanding of how your customers behave when they visit your website. In any case, ScrapingBee’s web scraping service can help.

ScrapingBee’s simple API allows users to ‘scrape’ any website and returns the data in a neat, structured format — all without any of the technical hassles usually involved in the process. What kind of data is most commonly collected using a scraper? A few examples include:

• Product information, such as price, description, and availability, from e-commerce websites
• Real estate listings, including property details and images, from real estate websites
• Job postings and company information from job search and recruitment websites
• News articles and other content from news websites
• User reviews and ratings from review websites
• Stock prices and financial data from financial websites

Better yet, ScrapingBee’s easy-to-use tool can rotate proxies and avoid rate limiting, reducing the chances of your scraping attempts being blocked. With ScrapingBee, business owners can access (and harness) an entire universe of data while saving heaps of time

Two Common Applications that Improve Event Organization 

We live in an age of technology, time has become a precious asset, and customer convenience is a necessity for a successful business. Therefore, if you or an enterprise usually plan conferences and events, as well as look for feedback from your attendees, then the productivity apps that are about to be introduced would benefit you. 

Here are the two productivity applicationss for improving event organization: 

1. Survey Monkey: Survey Monkey is an online survey tool that helps you in creating fully customizable software as well as the option to use previously made templates. It is a user-friendly interface and reliable interface that is used by many entities due to its high flexibility. 
2. Google Forms: Google Forms is another addition of Google Workspace, it includes different sorts of options and tools that can be added to your forms, unlike survey monkey, Google Forms is mainly used for RSVP when hosting events. It can also be used for applications. An advantage that you get from using Google Forms is that it saves you a lot of time by building statistics and organizing the data automatically, which makes data entry an easier job to handle. 

Surveys and RSVPs are requirements for any conference or event. You can now easily use them with these free platforms. 

Productivity Tools to Help You Communicate Better

How to utilize free communication platforms increase the communication methods between both teams and individuals?

Communication is the core of a successful project. It also gives more flexibility and ease of access to information, especially to those who travel a lot or work internationally. Therefore, utilizing the following applications may help in improving communication and sharing data. 

Here are two useful productivity tools for improving communication: 

1. Skype:  Skype is an online VOIP application that allows voice and video calls over the Internet. It also allows data transfers and video group chats which are all free of cost. One huge benefit of using Skype is its excellent connectivity and easily set up internet-based conferences. A huge advantage of skyping is that it allows sharing screens, which means that you can now give your presentation from home or anywhere outside the office. 
2. WhatsApp: WhatsApp has become a part of every smartphone. Everyone who is familiar with chatting and relies on it for communication recognizes WhatsApp. A huge advantage of WhatsApp is the interface for group chat. In case you were a team leader or a team member, you can easily communicate with the rest of the team, use voice and video calls, or even share media that gets automatically saved to the group’s conversation. 

Communication has never been easier with those two applications. 

Seven Important Features to Look for in an Email Manager Application 

Here are some major features to look for in an email manager and enhance your productivity:

1. Email Filtering: The software should allow you to set up rules and filters to automatically sort incoming emails into relevant folders or apply specific actions. It also includes several junk filtering mechanisms that help in cleaning the inbox from spam-based emails. 
2. Extensions: Adding third-party extensions to enhance your email management experience, even more, is now an easy task. Theme Packs can also be used. 
3. Saved Replies: It allows users to create and store pre-written responses, saving time and effort when frequently responding to common inquiries or requests.
4. Cloud Support: When attaching files that are too large for an email, the client automatically offers you the option to upload to a cloud service that would allow you to then share a link to the file in your email. 
5. Cross-platform compatibility: Works on all the common Operating systems and devices with the ability to synchronize. 
6. Security: If you handle confidential emails and messages that contain sensitive information, then look for a secure back-end platform that protects your inbox from any unauthorized access. 
7. Integration with other productivity tools: Consider software that seamlessly integrates with your calendar, task management apps, and other tools you use regularly.

One of the major free email managers in the industry is Mozilla Thunderbird. 

Thunderbird: is considered one of the top free email managers, Thunderbird is the easy answer to saving time when browsing emails, saving them, or looking for old emails. It can easily filter all the unnecessary emails, it also provides an important function which is the ability to add multiple email accounts and manage them separately or all together. Mozilla Thunderbird also possesses all the features mentioned earlier.

Email Management could be a hassle especially when many email accounts are being handled at the same time. Therefore, using Thunderbird would save you lots of time and effort in filtering emails. 

Productivity Tools to Help You Stay Informed

In this fast-paced era, staying up to date shows your professionalism and provides you with information that may be vital to your business. It also helps in educating you about current events around the world. For example, if you work in the stock market, staying up to date with the stocks as well as the current market situation is important. 

Here are some applications that help you read your news on the go: 

1. Pocket & Medium: Both applications share a similar function of saving your favorite news and articles to view on the go in a reader’s view where no distractions such as ads, banners, or sidebars exist. Pocket also offers access to this functionality when offline. Both applications also offer access to different categories and articles. 
2. Social Media Updates: HootSuite & Buffer: These two applications are social media managing applications that allow all your social media updates to exist on one platform that covers all your social media needs. It also allows posting to multiple social media networks at once. These applications are especially helpful to those handling both enterprise and personal social media accounts. 

Forget about newspapers; utilize your smartphone for your needs. 

Productivity Tools that Help With Time Management

Time Doctor: Do you sometimes wish you had more time to accomplish all the creative and productive tasks on your to-do list? Do you often wonder how your employees spend time at work? With an efficient time management software, you can save time, get more work done and boost your productivity by 22% or more. 

Time Doctor is a classic example of such a time management app. It helps employers and remote teams track how much time is spent on each client, task, and project. It makes it easy for you to create a to-do list and focus on each task for an allotted duration. Apart from its accurate time tracking feature, Time Doctor also has an in-built payroll module, chat monitoring, screenshot monitoring, GPS and desktop monitoring and employee monitoring features. Its accurate dashboard generates report sheets that evaluate each team member’s level of productivity and how work hours were utilized.

Summed up briefly, Time Doctor is an excellent time management tool that boosts the productivity of remote teams through:

• Helping business owners and remote teams to manage their time and maximize work hours.
• Enabling you to spend adequate time on your most productive tasks and to delegate discretionary tasks to team members.
• Nudging you away from distractions such as unproductive sites and apps.
• Streamlining employee monitoring and employee evaluation.
• Generating and emailing detailed timesheet reports for team members so that everyone can track how much time was spent on particular activities, 
• Providing accurate billing information for clients.

When exploring productivity tools, don’t forget to use this free online employee time clock offered by Time Clock Wizard for effective time management as well.

Productivity Tools to help you Store and Share Data

Do you often run out of storage?  Do you transfer a lot of files? Do you want easy access to your data at any time? Then utilizing cloud storage platforms is the answer to your personal use and enterprise use as well. 

Here are some of these cloud storage services that can be great productivity tools: 

• Google Drive: Google Drive is one of the top cloud storage providers as it offers an experience close to having an online computer. The drive itself stores all your data and information, but by simply using your Google email address you can get access to other Google applications such as google docs, sheets, and slides that automatically save to your drive. Using google drive on smaller devices such as tablets and smartphones also allows you to back up all your information and media automatically with almost no limit on space. It also allows you to create folders and albums to organize your data. Google Drive also works perfectly with enterprises. A function that exists in most Google applications that are sharing. It also exists on google drive, where you can share a folder or a project with only people who are allowed access to the folder or file. Other applications such as OneDrive, Dropbox, and iCloud offer similar services. 

• WeTransfer: With its user-friendly interface and straightforward design, WeTransfer eliminates the complexities often associated with sharing large files. By providing a seamless and intuitive experience, users can effortlessly upload files, add recipients, and send them with just a few clicks. Additionally, WeTransfer’s ability to handle large file sizes (up to 2GB in the free version and 20GB in the paid version) ensures that users can easily share high-resolution images, videos, and other multimedia content without worrying about file size limitations or slow transfer speeds.

Cloud Platforms would be the future of storage due to security from both accidents and unauthorized access. 

The post Productivity Tools: Learn How to Stay Productive Online – Updated 2023 appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

Tatawwar, which means “to develop” in Arabic, is an interactive digital programme, now open, that provides youth with the tools to turn challenges in their communities into innovation opportunities that address the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The new edition of Tatawwar introduces a comprehensive and inclusive approach to social entrepreneurship. The programme aims to reach a wider audience opening its doors to young people of all ages from around the world who aspire to learn how to start their own social enterprise. The online practical courses offered cover four main phases: pre-incubation, incubation, acceleration and post-acceleration, which provides a holistic experience that guides students from ideation to the establishment of their social enterprises.

Overall, the Tatawwar programme provides an exciting and innovative platform for young entrepreneurs to create positive social change and become leaders in their communities.

Tatawwar has already benefitted over 15,000 students from over 3,000 schools across the Middle East and North Africa to date, with more than 3,500 social innovative ideas been submitted on the platform. Winners and ambassadors who graduated from the programme have shown remarkable progress, launching social enterprises, raising capital, and even becoming youth advisory board members for major companies.

“HSBC is proud to announce the latest Tatawwar launch, a global expansion of our youth social entrepreneurship programme. Through partnering with Potential.com over the past four years, we have delivered a lasting impact on thousands of young people across the MENA region. Tatawwar provides access to tools, knowledge and a pathway for participants to build a more resilient future by shifting their mindset from job seekers to job makers. At HSBC, we believe that youth social entrepreneurs are the agents of positive change, and we are looking forward to continuing our support to the next generations around the world via this programme”, said David Ramos, Acting Head of Sustainability, HSBC Bank Middle East Ltd.

“Through our collaboration with HSBC, we’ve successfully equipped tens of thousands of young minds with essential innovation skills and insights into AI, Web 3.0, and other cutting-edge technologies, positioning them to confidently tackle the uncertainties of a rapidly evolving global landscape. We take great pride in our partnership’s transformative impact on the leaders of tomorrow,” said Shadi Banna, Chief Empowerment Officer, Potential.com.

Registration for the programme is now open on www.tatawwar.com, and all aspiring social innovators are invited to participate. The programme promises to provide students with the necessary tools to turn their innovative ideas into reality and empower them to make a positive change in their communities. Schools, parents, NGOs, and any other partners who would like to participate in empowering the next generation of social innovators are also invited to register via the website.

ENDS

Media enquiries to:

Will Blair | +971585805190| will.blair@hsbc.com

Daria German| +971529033191| daria@potential.com

HSBC in the MENAT region

HSBC is the largest and most widely represented international banking organisation in the Middle East, North Africa and Türkiye (MENAT), with a presence in nine countries across the region: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and the United Arab Emirates. In Saudi Arabia, HSBC is a 31% shareholder of Saudi British Bank (SABB), and a 51% shareholder of HSBC Saudi Arabia for investment banking in the Kingdom. Across MENAT, HSBC had assets of US$71bn as at 31 December 2022.

www.hsbc.ae

Potential.com

As an award winning global EdTech social enterprise, Potential.com harnesses the power of AI to collaborate with organizations in driving socio-economic empowerment initiatives, including sustainability, job creation, and entrepreneurship development.

Governments and top-tier brands worldwide trust Potential.com’s groundbreaking AI-powered empowerment SaaS platform to launch tailored programs that aid their citizens and customers in launching start-ups, growing businesses, or advancing their careers.

www.potential.com

About Tatawwar

Tatawwar has received numerous prestigious international awards for its contributions to community development and education in 2021 and 2022. The programme won two gold awards at Gulf Sustainability Awards, for Best Learning and Education Programme and Best Community Development, a gold award at International Business Excellence Awards for Most Effective Social Impact and silver for the Team of the Year, silver award at QS-Wharton Reimagine Education Awards for Best Online Programme, a bronze award at the International CSR Excellence Awards for Youth Empowerment, and was shortlisted in Global Good Awards for Educational Excellence and Special Judges Award for Innovation categories.

In the last edition, the first prize was awarded to “Microplastic Water Filter” from Egypt, the second prize was awarded to ‘Recycling of Plastic Waste to Produce building materials” from Bahrain, and the third prize went to “Solar Filter” from Bahrain, to supply millions of people with clean drinking water while saving the environment​.

www.tatawwar.com

The post Tatawwar Programme now open to the next generation of sustainable leaders to address UN SDGs appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

CSR – or Corporate Social Responsibility – is something that a lot of companies have taken on in the last few decades as a way to give back to their communities and make it clear that they care about more than just making money. In CSR, companies aren’t only donating money but also time, energy, and resources to projects benefitting the society and environment.

What is a CSR Program?

A CSR program is a company’s initiative to assess and take responsibility for the company’s effects on environmental and social well-being. The program encompasses activities such as reducing carbon emissions, improving waste management, increasing employee engagement in sustainability initiatives, and community outreach. 

The goal of a CSR program is to create a positive impact on society and the environment, while also benefiting your business. Impactful CSR programs can help a company build trust with consumers, attract and retain employees, improve its reputation, and boost sales. 

There are many different impactful CSR program ideas, but it is important to ensure that the program is aligned with the company’s core values and business objectives. Additionally, it is essential to engage employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders in the program in order to make it truly effective.

Useful tips for planning an effective CSR Program

An effective CSR program can be the difference between a company that is socially responsible and one that is not. There are a few key things to keep in mind when planning a CSR program. Firstly, it is important to align the program with the company’s core values. This will ensure that the program is something that all your stakeholders are passionate about and will want to participate in. Second, the program should be strategic and have specific goals that it is trying to achieve. Without clear goals, it will be difficult to measure the success of the program. Finally, the program should be sustainable and have a plan for how it will continue to make an impact long term.

What are the main steps in developing impactful CSR Programs?

When it comes to developing impactful CSR programs, there are a few key steps that you should take in order to ensure success. Here are the main steps in developing impactful CSR programs:

1. Define the problem or opportunity that you want to address with your CSR program.

2. Identify a clear target audience that you want to focus on

3. Identify the most important geographical region for your CSR program.

4. Define what would your program’s success metrics looks like.

5. Identify the stakeholders who need to be involved to deliver on those success metrics.

6. Evaluate your program regularly and make adjustments as needed.

7. Bring together all the program elements in one digital empowerment platform that will be your tool to launch, implement and report on your CSR program.

Since 2005, top brands and governments have been using the Potential.com innovation and empowerment digital platform to launch their impactful CSR programs.

10 Ideas for impactful CSR programs to launch in 2023

There are many ways to make a CSR program impactful. Some companies choose to focus on environmental sustainability, while others focus on giving back to the community. Here are a few ideas for CSR programs that can have a significant impact:

1. Launch open innovation programs

Open Innovation programs that aim to identify innovative solutions from the community to challenges that governments or brands are facing. The challenges could then be converted into market opportunities. The empowerment platform allows the development of the community at scale around these important areas. In doing so, it brings to the surface the best talent and ideas. These could then be supported to be taken to the next level. 

Click here to set up your custom open innovation platform in 2 simple steps.

 

2. Support local startups and SMEs

Startup and Small Business development programs that aim to empower entrepreneurs helping them start and grow their businesses. Given that startups and SMEs contribute to more than 50% of employment worldwide and a considerable amount to economic activities according to The World Bank, governments and brands have an interest in launching such initiatives. You can see here an example of our platform being used in the SME Empowerment Program and in the Emirates Development Bank Platform.

Click here to set up your custom Startup & SME Development platform in 2 simple steps.

 

3. Offer internships and job shadowing opportunities

Give students the opportunity to learn about your industry and gain valuable work experience by offering internships and job shadowing opportunities. This is a great way to invest in the future of your workforce while also giving back to the community.

4. Launch Women Empowerment Programs

Women empowerment programs are initiatives designed to help women gain control over their own lives and improve their social, economic, and political status. These programs often focus on providing women with education, training, and access to resources and opportunities that can help them achieve their goals and realize their potential. The aim of women empowerment programs is to help women become more independent, confident, and able to make their own decisions and choices. Ultimately, the goal of these programs is to promote gender equality and create a more equitable society. Cartier Women’s Initiative MENA is an example of a women empowerment program running on the Potential.com platform.

Click here to set up your custom Women Empowerment platform in 2 simple steps.

 

5. Empower the underprivileged or underserved communities

Underprivileged or underserved communities’ empowerment could be empowered through such platforms to help them with financial literacy – as Bank Muscat is doing, or getting people into a paid freelancing job which would help them launch their gig profiles or helping them with launching their first business. The applications of empowerment platforms are endless as are their benefits to the community.

6. Advocate for social change

Use your platform to raise awareness and advocate for social issues that are important to you and your employees. This could be done through social media campaigns, community events, or partnering with local organizations.

7. Educate your community on Future Job Skills

Future Job Skills development aims to develop new skills that are required in the job market including entrepreneurship. Schools and Universities empower their students through such programs. Brands use these programs to identify talent that they can hire or contract for various gigs. Our Youth Development Program shows how the empowerment platform is used in such scenarios.

8. Promote Sustainable Development

Sustainable Development practices that are aligned with the UN SDGs and with the companies’ and governments’ local priorities. Companies could use the empowerment platform to ensure that their supply chains are following sustainable best practices and code of conduct while also certifying and rewarding the best companies that demonstrate their sustainable actions.

Click here to set up your custom UN SDG Innovation platform in 2 simple steps.

 

9. Launch Climate Change Innovation Programs

Support your stakeholders in developing their skills and innovations. Create a real impact by inviting your community to innovate and submit new ideas to solve climate change-related problems.

Click here to set up your custom Climate Change Innovation platform in 2 simple steps.

 

10. Make a difference

Whatever cause is important to you, there is likely a way to incorporate it into your CSR program. Whether you focus on environmental sustainability, social justice, or something else entirely, make sure your program is making a positive impact.

Corporate social responsibility platforms and software

You might be thinking that this is going to be costly and require a dedicated team to manage.

Well, we’re happy to say that your thoughts are completely incorrect. 

You can implement such programs easily and affordably if you have the right digital platform and process in place. 

Having such a platform would allow you to use a “digital-first” strategy to reach and engage a large audience in a self-service way.

The platform would allow you to engage other stakeholders, shortlist the best talent and report on progress toward your KPIs.

Examples of Impressive CSR Programs

There are many different ways to measure the success of a CSR program. Some common metrics include employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and community involvement.

However, one of the most important aspects of a successful CSR program is its ability to make a positive impact on society. With that in mind, here are some examples of impressive CSR programs that are sure to make a difference in the years to come:

1. HSBC’s Tatawwar – Building Tomorrow’s Minds initiative

Innovation & social entrepreneurship program enabled by the potential.com innovation and empowerment platform. Tatawwar, meaning “To Develop” in Arabic, is an exciting programme that brings together students, teachers, parents, schools, governments and the business community to help innovate for a shared future addressing 3 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

2. Maliyat Program by Bank Muscat

Financial Literacy program enabled by the potential.com innovation and empowerment platform. This program is a CSR initiative that aims to equip participants with the essential skills they need to better manage their finances and take prudent decisions, especially the youth and students when graduating and taking up jobs as financially independent individuals. By empowering the youth and other participants with financial skills, Maliyat will contribute to the development and progress of Oman and its citizens.

3. Cartier Women’s Initiative, MENA 

Women Entrepreneurship competition enabled by the potential.com innovation and empowerment platform. The Cartier Women’s Initiative is an international business program to identify, support and encourage projects by women entrepreneurs. The Cartier Women’s Initiative aims to encourage inspirational women entrepreneurs worldwide to solve contemporary global challenges.

4. The African Women Leadership Fund (AWLF)

AWLF is established by the Economic Commission for Africa under the leadership of the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations and the Chairperson of the African Union, with support from UN-Women; the Office of the Special Envoy on Women, Peace and Security of the African Union Commission and the African Women Leadership Network. AWLF is an innovative impact investment fund which aims to accelerate the growth of women-owned and operated funds and companies across Africa.

5. Nestlé’s Creating Shared Value 

Nestlé’s Creating Shared Value initiative is all about finding ways to create value for both society and Nestlé itself. The initiative focuses on three areas: nutrition, water, and rural development. So far, Nestlé has made significant progress in each of these areas, improving the lives of countless people in the process.

Conclusion

As we look ahead to the next decade, it’s clear that CSR programs are only going to become more important. Businesses that can align their programs with their brand values and have a positive impact on the world will be the ones that succeed. We can’t wait to see what innovative and impactful CSR programs businesses come up with in the next few years.

What are your thoughts? What CSR programs do you think will be the most successful in the next decade? Let us know in the comments below.

The post 10 Ideas for Powerful and Impactful CSR Programs to Launch in 2023 appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

Founded in 2005, Potential.com began life as a coaching and training consultancy, helping leading international organizations to maximize performance, meet critical business challenges, and position themselves for long-term success.

Realizing the potential of learning on the internet, Potential.com quickly evolved to become a pioneer in educational technology and a leading destination for online learning across emerging markets launching thousands of empowerment programs in the whole world.

At Potential.com, we develop innovative learning solutions to fuel the world’s ambition. By merging education and technology, we empower millions of professionals, entrepreneurs, and organizations from around the world to perform at their very best.

Empowerment Programs by Potential.com

• SME Empowerment Program
• Tatawwar – Building Tomorrow’s Minds
• Unified Champion Schools – Special Olympics
• Non-Financial Services – Emirates Development Bank
• Maliyat Program – Bank Muscat
• Hadafi Women Entrepreneurship Program
• Art of Zyaed
• Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards
• Tip Healthcare Awards
• Entaliq in KSA
• African Women Leadership Fund

SME Empowerment Program

More than 90% of global businesses are small or micro, but less than half of small business are online. SMEEP aims to positively change this via its free program that guides start-ups and small and medium businesses through a step-by-step process to digitize their business. Core program aspects include learning, planning, and implementing the digitization plan.

Initially launched in 2010 as a response to the financial crises, SMEEP reached over 300,000 SME’s across the globe, empowering them to evolve their businesses and succeed. So far, in 2021, more than 6000 startups and SMEs have registered and benefited from the program.

We now have committed to an even bigger goal in the coming year.

SMEEP is now open to all entrepreneurs, business owners, business leaders, and any top-level managers in start-ups and small and medium businesses.

Some key values and attributes that the program participants exude:

• Innovative
• Forward-thinking
• Solution-based
• Action-oriented
• Self-starters
• Disciplined

Program’s website: www.potential.com/sme

Program’s regional partners: Aramex, Amazon Web Services (AWS), CISCO, Schneider Electric, and World Free Zones Organization.

Some community partners: Beirut Digital District, Leancubator, LIT Creative Agency, Businessita Women Empowerment, and many others.

Tatawwar – Building Tomorrow’s Minds

Tatawwar, meaning ‘to develop’ in Arabic, is an exciting, interactive education program designed by Potential.com, in partnership with HSBC, now in its fourth year.

It brings together students, schools, parents and the business community to help innovate for a shared future. It gives 15-18-year-olds across the MENA region the chance to practice important business skills, understand sustainable commitments, and connect with some extraordinary professionals along the way.

This program marks the first step into a sustainable future for participants, with Tatawwar building the skills needed for further education and employment, while promoting understanding of the UN Sustainability Goals and their impact on communities.

The core program objective is to support 5,000 students per cohort take charge of their learning to develop and apply the following skills:

• Sustainability: Building awareness around SDGs, with a focus on climate action, water scarcity and health and wellbeing issues.
• Innovation development: Problem solving, critical thinking and product development (Software and Hardware)
• Business skills: Business model development, financial literacy and presentation / pitching

To ensure the sustainability of the program, our aim is to engage the stakeholders around the youth in target markets. This includes:

• Engaging the Ministries of Education and Ministries of Youth in our target markets so that the program is aligned to their activities
• Engaging the Fabrication Labs and Maker Spaces in key cities to help students develop their prototypes
• Engaging the general public including parents, teachers, volunteers and other stakeholders

Program’s website: www.tatawwar.com

Unified Champion Schools – Special Olympics UAE

The Special Olympics Unified Champion Schools is a program that is aimed at promoting social inclusion through intentionally planned and implemented activities affecting systems-wide change. With sports as the foundation, the three component model offers a unique combination of effective activities that equip young people with tools and training to create sports, classroom and school climates of acceptance. These are school climates where students with special needs feel welcomed and are routinely included in, and feel a part of, all activities, opportunities and functions.

This is accomplished by implementing inclusive sports, inclusive youth leadership opportunities, and whole school engagement. The program is designed to be woven into the fabric of the school, enhancing current efforts and providing rich opportunities that lead to meaningful change in creating a socially inclusive school that supports and engages all learners. What a Unified Champion School “looks like” can vary greatly from school to school, based on the needs, goals, schedules and other factors unique to each school; but the basic building blocks remain the same.

Program’s website: https://competitions.potential.com/unified-champion-schools/

Non-Financial Services – Emirates Development Bank

Non-Financial Services from EDB will continue the bank’s role in developing the SME sector in the UAE given its importance to the country.

Emirates Development Bank launched an online empowerment platform. The platform will provide Free essential resources and content to help entrepreneurs at various stages of their business development.

Powered by Potential.com, the online platform will provide, EDB’s website visitors as well as the general public, access to business courses, templates and professional video content curated for:

• Entrepreneurs with an idea they want to turn it into a viable business
• Startups that have established their business and are looking to scale up & expand
• Existing business owners that want to expand their SME business

These business courses will cover topics such as Strategy, Innovation, Sales, Marketing, and Accounting. Entrepreneurs will get practical professional tips on how to address common business challenges delivered through short videos that are curated for the UAE market needs

Program’s website: https://nfs.edb.gov.ae/

Maliyat Program – Bank Muscat

In line with its vision “To serve you better, everyday” and Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives, Bank Muscat has proudly launched, ‘Maliyat’, an online Financial Literacy Program. This program aims to equip participants with essential skills they need to better manage their finances and take prudent decisions, especially the youth and students when graduating and taking up jobs as financially independent individuals. By empowering the youth and other participants with financial skills, Maliyat will contribute to the development and progress of Oman and its citizens.

The program content is well-structured to cater to the needs of all age-groups. The key aspects of the training include defining personal financial goals and planning to achieve the goals.

Hadafi Women Entrepreneurship Program – Season 2018

Hadafi, the free women entrepreneurship program, is an empowerment program that aims to empower women across the MENA region by providing better access to entrepreneurial resources, training, finance, media coverage and support for women who want to start up or have started up their business in the past 2 years.

History: Launched in 2013 in Saudi Arabia, Hadafi has been supporting more than 100,000 women across the Middle East and North Africa. The program has been providing participants with firsthand experience from successful entrepreneurs in order to help turn their passion into a real business.

*Winners of the Hadafi Women Entrepreneurship Program – Season 2018 will be announced in February 2019

Program’s website: https://competitions.potential.com/hadafi/

Art Of Zayed

In line with the Year of Zayed, PepsiCo is officially contributing to the celebration of the life, legacy, and values of an inspirational world leader, the late Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, founder of the United Arab Emirates. PepsiCo aspires to commemorate his life’s achievements and commitment to the nation while encouraging future generations to honor his legacy and fulfill his vision of prosperity, tolerance, and peace.

Through Art of Zayed empowerment program, PepsiCo aims to bring together all of the UAE’s artists, musicians, and poets to commemorate the values of the Year of Zayed through their work.

Our objectives are to educate, raise awareness, and honor the life and achievements of the late Sheikh Zayed and to reinforce his status as an eternal source of national pride and a powerful symbol of the UAE.

The themes of the Year of Zayed include the following values;

• Wisdom: seen in his vision for the UAE, and his achievements, words, and foresight.
• Respect: conveyed in his respect for all people regardless of their nationality, gender, status or religion.
• Sustainability: projected in his understanding of the natural environment and commitment to sustainability that has shaped the positive and constructive approach of the UAE to meet the world’s greatest environmental challenges.
• Human Development: shown in Sheikh Zayed’s beliefs of investing in people’s welfare, building their knowledge, and enhancing their capabilities through financial aid or in-kind assistance to improve human development around the world.

Participants’ artwork, music or poetry must reflect the above values.

The top 10 finalists will showcase their artwork, music or poetry at the Art of Zayed Awards Ceremony. The best 3 will win AED 10,000 each in cash prize and receive the following benefits:

• Anghami will feature the winners in Music and Poetry on their platform.
• The Dukkan Show will promote all 3 winners and feature the music and poetry submissions as part of their episode mix on the platform.
• Fujairah Fine Arts Academy will feature the winners of the art and music categories by hosting their pieces at the academy and providing the musician a free music course.

Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards

Another empowerment program, The Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards; an international business plan competition created in 2006 to identify, support and encourage projects by women entrepreneurs. The Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards aim to encourage inspirational women entrepreneurs worldwide to solve contemporary global challenges by:

• supporting and recognizing creative women who are making concrete contributions to finding solutions for the future of our planet
• bringing these business solutions to the largest audience possible.

Since their inception in 2006, they have accompanied 180 promising female business-owners and recognized 64 laureates.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE COMPETITION

The 21 finalists, representing the top 3 projects from each of the 7 regions, will receive:

• One-to-one personalized business coaching prior to the Awards week
• Series of entrepreneurship workshops, knowledge sessions, and networking events during the Awards week
• Media visibility
• A scholarship to attend the INSEAD Social Entrepreneurship 6-Day Executive Programme (provided the business meets INSEAD’s eligibility criteria)
• Networking opportunities through the Cartier Awards community

WINNING PACKAGE

First prize for the 7 laureates:

• • US$ 100 000 in prize money
  • One-to-one personalized business mentoring

Second prize for the remaining 14 finalists:

• • US$ 30 000 in prize money

*Winners of the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards will be announced in February 2019

TIP Healthcare Awards

In line with the UAE Vision, Innovation Strategy and the Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030, healthcare is identified as one of the key strategic pillars. With a VISION to position Abu Dhabi as a center of excellence and innovation in Healthcare. Department of Health, Abu Dhabi, announces TIP Healthcare Awards an empowerment program through the TIP (Technology Innovation Pioneers) Platform initiated by the Ministry of Economy and Department of Economic Development Abu Dhabi.

The TIP Healthcare Awards objective is to establish a sustainable world-class platform to encourage quality and competitive, healthcare innovation, on a global scale; by attracting innovators and entrepreneurs from all over the world and to stimulate innovation across a wide healthcare spectrum.

The Awards, hosted under TIP (Technology Innovation Pioneer) movement, is a vehicle which will undoubtedly boost innovation across industries, help spark creativity in science and technology amongst generations, and contribute to our vision of a “Healthier Abu Dhabi”.

The Department of Health Mission is; Bringing together global leaders and entrepreneurs in healthcare’s innovation, technology, and research to shape the future of the world’s health practice. It will activate a research network across the nation, that will position Abu Dhabi as a world-class hub for innovation in healthcare and life science, backed with attracting the most talented experts from all over the world. Some of the current topics faced today, in line with our current focus on Non-Communicable Diseases.

Entaliq in KSA

Entaliq in KSA empowerment program was launched in September 2016 by Airbus, the world’s leading aircraft manufacturer in partnership with TAQNIA Aeronautics and Saudi Arabian Airlines. The incubation program falls in line with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s ambitious ‘Vision 2030’ innovation strategy, promoting the sustainable future growth of the Kingdom’s aviation industry by cultivating and accelerating innovation in the Middle East’s aerospace sector.

As a leader in STEM innovation, Airbus has built a strong network in the Kingdom which includes organizations, like TAQNIA and Saudia Airlines, that pride themselves on the promotion of technology and knowledge sharing. Airbus continues to pioneer more STEM-related partnerships designed to drive the future growth and sustainability of national and global standards in the aviation industry.

The inaugural 2016 cycle of Entaliq with Airbus attracted more than 1,000 Saudi applicants, over 70 unique project idea submissions, and concluded with an awards ceremony that presented the opportunity for the top 20 participants to be recognized for their creative and innovative projects. Providing a platform for knowledge transfer and inspiration, Entaliq in KSA supports the development of innovators and entrepreneurs across various science and aviation technology disciplines, highlighting their achievements across the globe.

The winners of the Entaliq in KSA challenge have the potential to be coached by experts, mentored by aerospace industry veterans, and trained on how to develop realistic business plans. Presenting these plans to a judging panel of industry professionals provides young passionate Saudis with the possibility of incubating their projects and turning their ideas into reality.

African Women Leadership Fund

The Economic Commission for Africa its partners, through the African Women Leadership Fund, aim to create a sustainable platform to accelerate the growth of women-owned and operated companies across Africa, as captains of industry in the startup space and also create a framework for supporting microenterprise.

The African Women Leadership Fund will work with and support women-owned and run fund management companies, as well as women-focused impact funds. To do this, the Fund will raise investment and technical assistance capital and build a platform to identify, mentor, support, and invest in women entrepreneurs at scale.

In this online empowerment platform, we are aiming to identify talented aspiring women fund managers who could lead these investments. Register in the program to learn more.

New empowerment programs empowered by Potential.com and mainly targeting entrepreneurs, Startups, and SMEs will be launched every year. Be ready to reach your potential and entrepreneurial success through our Real World Education.

The post Empowerment Programs’ Highlights by Potential.com appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

So what is creative thinking?

Creative thinking is the process of nurturing your imagination allowing you to “think out of the box”. 

Being able to train your mind to think creatively helps you invent, problem-solve, create and communicate in fresh, new ways. Moreover, studying art and design, along with diverse disciplines, provides a rich tapestry of perspectives and techniques, enriching your creative thinking process even further.

Creative thinkers are in high demand in the job market and creative thinking is one of the key skills needed in future jobs according to a recent report by the World Economic Forum. 

So, let’s develop your creative thinking skills!

In this article, we will take you through a step by step process of how to improve your creative thinking skills. You will learn about different ways used to help you become more open-minded, innovative and creative. 

Article Outline

• The importance of creative thinking
• 6 Ways to apply creative thinking in your everyday life
• Thinking Hats: Approach Creative Thinking by de Bono
• Another Creative Thinking Approach: Lateral Thinking
• Things to Avoid which will impact your Creative Thinking
• How to succeed in your career based on your enneagram (infographic)

Every person can improve their creative thinking skills. By doing so, it will help you create, interpret and come with solutions to challenges in your daily life routines at school, university, organization or simply at home. 

“Everyone is born creative” – Hugh Macleod

A group of CEOs were asked “What is the skill you most value in your people?” as part of a survey, they said creativity, the ability to solve problems, come up with new solutions, and use brainpower to figure things out. Moreover, developing creative thinking skills not only involves nurturing your imagination but also understanding your personality traits and how they influence your thinking process. Taking a DISC personality test can provide valuable insights into your unique behavioral styles, helping you to enhance your creative thinking capabilities. By knowing your strengths and areas for improvement, you can better leverage your natural tendencies to think outside the box. Discover more about your personality by taking our online DISC test today.

Before we get into the techniques, let us explore why is it important to become a creative thinker.

Everyone Should Become a Creative Thinker

Being able to train your mind to think creatively helps you invent, problem-solve, create and communicate in fresh, new ways.

When you think open-mindedly you become a happier person ready to accept exciting surprises from life. 

8 reasons why creative thinking is an essential skill for everyone 

The following are 8 reasons why you are advised to be creative in your everyday life: 

1. Thinking creatively adds value not only to your life but also to the life of others. Translating your thoughts into beautiful work, projects ‘yourself’ clearly into the world you live in. 
2. Creative thinking helps you become self relying and more confident. You can think on your own without the help of others making you a stronger, truly-happy person. 
3. By thinking creatively you become true to yourself. You accept who you are without worrying about other peoples’ judgments. 
4. Thinking open-mindedly gives you a reason to wake up every morning to start exploring new ideas and thoughts. It makes your life worth living. 
5. Creative thinking can bring out hidden talents that you have not noticed before. Instead of just nagging about a problem, it helps you discover new opportunities that you haven’t been aware of. 
6. Thinking ‘out of the box’ makes you feel satisfied at all phases of your life. You never feel that you have reached a dead end instead you are always ready to explore new challenges. You have the ability to see what others can’t see. 
7. Being creative helps you express your feelings allowing you to be whatever you want to be in this world. 
8. The more experienced you get with thinking creatively, the easier it becomes to master difficult situations you may face in your life. 

As explained, creative thinking has many advantages but most importantly it will make you a happier and better person so start practicing!

Check out the below infographic extracted from a global study done by Adobe.

6 Ways to apply creative thinking in your everyday life 

Successful people today are great creative thinkers.

Practicing creativity on a daily basis guides you to become a great success in the future.

The most important thing is to feel free when trying to apply creativity in your life. Creativity is having the power to expand your imagination bringing the most out of your potentials. 

The following are 6 ways to apply creative thinking in your life: 

1. Risk Taking: Being adventurous and ready for life’s challenges pushes you a step forward to creativity. 
2. Playing: Trying to play and be funny at times gives you the chance to manipulate the given problem accordingly to what you need.  
3. Regularly asking Why: Being curious and nosy, wanting to ask questions all the time opens endless doors and possibilities. 
4. Generating large quantity of ideas: By producing a big number of possible solutions, a smart, unique, unexpected answer might be discovered. 
5. Day Dreaming: Wondering about things related to your project frees your mind to expand its horizons and explore new ways out there. 
6. Reading: Going to the library and spending hours reading can nurture your imagination and grow a strong creative thinker. 

Therefore, by working on being a risk taker, a day dreamer and a good reader you are forcing your mind to grow in all directions.

So follow the above steps to WOW your way to become a high-standard creative thinker as opposed to being a boring, traditional thinker with limited abilities! 

See also: Innovation Design Thinking

Thinking Hats: Approach Creative Thinking by de Bono 

The “6 Thinking Hats” is a system designed by Edward de Bono as an approach to promote creative thinking. It is a tool used to enhance real thinking to make the process more productive and focused.

The ‘6 Thinking Hats’ separates thinking into 6 different roles, each role identified with a colored symbolic thinking hat. This approach helps to redirect thoughts by mentally switching from one hat to the other. 

6 Thinking Hats – by de Bono

The following are the 6 thinking hats and what each color represents: 

1. “White Hat”– stating facts and information, things you already know.
2. “Yellow Hat”– looking at the bright side, being optimistic and positive, adding value and benefits.
3. “Red Hat”– expressing feelings and emotions, your reactions and opinions.
4. “Blue Hat”– managing and controlling, looking at the bigger picture.
5. “Green Hat”– exploring other alternatives, generating new ideas and solutions.
6. “Black Hat”– being realistic and practical, being cautious, finding where things might go wrong, discovering dangers and difficulties. Black Hat is usually called the ‘devil’s voice’.

The above 6 hats, when combined together, allows your mind to think clearly and objectively.

For example, you can start by grabbing the “Blue Hat” asking yourself questions such as: what is our goal? Are the 6 guidelines observed clearly? What is the subject addressed? This helps you get an overall view of your problem.

Next, you can grab the “Red Hat” expressing what you feel towards the problem and asking yourself who might be affected by this problem.

Then, you can grab “Yellow” and later “Green Hat” to invent new concepts and solutions.

Finally, you can switch between the “White” and “Black hat” in order to validate your solution by using information that you already know. 

Start training your mind to switch directions from one hat to another to solve problems efficiently, effectively bringing out benefits too! 

Here’s a video to explain the process:

Another Creative Thinking Approach: Lateral Thinking 

Lateral Thinking is a phrase invented by Edward de Bono that means thinking about a problem in a different way than what is usually used.

You can check out Edward de Bono’s book on the topic.

Lateral thinking is far from logical thinking most people use today.

It is expanding your thinking limits, freeing yourself from boundaries giving you the chance to explore things you never knew existed. 

The following are 5 steps involved in Lateral Thinking: 

1. Change the focus of your thinking, allowing your mind to discover new options. Don’t be afraid to try something new. 
2. Break free from limits of traditional logical thinking of reason. Think messy, think all over making every small detail count. 
3. Develop new ideas and shape them to fit the situation you have on hand. Generating ideas is not sufficient; implementing these ideas according to what you need is what it takes to be a success. 
4. Use diverse unrelated data to help you come up with new concepts. Break down data, group them together or even try data you have never imagined might work. By experimenting without judgment, unexpected solutions may arise!  
5. Look beyond obvious alternatives. Sometimes, opportunities are hidden and can only be discovered by thinking ‘out of the box’. 

Creative thinking is the ability to free your mind to create, interpret and visualize possibilities.

See also: How to become an exceptional critical thinker

Whether you decide to use lateral thinking or the 6 hats thinking approach, work your way to become a WOW creative thinker!   

Things to Avoid which will impact your Creative Thinking

Creative thinking pushes passion allowing you to love and live beyond your limits.

However, sometimes situations happen in life that restricts your freedom. It’s up to you to break down these walls and live up to your full potential, with the support and resources from Customwritings to help you overcome any obstacles.

The following are 8 things you are advised to avoid in order to be able to unleash your creativity: 

1. Complain about a problem: 

   Don’t just nag about a problem instead try to discover opportunities that might be hidden deep within.

2. Worry about what others think: 

   Don’t waste your time worrying about other peoples’ judgments. Be happy with who you are and don’t be afraid to show it.

3. Stay in your ‘comfort zone’: 

   Living up to your potential is not easy but make sure you give it a go! Don’t take the easy way out because you will never know what great things you might be missing! 

4. School limiting your creativity: 

   Society wants robots. It does not prefer you to think for yourself. Schools are programmed to help society limit youth potential. Don’t fall for the trap. Allow your mind to explore new, fresh places that it has never been given a chance to explore before. 

5. Hold back when you have a good idea: 

   Instead of just accepting what you know innovate something not created before. Unleash your creativity to flourish throughout your life and career.  

6. Ego: 

   Focus on what’s right rather than who’s right. Eliminating your ego allows you to change the way you think becoming more flexible and open-minded. 

7. Stop learning: 

   Being smart is not being able to generate an idea but it is being able to recognize the value of the idea and make it happen. Keep looking for answers putting what you know into reality! 

8. Assume certain perceptions: 

   Naturally, in your everyday life there will be certain boundaries already set previously. Don’t assume they will always be there instead work your way to break them down and free yourself to make a change for a better world! 

We suggest you try to avoid the 8 points mentioned above in order to free your mind to think creatively.

It is a step forward to raise hidden talents that will push our world to lasting global success!

How to succeed in your career based on your enneagram

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to succeeding in your career. Some personality types thrive when put in front of a crowd, but for others, it’s their worst nightmare! Similarly, some personality types have the potential to be amazing employees but their personalities may be able to show success in a different way. 

Understanding your career personality type is a great way to figure out how to succeed in your career. Using your Enneagram type, you can learn personality-specific ways that you can thrive. For example, type five does well when they can work independently and can use “heads down” (no meeting) days to get the space they need to be productive.

Ready to find your career Enneagram? Check out the infographic below to get started.

The post Creative Thinking: What is it, Why is it Important, and How to Develop it? appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

Millions of companies around the world rely on a call center operation to answer customer calls or to sell to customers.

After the COVID-19 outbreak reduced our face to face interactions, Call Centers and Contact Centers became even more important. Customer calls have risen during the pandemic.

Also, Call Centers provide many job opportunities and will continue to do so in the future.

American companies employ roughly 2.9 million customer-service workers, up 30% from a decade earlier.

according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In this practical article, you can learn about what is a Call Center, what are the main components in a Call Center, and also pick up some essential call center tips and call center software.

So are you ready?

All professionals use the telephone as a way to communicate and engage with their customers, partners, colleagues and more so having good phone skills is everyone’s business.

Anyone that wants to be, or is involved in Call Center setup or operations for their companies would benefit from this What is a call center article.

Inside sales, customer care professionals, call center agents and contact center team leaders, sales managers and individuals looking for a call center job should know what is a call center, what are the operations in it, and also know some of the best practices related to it.

So let’s explore what is a call center.

What is a Call Center and how does it differ from a contact center? 

A call center is a department or business that accepts inbound calls – such as inquiries or support calls and outbound calls – ie. marketing or survey calls

Call centers became a very popular way to serve customers especially with the development of the interactive voice response (IVR) systems – those automated prompts on the call that ask you to press 1 for this and 2 for that etc..

Call centers were initially designed to handle voice calls coming in or being made out of the center.  

However, as technology evolved, and people had more opportunities to interact with organizations, the call centers had to evolve too. Now they address all customer interactions including email, social media, web chat and the like. These call centers became known as contact centers as they needed to account for all customer engagements.  

Since customers would be contacting the contact center through any channel, these centers need to have a complete view of the customer across the various touchpoints in what is called a 360-degree view of the customer.  

What are the Call types that take place in a contact center? 

Contact centers have two main types of calls or interactions that take place in them: 

Inbound and Outbound Call Center Calls:

1. Inbound calls: which are calls that come into the center by clients that have a problem or want to ask a question. These calls should be serviced as quickly and effectively as possible. Since they are originated by the client, they can provide a great opportunity to delight them with exceptional service. 
2. Outbound calls: which are calls that are originated by the contact center staff either for sales, collections of money owed, customer service surveys, or as a follow-up to an inbound call request. Doing outbound calls can be very tricky since the call can take place at a random time that might not be convenient for the client.  

A lot of thought needs to go into the efficient handling of the calls so that organizations ensure that customers get the best possible experience.  

A specialist from Cooltechzone.com said that millions of companies around the world rely on a call center operation to answer customer calls or to sell to customers.

What are the Elements of an inbound call center call? 

Call centers provide organizations with an effective and convenient way to solve customer problems or address their needs. The basis of any call center operation is the calls that take place between the agent who answers the call and the customer or caller on the other line.  

The structure of calls in a Call Center

There are 3 elements to an inbound call center call that agents would need to be trained on:  

1. Opening the call: When a call arrives and the agent picks it up, they will greet the client and introduce themselves 
2. The call body: The focus in the main part of the call is to listen well, understand the customer issue, and address it appropriately. 
3. Closing the call: Before closing the call with the client, a thank you farewell message is provided. Then the agent would need to wrap up the call and add any notes to the customer system. 

Related article: Telephone Etiquette – Tips for Better Phone Conversations

What is a Call Center Structure and Team Functions  

Contact centers are designed around key functions made up of teams. Having an effective Call Center team is very important. 

The Call Center Team

Here are the usual functions you would find in a contact center 

• Contact Center Agent –Answering contacts that come from the customers or doing outbound calls 
• Contact Center Team Leader – Handling Escalations from agents that they weren’t able to solve 
• Workforce Management (WFM) Lead –Prepares staff schedules, holidays, and leave bookings  
• Quality Management Team –Monitoring Interactions, preparing scorecard, recommending agent training, recommending corrective actions    
• Management Information Systems (MIS) Team –Responsible for preparing dashboards, prepare reports, daily, monthly, and yearly performance report, call volume report, etc 
• Contact Center Manager –Responsible for the overall management of the contact center. 

According to a Harvard Study on customer service:

Turnover rates for customer service workers are high—27% annually, on average.

So with that statistic in mind, Call Center managers and administrators should be very mindful of their agents’ well-being.

Since we have learned about what is a call center, we can now move on to some call center tips to improve customer service.

These tips can be useful for you whether you work in a Call Center or in your own dealing with those around you.

Great Customer Service Words & Phrases used in Call Centers

When customers contact the customer service center, they are usually facing a problem, which means they are already starting the contact with you with a negative experience.

Call Centers as Customer Service Centers

Your aim is to turn that experience into a positive one and the words and phrases you use can make a great difference.  

Here are 5 great customer service words and phrases that you can use:  

• It’s unfortunate that you are facing this problem 
• Based on our experience this is the right course of action 
• Replace the word “but” with “All I’m saying is”  
• When things go out of hand, you can remind the client “I’m just doing my job” 
• Definitely! is much more effective than yes 

These 5 terms can help improve your customer communication and turn the negative situation into a more positive one.  

Tips on how to handle an angry client call

Many of us face the occasional angry client – whether internal inside our company or external in dealing with buying customers. Some customers are rude and not reasonable, but in the vast majority of times, customers are reasonable. 

Call Centers help in Customer Satisfaction

Here are 3 tips on how to handle an angry client and diffuse the situation 

• Listen, Listen and Listen some more 
• Don’t argue with the client, since you will never win 
• Empathize with the client and let them know you understand their situation 

After understanding the problem and situation, if you can solve it that would be great. If not, then you need to make it clear that the problem is out of your hands and it’s unfortunate that they had that experience. Depending on the policies of the company, you might be able to offer them something to compensate them for their bad experience.  

Remember, not to take any negative customer contact person, you need to learn to separate your emotion from the job. 

Outcomes that should guide all Customer Service Engagements 

Customers are essential for all businesses, and taking care of these customers would help in increasing their loyalty to your organization. Solving customer problems, however, could be a very costly activity from a time and money perspective, so how can we ensure that we are not overdoing it? 

Here are 3 outcomes that should guide all your customer service engagements: 

1. Customer Centric - always ensure that any process or activity has the customer at the center of it 
2. Performance Driven - continuously measure and enhance the performance  
3. Results Oriented - keep tracking how well you are doing in solving customer problems and how happy the customers are 

The above 3 outcomes help keep a balance to ensure that you are effectively addressing customers’ problems and being effective in how they are being addressed to ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction.  

We hope that you have learned about what is a call center and can apply the above tips to improve your customer service or sales skills.

The post What is a Call Center? Here’s what you need to know (Updated) – Potential.com appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

Wouldn’t you agree?

Consumers are now, more than ever, digitally connected. Businesses that can market their products and services digitally would be rewarded with more sales.

45% of consumers say they’re using their mobile phone more as a shopping channel since the COVID-19 outbreak

– according to the recent global consumer insights survey by PWC. 

If you want to get more traffic, more leads, and eventually more sales, you need to perfect your digital marketing strategy. In today’s competitive landscape, smart businesses will hire a full-stack digital marketer to effectively reach and engage their audience across multiple platforms.

That’s why we put together this digital marketing guide.

Marketing used to be considered an Art, but nowadays, it’s a more of a Science.

If you can master both the Art and Science aspects of Digital Marketing, then you are bound to be successful.

Whether you are new to digital marketing, a recent graduate, marketing professional, digital marketer, or an entrepreneur, The Ultimate Digital Marketing Guide will help you understand the digital marketing landscape, and provide you with a set of practical skills and resources to maximize your marketing performance.

The guide is divided into key sections that address each Digital Marketing focus area that you should be aware of and perfect as you reach out to your prospects and community at large.

So let’s get started!

How to Prepare a Digital Marketing Plan

Marketing planning involves deciding on marketing strategies that will help the company achieve its overall strategic objectives. Here’s what a digital marketing plan looks like.

Digital Marketing Plan Executive Summary:

The purpose of this section is to provide a brief summary of the main goals, objectives, and recommendations. Thus guiding management review and decision making.

The most important part of a digital marketing plan is the segmentation of your customers so that you know who to focus on. This would also help you in ensuring that your marketing investments will provide you with a good return.

In this short video, you can see 3 ways to segment your customers:

Digital Marketing Situational Analysis:

This section describes the target market and the company’s position in it, including information about the market, performance, competition, and distribution, it includes:

• A market description that defines the market and its major segments, customer needs, and the overall marketing environment.
• A product review
• A review of competition
• A review of channels and distribution
• SWOT Analysis: This section is designed to assess the major strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for the company and its products.

Digital Marketing Objective & Issues:

This section states the main marketing objectives that the company would like to attain in the coming period and discusses the key issues that might affect these objectives

Digital Marketing Strategy:

Outlines the broad logic by which the business plans to achieve its marketing objectives, and the specific target markets, positioning, and budgets. It also outlines specific strategies for each element in the company’s marketing mix

Actions and Tactics:

This area of the marketing plan outlines how marketing strategies will be turned in to specific actions, tactics, and programs, answering the following questions: What will be done? When will it be done? Who is responsible? And How much will it cost?

Budgets:

This section details a formal marketing budget for all activities outlined in the previous sections. It forms the basis for marketing operations, including materials, production, scheduling, personnel, and other activities.

Digital Marketing KPIs and Controls:

The final section outlines the key indicators that will be used to monitor progress and allow management to review the implementation and success of the overall marketing plan.

See this example for more details: 5 Valentine’s Day Marketing Ideas

How to Organize Your Digital Marketing Team and Department

Every company must design a marketing organization or department that can carry out its marketing strategies and plans. Here we are going to explore the various ways that modern marketing departments and the marketing team can be arranged.

Check out the article about the importance of teamwork.

The most common type of structure is the functional organization. Under this structure, different digital marketing activities are headed by a specialist, for example, a social media manager will be responsible for all social media activities and report to the marketing director. This functional marketing structure operates across all products and geographies.

Companies that sell across countries or internationally, often use geographic organization. Its marketing people are assigned to specific geographic markets, which allows them to settle into a territory, understand customers, and work with minimal travel time and cost.

Companies with many different products or brands often create product management marketing structure and use a  platform for storing and managing digital content. Using this strategy, a product marketing manager develops and implements a complete marketing strategy and program for a specific product or brand.

For companies that sell one product to many different types of markets and customers, a market, or a customer management structure might be best. Marketers in market management structures are responsible for developing marketing strategies for specific markets or customers. VIP banking is an example of this.

Marketing organization has become an increasingly important issue in today’s business landscape. With many companies finding that the environment calls for less focus on products, brands, and territories, and more focus on customer engagement and management.

Elements of a Successful Digital Marketing Plan:

We will introduce you to the essential elements of a successful digital marketing plan, and provide a simple and framework for owners and marketers to use when setting, planning, project scope, and executing their strategy.

• Digital presence: 

The website of the business is perhaps the foundation with regard to digital marketing. It is the home base for all your online activities and provides a central resource for your customers to find information and connect with your business. With more and more people interacting with brands via their smartphones and tablets, it’s necessary to ensure you’re delivering a consistent and responsive experience across all devices.

• Content development:

Businesses need to develop informational content – whether in the form of blogs, eBooks, infographics, white papers or videos in order to create awareness and interest. Content needs to be broad, searchable, and specifically geared to attract and engage your audience.

• SEM and SEO:

Search Engine Optimisation is the art and science of increasing a website’s visibility in search engines. There are a variety of SEO techniques, from on-site technical analysis and improvement to content distribution & link-building. Secondly, Search engine marketing solutions such as Google AdWords and display ads are crucial to gaining exposure. Many advertisement agencies now specialize in offering Google Adwords management services because of how important it is.

• Email Marketing: 

A solid digital marketing strategy requires a strong email strategy. Email marketing is still one of the most cost-effective ways to educate large audiences about your product or service. If you want to generate leads, convert leads, and develop a relationship with your customers, you must build a database and use email marketing effectively. Many email search tools are available to help you find your customers’ email accounts. This will help you connect to the user of interest.

• Social Media:

Social media remains one of the most powerful tools to establish a connection with your users. It helps you build brand authority and awareness. You can build trust, credibility, and keep your customers aware of what you are offering.

• Convert & Measure: 

Lastly, it’s important to have a testing and optimization plan in place to measure your marketing results and improve them as much as possible.  You need to take the time to review metrics at each phase and determine what needs to be tweaked, what worked, and where to go from there.

Check out our 5 Key Elements of Setting up a Marketing Plan to get another perspective.

Key Digital Marketing Metrics that you Should Track

It’s important to continually learn about and improve your marketing initiatives. But before we can optimize our campaigns, we have to be able to measure and manage them.

In this short video you can find 3 things that you should always have in mind as you launch your digital marketing campaigns:

Now, we’re going to show you the 5 key digital marketing metrics you should be tracking.

The first key Digital Marketing metric is Total Visits. 

Your website should be the primary target of new or existing customers, but you can also measure total visits to any location relevant to your campaigns, such as landing pages or social channels. Measuring your total number of visits will give you a “big picture” idea of how well your campaign is driving traffic.

The second key Digital Marketing metric is Conversion Rate

Whether it’s email subscribers, eBook downloads, or a pure lead generation conversion, every campaign has a goal. Once we understand how many people have visited our page in question we need to determine what percentage of them actually did what we wanted them to do in the first place.

If your goal is a white paper download, and you had 1,000 visitors to the page,  and 100 of those did what you wanted them to (download an eBook, fill out a form, etc) then your conversion rate for that goal would be 10%

The third key Digital Marketing metric is the Cost per Conversion (CPC)

Using the previous example, where 100 people out of 1,000 converted and completed your goal, it’s important to understand how much you spent to get those 100 conversions. Let’s say you spent a total of $500 dollars on your campaign. Take the total amount you spent, divided by the total number of conversions to get the cost per conversion for your campaign.

The fourth Key Digital Marketing Metric is the Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC)

CAC is an extremely important and versatile metric, which can be applied to both your on and offline activities. In the previous example, we looked at conversions, which could be any goal you want to achieve. CAC, however, focuses on customers and how much it costs us to acquire them.

Let’s say you spent $10,000 dollars on all your marketing initiatives, from social media, and content, to SEM, SEO, and Email. All these efforts helped you acquire 100 new customers. To determine CAC, you simply take the total amount spent on all initiatives, divided by the total number of a customer acquired by those initiatives. In this example, our CAC would equal to $100, meaning it cost us $100 marketing spend to acquire 1 customer.

The fifth key Digital Marketing metric is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value or CLV for short helps us understand the value of an average customer over their lifetime. There are a number of ways to calculate CLV depending on your business model,  but the simple formula is to take the

(Average Order Value – Costs to Acquire a Customer) x (Number of Repeat Sales) x (Average Retention Time)

For example, let’s say you’re selling magazine subscriptions for $20 per month, and on average it costs you $15 to acquire a customer, with the average customer subscribing for 3 years. Our CLV formula would look like this ($20 – $15) x (12 Months) x (3 Years) = $180.

Now, compare your Customer Lifetime Value to the Cost of Acquiring a Customer.

The ideal ratio of CLV o CAC is 3 to 1, and some companies like salesforce use 5 to 1. The point is if your CLV to CAC ratio is too low, your business is not sustainable if it’s too high you’re not investing enough in acquiring new customers.

Essential Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as part of your Digital Marketing Strategies

Digital marketing is too diverse and dynamic to be confined to a certain number of elements. However, with limited budget and resources, make sure your efforts and investment are focused on these top 6 areas.

Search engines have two major jobs: discovering and building a directory of all web content and providing searchers with a ranked list of the most relevant websites and content based on what these people are looking for. As such, making sure your web properties are being found by the people who need your services should an essential part of your marketing plan.

In this lesson, we’ll show you how to succeed with SEO, and give you a few practical tips along the way.

Indexation and Accessibility

You could have the website in the world, but if the search engines can’t properly access, crawl and index your site none of that matters. This applies to search engines as well as your human visitors. Look out for the following:

• Titles: Create eye-catching titles that raise the reader’s interest.
• Keywords: Pick keywords that will help bring people to your site and are relevant.
• Links: Link to quality sites that compliment what your website is about. It’ll encourage sites in your niche to link to you as well.
• Quality: Try to publish unique and quality content. This prompts users to come to your site because they cannot easily find the content elsewhere.
• Freshness: You need to add new content on a regular basis

Site Speed & Performance

Making your site faster and perform more efficiently is not only great for user experience but search engines love it too. In fact, Google penalizes slow websites with lower rankings, so make sure you measure and enhance your performance on a regular basis, Here’s how:

• Use Cloudflare or other CDNs: Content delivery networks essentially create copies of your website in the cloud and deliver your content to users from the nearest server. This cuts down on wait times but also protects your site from vulnerabilities.
• Optimize Image Size and Formats: Pretty simple, smaller file sizes load faster. It’s important to minimize image file sizes while maintaining the best possible quality.
• Validate your Code: Ensure your websites’ code is error-free and W3C compliant. Browser errors can slow page load times and make pages difficult to read for both humans and search engines
• Optimize Website CSS and Javascript: Compile all your CSS and Javascript files into one document for each and compress them.

Keyword Research

While SEO continues to evolve, one thing remains the same, Keyword Research, here how to do it right:

• Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.
• Brainstorm some keywords or phrases that you think people would type in related to that topic
• Research related search terms. Google Keyword Planner, Trends, or Autocomplete are great ways to get suggestions
• Search for keywords you can win, i.e. ones that are relevant to your business, can drive significant traffic, and have moderate competition.

Link Building

If we think of the web as a vast city, then links are the streets that connect each page. Building links not only help generate referrals traffic but also helps build credibility and authority for your website. Here are a few key tips to get started:

• Internal Linking: Ensuring your pages are properly linked to each other internally. Pages only should be a click away from each other
• Get links from authority websites in your niche. Find where authorities in your industry link to and are linked from and think about how you can get involved.
• Social Media: not for the links themselves, but to get your content noticed by the people most likely to share your type of content
• Create Linkable and Distribute: You need is a catchy story of your brand or a trending topic in your industry that is tailored to a specific group of audience.

Inbound and Outbound Digital Marketing Strategies

Inbound marketing is the art and science of turning strangers into customers and how to do that?

We do that by producing content, distributing it online, and bringing your customers back to your presence, and nurturing and building relationships.

The three key tips for inbound marketing include:

1. Defining your audiencemeans understanding their main points, their needs, their objectives, and having a clear plan to address those when the time comes. Once you understand what your target audience looks like, once you understand what they need from you, you can clearly create a step-by-step map of how to turn them from strangers into customers.
2. Having a clear content strategy and distribution plan. You know your target audience. Now you need to produce the content that’s customized to your audience and have a plan on how you will distribute it to reach them. Where does your audience live? Are they on Facebook, are they on LinkedIn or Twitter? Are they in your mailbox? You can reach them a whole number of different ways and online really works well for that.
3. Nurturing and building your relationships.You have your audiences, you have your content and distribution plan. Now it’s time to take people from strangers to customers through the buyers’ journey. It’s important to understand that not every customer is ready to buy, so how do we take people along that path? Well, we create content customized for people who are just exploring, you create customized content for people who are actively evaluating options and you create content customized for people who are hot leads and ready to close. Now, most companies will focus on the hot leads but if you do that, then you’re ignoring

Outbound marketing is what people traditionally think of when you hear of advertising, it’s your radio ads, it’s your TV ads, and it’s your print ads. Essentially it’s a strategy of pushing out your message to a wide audience as possible in an effort to persuade and communicate with them the benefits of your product or service.

Here are three tips on how to effectively run an outbound campaign.

Communicating your competitive benefits.

A lot of ads try to be clever but they fail in communicating the essential points required in advertising and derive no value. Be sure to communicate three things in your ads, the first is what exactly is your offering?

The second is why should your audience want it. The third point is how should your audience act on it and how should they get and take advantage of your offer.

If you are selling something based on price, then include the prices in the advertising. If you are selling your service then be sure to communicate the benefits that the user will get out of it.

Grabbing and holding your audience’s attention.

Now we are constantly bombarded by advertising messages and our attention spans are shrinking every day. Whether it’s a billboard or an email in my inbox you as an advertiser have less than three seconds to grab my attention and once you have my attention you better know what to do with it.

It is also a good idea before you run an ad; whether it’s online, radio, or print, is to examine what’s going on in the landscape.

Look at your competitors’ look about their advertisings and see what ads are offering similar products and services to yours and how you can differentiate your messaging and your positioning in your advertising to really stick out and keep my attention.

Testing and optimizing your ads.

Now if you have the budget, running focus groups on your ads and getting other people’s opinions is a great way to understand whether your messages are getting across, or whether the cost actually works effectively and whether your ad has the desired outcome.

A cheaper and easier way to do it is the “So what test”. Put yourself in your audiences’ shoes. Go through your ad and think to yourself so what why should I care. If you don’t pass that test, if you don’t have an answer to the so what question, your ad has failed and you should probably go back and tweak a few things and really make an impact.

In summary, you want to highlight your competitive advantages and communicate these essential messages. You want to grab and hold on to your audience’s attention and never let go. Lastly, you really want to test and optimize your advertisement to make sure that it is the best that it can be.

Email Marketing Strategies and Tactics

Email marketing is still one of the most successful marketing channels and is a key component of a solid digital marketing plan. In this lesson, Here are some practical tips and advice that you can use today to maximize your email ROI.

Marketing Best Practice #1 – TEST, TEST, TEST

For any email campaign, the easiest element to test is the subject line, which is a great start. However, if you want to take your email marketing to the next level, you should be conducting tests on all the following elements:

• · Email messaging/content
• · Layout and images
• · Calls to action and buttons
• · Day of the week & time of day
• · Personalization
• · The landing page your sending people to
• · Target Audience
• · Device responsiveness

Best Practice #2 – Aim like a Sniper

Too many marketers rely on “Spray and Pray” for their email marketing strategy, they send emails out to as many people as possible and hope for results. In reality, the best marketers use email as a precision-guided missile, delivering relevant valuable, and engaging content to a highly targeted audience.

Best Practice #3 – Get Personal

Everything from the content of the subject lines to the content of the emails themselves can be personalized to the user who is receiving it.

Best Practice #4 – Motivate & Incentivize

Use incentives to increase open and click-through rates: When you include an incentive in your subject line, you can increase open rates by as much as 50%. “Free shipping when you spend $25 or more” and “Receive a free iPod with a demo” are examples of good, incentive-focused subject lines. The same applies to your buttons and calls to action.

Best Practice #5 – Keep it Simple

Email readers have short attention spans. After I open your email, you have less than 3 seconds to convince me to keep reading or to visit your landing page, so simplicity is key. Don’t stuff your emails with too many messages or objectives, one is enough. The same applies to the layout of your email. Make it easy for me to navigate and find my way.

Best Practice #6 – Make it Mobile

In today’s world, the vast majority of emails are opened on mobile devices and tablets. Are your emails designed to adapt to different device screens? Responsive layouts have become a key driver of email performance, and those who haven’t made the transition are now suffering because of it.

Best Practice #7 –Build a Pyramid

Structure your email like a pyramid, with key content taking center stage at the top of the body, and support it with a wide foundation of details underneath. Your most important key messages and calls to action should be located above the fold, where the user doesn’t need to scroll down in order to see it, and every message should contain the key information you wish to share, answering the five Ws (who, what, where, when and why).

How to Get Social Media Results For Your Business

Social media allows your company to directly connect with your customers, prospects, and brand ambassadors about everything from products to challenges. An engaged audience is one of the greatest assets a brand can have. But do you know how to use social media to solidify these relationships?

We will introduce you to the essential best practices to create a winning social media strategy:

1. Clarify Your Business’ Social Media Goals: 

   The most important part of your social media marketing plan is defining clear goals. All decisions are informed by these, so without clearly defined goals, your social media plan will also be scattered and/or ineffective. To prevent this from happening, start by writing down at least three social media goals for your business. Make sure each goal is specific, realistic, and measurable.

2. Find Your Audience: 

   Too often we see brands engage in any and all social media channels in an effort to be present everywhere and anywhere. The first key to success in any social media initiative look at how engaged and active your audience is with a particular network and see where you can make the most impact.  It’s worth investigating the relationship between social channels and your business, in order to understand which activity would have the most impact on your desired results.

3. Develop Your Content Strategy: 

   The previous two tips should now create a framework for you to develop a comprehensive content strategy for your marketing plan. Within your content strategy, you should include what type of content you intend to post, how often you will post content, who your target audience is, who will create the content, and how you will promote the content.

4. Plan ahead and use Scheduling: 

   When planning and executing your social media strategy, it helps to save time by scheduling pre-planned content. This not only helps to build an audience, but it also prevents you from inundating your follower’s feed with too much or not enough information. Scheduling helps you maintain a steady flow of content being published throughout the day. Another advantage to scheduling your posts is that you still can continue to share news, updates, and content in the event that you are busy or away from the office.

5. Use Analytics to Track Progress and Adjust Your Strategy as Needed: 

   Once your social media marketing plan has been implemented, it’s now time to check the appropriate metrics and see how your content is performing based on your goals. Once you’ve analyzed your current campaign, resolve to do more of what is working, and revise things that are not working. You will need to keep developing your strategy and content and use analytics to guide your next steps throughout your social media campaign.

Best Practices for Content Marketing Personas 

Today, potential buyers and clients get their information online from various sources.

They themselves and guide their buying decisions. The organizations that succeed are those that embrace the science of creating and distributing high-quality content to guide leads through the buyer’s journey.

Easier said than done!

Here are the essentials to creating a successful content marketing strategy:

1. Personas

Before creating any piece of content, we must first identify and profile our audience, and the people who we intend to reach with our content. But how do you create them?

• Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content
• Use form fields that capture important personal information.
• Take into consideration your sales team’s feedback on the leads they’re interacting with most.
• Interview customers and prospects, either in person or over the phone, to discover what they like about your product or service. Map the Buyer’s Journey

2. Map the Buyer’s Journey

It’s important to identify the steps that prospects or visitors will take in order to become customers or regular users. Identifying these steps is key to creating relevant, valuable, and engaging content for every persona, and at every stage of the buying cycle. In simple terms, you will need different content to create awareness, a separate set of content for the consideration phase, and a final set of content for the decision phase that is designed to close the deal.

3. Set content marketing goals, align them to business goals

When you’re planning a piece of content, how do you decide what is worth creating and what you should pass on? Every piece of content you commit to should serve a clear purpose for your marketing efforts.

4. Create a content execution and distribution plan

Once you know what kind of content you will create, you need to establish the process for creating it. Your content execution plan should be a step-by-step map of how an idea turns into a finished product, and how to distribute those pieces of content so that they reach the right audience. 

How to Make Money & Generate Revenue For Your Business through Digital Marketing

There are several revenue generation models that you can use to package, market and sell your products and services both on and offline.

• Product & Service Sales:

  Many online companies and e-commerce platforms draw a good portion of their revenue. This revenue is generated from markups on goods and services they sell online. This is the simplest and most direct method of marketing your offerings.

• Advertising Income:

  For online publishers and platforms that attract large or specific niche target markets, sales of online ad space. This can be a major source of revenue. Advertisers will pay to reach your audience if it meets their criteria.

• Sponsorship Income:

  Platforms and brands can solicit sponsors for some or all of their content. Thus collecting sponsorship fees in order to help cover some or all of their costs. Every time you see something that is “brought to you by a brand” that’s sponsored content.

• Membership & Subscription Revenue (Including SaaS models)

  Web marketers can also charge subscription fees for use of their site or service. Many online newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal or New York Times require subscription fees for their online services. These are recurring payments made in exchange for continued access to a product or service.

• Profile and User Data Income:

  Websites and platforms that have built databases containing in-depth user profiles. Such data can be valuable to advertisers who are willing to pay in order to reach particular audiences. Facebook, for example, enables 3^rd parties to advertise to its users. These advertisements are based on a number of different criteria, including your interest, geographic location, job title, etc.

• Transaction commissions and fees: 

  Some platforms charge commission fees on transactions between other parties who exchange goods or services on their websites. For example, eBay connects buyers and sellers and takes a percentage of each successful transaction

• Referral Revenue: 

  Companies can collect revenue by referring customers to others. For example, hosting companies like GoDaddy will pay 3^rd parties for every successful client they receive from them. This is essentially a finder’s fee.

Add a Podcast to your Digital Marketing Strategy

Why do you need to have a podcast?

1. If you are passionate about something or a subject and you have the right expertise. Then you want to share it with people why not share it with audio? A podcast is audio on demand. So people can listen to you to what you have to say anytime during the day. They can be running, driving, stuck in traffic, or doing exercises.
2. If you want to build your own authority and credibility; you can create your own podcast in a simple niche a focused niche and niche down. So you can target a very narrow segment of your target audience.
3. You can build a mass community following you; following what you have to say. You can talk about any field you want. In iTunes, we have 16 categories and hundreds of subcategories. In any field, you want to talk about in business, medical, in business. Let’s say you have careers you have many other subcategories even you can talk about art, music, and others. Only in iTunes we have 525 million subscribers so imagine the community and how you can leverage it.

Why do you need to podcast? One because you are passionate about something and you want to share with people. Two because you have and you want to create your authority and create credibility and more credibility for yourself. And three because the audience is there and is waiting for your expertise.

So have a Podcast and let us listen to you.

Conclusion

We hope that through this Digital Marketing Guide you would be able to learn what should be done to have a successful 2020!

Additional reading: discover the differences between marketing and advertising.

The post Digital Marketing for Business – The Ultimate Guide to get more Leads and Sales (Updated) – Potential.com appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

HSBC and Potential.com have today launched the third edition of its future skills flagship programme, Tatawwar: Building Tomorrow’s Minds, for students across the UAE, Egypt, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Algeria.

Tatawwar: Building Tomorrow’s Minds is an interactive online and face-to-face programme that brings together students aged 15 to 18, schools, parents and the business community to innovate for a sustainable future by addressing the three United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):

1. Climate Action
2. Human Health and Well-being
3. Clean Water and Sanitation

Tatawwar, which is translated to “to develop” in English, encourages students to develop core future skills in innovative design thinking, financial literacy, critical thinking, and entrepreneurship. It raises awareness of how business can help address social and environmental problems in their community through innovation.

The past 2 editions of Tatawwar: Building Tomorrow’s Minds have seen more than 5,000 students from over 1,000 schools across the Middle East and North Africa region, register in the blended learning programme.

The Tatawwar team hosted 20 prototyping workshops for over 500 shortlisted students, in each of the programme’s countries in partnership with local Fablabs and maker spaces.

Commenting on the launch, Daniel Howlett, Regional Head of Commercial Banking, HSBC Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, said: “Education is a priority for governments across our region as they transition towards building sustainable and knowledge-based economies. As the region’s leading international bank, HSBC is uniquely positioned to support the growth of this vital sector.”

Sabrin Rahman, Regional Head of Sustainability, HSBC Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, added: “Ensuring every student has the opportunity to build the core future skills they need to thrive in tomorrow’s global economies, while building awareness of how business can help address social and environmental concerns, is fundamental to our approach. Tatawwar: Building Tomorrow’s Minds embodies just that, and we are very proud to roll-out this great initiative to students, parents and schools again by building on the great success of the programme over the last two years.”

To date, 9 winners and 30 ambassadors have graduated from the programme after undergoing extensive mentorship and further development on social entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and employability skills.

First prize in the last rollout was awarded to Bader Al Sarraf from Bahrain for his ‘Solar Panel CO2 Converter’, a project that produces green energy while also reducing CO2 in the air. One of the winners of the first rollout, Samah Abdulla from Egypt, has already raised capital through crowdfunding, launched her Water Management and Saving (WMS) app and has secured participation in a local incubation programme.

“We are very proud of how the potential.com empowerment platform has enabled Tatawwar to scale and adapt to various disruptions caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. Together with HSBC and through the engagement of the high-school student stakeholders, we are demonstrating how large scale empowerment and impact can be achieved,” said Shadi Banna, Chief Empowerment Officer, Potential.com.

Students can now register for the programme at www.tatawwar.com. Schools, parents, NGOs and any other partners who would also like to participate in empowering the next generation of social innovators are also invited to get in touch through the website.

Coverage update:

• • • Zawya MENA – Tatawwar 2020 / 2021 puts the spotlight on high school students as the next social innovators
    • Zawya UAE – Tatawwar 2020 / 2021 puts the spotlight on high school students as the next social innovators
    • Zawya KSA – Tatawwar 2020 / 2021 puts the spotlight on high school students as the next social innovators
    • Campaign ME – Tatawwar 2020 / 2021 puts the spotlight on high school students as the next social innovators
    • Middle East Events – Tatawwar 2020 / 2021 puts the spotlight on high school students as the next social innovators
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HSBC in the MENAT region

HSBC is the largest and most widely represented international banking organisation in the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey (MENAT), with a presence in 9 countries across the region.  HSBC has operations in the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait and Algeria. In Saudi Arabia, HSBC is a 29.2% shareholder of Saudi British Bank (SABB), and a 51% shareholder of HSBC Saudi Arabia for investment banking in the Kingdom.

This presence, the widest reach of any international bank in the region, comprises some 350 offices and around 9,800 employees. In the year ending 31st December 2019, HSBC in the MENAT region made a reported profit before tax of US$ 2,327m.

Potential.com

Potential.com is a global EdTech social enterprise that works with organisations to support socio-economic empowerment projects such as sustainability, job creation, and entrepreneurship development.

Governments and leading brands around the world, rely on Potential.com’s innovative empowerment SaaS platform to launch customized initiatives for their citizens and customers by helping them; startup, expand their businesses or enhance their career prospects.

The post Tatawwar 2020 / 2021 puts the spotlight on high school students as the next social innovators appeared first on The Online Learning Platform.

Tatawwar brought to you by HSBC in partnership with Potential.com is supporting the next generation of social innovators

Dubai, UAE, 17 May 2020: Tatawwar: Building Tomorrow’s Minds, from HSBC and Potential.com, have announced the winners of the 2019 / 2020 programme rollout at a live-streamed final awards event. The first prize was awarded to Bader Al Sarraf from Bahrain for his ‘Solar Panel CO2 Converter” project that produces green energy while also reducing CO2 in the air.

The remaining 5 winners who come from UAE, Oman and Egypt are: Marah Abdehaq – Proteria natural protein supplement, Joel Jiji Olassayil – Accel Agro for faster plant growth, Iman Al Farsi – Project R3D for efficient desalination, Rishabh Java – Broccoli Brains a wearable and app for ADHD treatment, Suhaila Elmetwalli – Bio-purifier an affordable natural water filter.

9 distinguished judges listened to 1-minute pitches from the finalists and reviewed their prototypes and business models. The judges representing Texas A&M, Nottingham Trent University, British University in Dubai, Al Tamimi & Company, AW Rostamani Group, German University Technology in Oman, Cairo American College, AJM Kooheji Group and the Ministry of Education in the UAE provided diverse perspectives when evaluating the finalists’ projects.

Final event ceremony recording: https://www.facebook.com/tatawwarme/videos/2595249140794445/

“It’s been another fantastic year for the Tatawwar programme where we’ve seen many bright ideas come to life. The students have been able to access numerous resources to help sharpen their future skills and have a real taste of what it means to build a business with social and environment impact,” said Dan Howlett, HSBC’s Regional Head of Commercial Banking, Middle East, North Africa and Turkey.

“We are very pleased that we were able to substantially increase the number of students this year which made it a lot more competitive for the students and allowed them to be innovative and think outside of the box. Congratulations to all the finalists for getting this far and we wish them all the best on their future endeavors,” he added.

This year’s edition of Tatawwar: Building Tomorrow’s Minds has seen a total of 4650 students from over 1000 schools across the Middle East and North Africa region, register in the blended learning programme. The Tatawwar team hosted 12 prototyping workshops for the shortlisted 165 students in each of the programme’s countries in January and February. It was followed by online mentoring to help them develop their prototype and business models before choosing the top 20.

The top 20 who competed in the finals included 2 students from Algeria, 2 from Bahrain, 4 from Egypt, 2 from Kuwait, 1 from Oman, 3 from Qatar, and 6 from the UAE. Over the past weeks, they went through an acceleration programme that included twice-weekly webinars to help project owners fine-tune their pitching skills, and learn key business skills including financial projections, raising funding, future career fitness, technology trends and marketing.

Each webinar brought together international experts on each of these topics to help the students. In addition, each of the top 20 students was provided with four one-on-one coaching sessions and will get a one-year free membership to their local fablabs, where they can continue to develop their prototypes.

Sabrin Rahman, Regional Head of Corporate Sustainability at HSBC, Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, said, “Tatawaar has put the students at the centre of the self-directed learning – with a wider ecosystem created to support them to flourish which includes mentors and industry experts. This model has been heavily tested with current school closures. The only way to ensure long term success in the face of uncertainty is to embed individual accountability and to develop civic responsibility within our next generation. We are so proud of how the students have risen to the challenge and believe blended learning has a bright future.”

The top six winners’ prototypes will be showcased at the HSBC sponsored UK Pavilion at Expo 2021 Dubai and will also receive USD 12,000 in cash prizes. They will also be supported to crowdfund their projects and develop them further.

Shadi Banna, CEO of Potential.com said: “We are delighted that this blended learning programme delivered on its goal of identifying very talented individuals and supporting them to hone in essential practical skills, while also empowering nearly 5000 students through online learning, resources and tools to help them succeed.” 

Tatawwar: Building Tomorrow’s Minds is an interactive online and face-to-face programme that brings together students aged 15 to 18, schools, parents and the business community to innovate for a sustainable future by addressing one of three United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals:

1. Climate Action
2. Human Health and Well-being
3. Clean Water and Sanitation

Two of the Tatawwar previous winners, Samah Abdullah from Egypt and Zoya Naeem from the UAE, have come up with innovative solutions to address the water scarcity challenge and crowdfunded their projects. Samah has developed and just released her first WMS App which is now available for download on the Google Play store.

The next rollout of the Tatawwar programme will commence in mid-September 2020. The finals and highlights from this year’s programme can be watched on the programme’s web page www.tatawwar.com.

-Ends-

HSBC in the MENAT region

HSBC is the largest and most widely represented international banking organisation in the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey (MENAT), with a presence in 9 countries across the region.  HSBC has operations in the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait and Algeria. In Saudi Arabia, HSBC is a 29.2% shareholder of Saudi British Bank (SABB), and a 51% shareholder of HSBC Saudi Arabia for investment banking in the Kingdom.

This presence, the widest reach of any international bank in the region, comprises some 350 offices and around 10,500 employees. In the year ending 31st December 2018, HSBC in the MENAT region made a reported profit before tax of US$ 1,557m.

Potential.com

Potential.com is a global EdTech social enterprise that works with individuals, governments and corporates to support key social projects such as job creation, SMB and entrepreneurship development, workforce optimizations and Skills-to-job matching.

Governments and leading brands around the world, rely on Potential.com’s innovative empowerment platform to launch customized initiatives for their citizens and customers by helping them; startup, expand their businesses or enhance their corporate career.

Press coverage:

Entrepreneur Middle East: Tatawwar Chooses Six Student Innovations To Be Showcased At Expo 2021

Saudi Gazette: 6 Tatawwar winners announced during online awards ceremony

Etleboro: 6 Tatawwar winners announced during online awards ceremony

News Now: 6 Tatawwar winners announced during online awards ceremony

BizBahrain: 6 Tatawwar winners announced during online awards ceremony taking home cash and support

News.calliber: Bader Al Sarraf from Bahrain wins first prize in Tatawwar programme

Zawya: 6 Tatawwar winners announced during online awards ceremony taking home cash and support

krazywads.com: 6 Tatawwar winners announced during online awards ceremony taking home cash and support

Al Press: 6 Tatawwar winners announced during online awards ceremony taking home cash and support

EIN Newswire: 6 Tatawwar winners announced during online awards ceremony taking home cash and support

Kolasuhuf.com: الإعلان عن 6 فائزين محظوظين في برنامج “تطوّر” خلال حفل توزيع الجوائز الإلكتروني

SME 10X: Bader Al Sarraf from Bahrain wins first prize in Tatawwar programme for his ‘Solar Panel CO2 Converter” project

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