Media training 101 for small businesses

-
Image
Great news: you just scored a big press interview to promote your business. The story will expose your brand to the perfect new audience and drive meaningful traffic to your website. So…don't blow it. Yes, just as quickly as the excitement for the opportunity arrived, the realization that you now have to do an interview sets in. I get it—press interviews can absolutely be intimidating. The resulting coverage represents a significant opportunity to acquire new customers, drive sales, or raise awareness, and you want to be sure to represent your brand well and really compel the audience to check out your company. On top of that, you have to contend with adrenaline and nerves in the moment. You may be thinking, "So many other business owners are so polished and articulate in their interviews. How am I going to pull that off?" Deep breath. A successful interview is usually the result of good media training: preparation and practice in advance of an interview. I've tr...
1 comment

How a Canadian volunteer group organized a massive mask-sewing effort with Zapier

-

Zapier allowed us to expand so rapidly. It was like magic! — Lee-Anne Moore-Thibert, founder of Canada Sews

As COVID-19 cases started cropping up in North America, Lee-Anne Moore-Thibert found herself coordinating a massive volunteer effort to sew personal protective equipment for health workers in need around Canada.

Work at her paralegal practice stopped when the courts closed, and she joined with a group of friends to help meet requests for masks from health workers in need. Now, she's working with others to manage 8,000 volunteers helping to provide supplemental PPE to health care workers and people in other essential jobs.

Eliminate the risk for human errors

Simba Tipton, who's organized large-scale events like EGLX—the largest gaming convention in Canada—came on board to help with logistics. A Zapier power-user, he quickly saw how automation could help Canada Sews.

"I started using Zapier to create better workflows for my team," says Simba. "I just used whatever skills I had working with spreadsheets and Zapier to help [Canada Sews] centralize information and get data to the right people."

At first, Lee-Anne was taking mask requests from a built-in form on a website, which sent an email alert every time it was filled out. She input those requests into a spreadsheet and shared those out to the teams manually.

"There was a lot of room for error because I'm exhausted," she says. "[The teams] had access to everything, they could easily make a mistake and delete an entire row."

After some tinkering, she and Simba eventually landed on a solution that eliminated manual data entry and consolidated the efforts from other volunteer Facebook groups.

How to organize a massive volunteer effort

Choosing the right tools helped Lee-Anne keep the operation moving.

Use a powerful spreadsheet app and add rows for new form responses

Canada Sews moved its information to Airtable. Part database, part spreadsheet, Airtable allows users to see the same spreadsheet data in multiple views. Each region coordinator has a custom view, so they can see mask requests from their specific province.

Mask requests come in through Typeform.

"Typeform has very powerful conditional logic which helped us with customizing an applicant's journey based on their responses," Simba explained.

Because of the sophisticated conditional logic, Canada Sews needed an intermediate step between Typeform and Airtable. Typeform's built-in Google Sheets integration created a spreadsheet of responses, and then they used Zapier to send that information over to Airtable.

When a new entry appears in Google Sheets, it triggers a Zap—an automated workflow on Zapier— to add mask requests as new rows in Airtable.

Because Airtable views exist for each province, a coordinator for Alberta, for example, will see only requests that come in from that region.

Send a daily reminder in Discord

Simba set up a second Zap to trigger daily reminders in Discord for volunteer coordinators to report daily numbers.

"I am not a very tech-savvy person," Lee-Anne admits. "Simba worked a miracle. All of a sudden, everything was automated. Zapier saved me hundreds of hours of data input and the concern of human error."

An unfortunate reality

Canada Sews only provides masks upon request and has strict requirements for the fabric and pattern used to make masks. Many UPS locations in Canada have also provided pro-bono help, acting as drop-off locations for mask cleaning, and are also providing free shipping for masks to reach their final destination.

"We had a feeling [the PPE situation] would be grim and the trickle-down [of supplies] wouldn't reach nursing homes, grocery store workers, or couriers," Lee-Anne says.

As the crisis continued in Canada, Lee-Anne and Simba say automation has helped them scale Canada Sews, and prepare for the worst.

"I'm more than happy to help build it into what it needs to be," Simba says. "Zapier has helped us scale and will help us scale more."

The effort has also received assistance from Zapier's First Responder Fund, which is helping front-line workers responding to COVID-19 around the world by comping Starter plans for 2020.

"Without that, the entire program gets shut down," says Lee-Anne. "Zapier has been a godsend and it's so amazing to see the generosity of so many organizations to allow this to continue."

About Zapier: Zapier helps you automate the tedious tasks in your day by connecting web apps. Our automatic workflows, which we call Zaps, send information from one app to another, so you can stop worrying about copy/pasting and can focus on more important matters. Read more customer stories to see how people are using Zapier to automate and solve big problems. Then, give Zapier a try for free.



from The Zapier Blog https://ift.tt/37hgkov

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If Time-Tracking Apps Don't Work for You, Try a Productivity Journal

-
Image
Monitoring how you spend your time leads to a wealth of useful information: It can tell you what time of day you're most productive , help you create better estimates for how long tasks will take, and show you what activities you'd have to cut to focus your energy on a new idea or project. The most precise way to monitor how you spend your time is to use a time-tracking app . But these apps require a lot of overhead. You have to diligently log your hours (or make sure your app is logging them correctly) and sort your tracked time into categories. You have to pause after every task—no matter how brief—to capture time spent accurately. If tracking your time at such a granular level sounds like a punishment, but you still want insight into how and where you spend your time, consider the less menacing sibling of time-tracking apps: a productivity journal. What Is a Productivity Journal? I kept a journal as a preteen, though in those days I called it a diary. Snoopy and Woods...
Read more

The 25 Best Productivity Apps for iPhone in 2018

-
Image
The best productivity apps for iPhone make possible something that would otherwise be impossible, or they make something you need to do simpler and faster. Imagine being asked, unexpectedly, for a copy of a tax form from last year as proof of address during an important appointment that you traveled many miles to attend. In fact, it happened to me, and thankfully I had a copy of the document I needed saved to a file syncing application, which meant I could pull it up on my phone and show it to the gracious Customs and Border Protection officer who demanded to see it. If that's not productivity by way of efficiency, I don't know what is. Perhaps a more routine example is keeping track of time spent in an off-site meeting so that you can claim it as an expense later. If you have the right time-tracking mobile app, you can record the time on the spot rather than having to estimate it and remember to record it later. The use cases for productivity apps are infinite, and sometimes...
Read more

What's the difference between the Wiki and OneNote tabs in Microsoft Teams?

-
Image
It's easy, in a team chat app, for key points to get lost in the ongoing flow of conversation. That's why every channel in Microsoft Teams has a Wiki page, where you can store things like meeting notes or outline the current state of a project. You can also add a OneNote tab to every channel for similar purposes. The Wiki and OneNote tab are pretty overlapping features, so you might be wondering which one you should use. My answer, unhelpfully, is "it depends." Here's a quick overview: The Wiki is fast and simple but only works inside Teams. OneNote offers more features and can be used outside Teams. My advice: if the Wiki works for you, that's great. Use it. If you want more out of your note-taking, and the ability to reference notes outside of Teams, use OneNote. Let's go over both features with more detail, so you can choose the tool that works for you. The Wiki is fast and functional—but only exists in Teams You can probably find the Wiki in ...
Read more