end povertee

I just love when I find a project posted on our site from a company that is just an amazing feel-good.  And this company mixes fashion with the feel-good.  To me, it doesn’t get any better than that! end povertee® clothing line was created as a platform that would inspire, bring awareness and empower every one of its customers to make an impact to reduce extreme poverty in our Global family.

Every time you purchase end povertee® tees and products 50% of the net profits raised from the sale of the goods is given directly to charities/organizations working to eradicate extreme poverty. The money is used to provide a variety of basic needs including; education, food, shelter, clean water and proper medical supplies.

When you wear their stylish and sweatshop-free t-shirts not only do you look good on the outside but you feel great on the inside knowing that your purchase changed the life of someone living in extreme poverty. How cool is that? And making their logo for them is even cooler.

I recently asked Jenni Young of end povertee about their business and needs and here’s what she had to say:

1.     Before crowdSPRING, what method did you use for creative service work?

In the past, I was part of creating several websites for films etc and I would find creatives to do work through networking with friends, co-workers or posting ads to craigslist.

2.     What made you decide to use crowdSPRING?

While we were in the beginning stages of the launching the business, the web designers kept giving us ideas for logos but nothing seemed to fit.  We never had the wow moment of THIS IS IT!  When we were just about to choose any logo, assuming we needed to make a decision and move forward…we happened upon the crowdSPRING website.  I don’t even remember how we found it but when we did…we thought wow!  This could be the answer to our problem.  We looked around other projects… got so excited and listed the logo ad immediately! Approximately one week later…we had the moment of saying…WOW that’s our logo!

3.     What is your small business bible?  As in, what is a must-read every day for all small business owners and employees?

As a small business I wish I had more time to read everything but I don’t.  I depend a lot on friends who have small businesses for advice.  I do keep up with and love Entrepreneur magazine, which I have been reading for over 20 years.  I also read my daily dose of affirmations from Neale Donald Walsch to keep me on a positive note and moving forward fearlessly.

4.    If your best friend told you they wanted to start a business and asked for your best piece of advice, what would it be?

1) Make sure it is something you are very very passionate about…it could take a very long time to reap any type of financial benefit.   2) Make sure it has something new to offer your customers.  3) Make sure that your company makes it a priority to give back to the community in some way!

Oh and Jenni wanted to make sure we gave a great shout out to the winning creative – Great job YuSee Grafisch!

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

Web Design Trends for 2010 - http://bit.ly/458nIe

45 Animal Inspired Logo Designs - http://bit.ly/u5JWi

40 Incredibly Useful Web Design Tools You Should Use Daily - http://bit.ly/44p4ik

The 16 Most Influential Web Design Blogs of 2009 - http://bit.ly/2K8sRX

45 Inspiring Navigation Menus That You Must See - http://bit.ly/2kpZQ9

Build a Slick Rich User Interface in Photoshop - http://bit.ly/2sbi1g

50 Clean, Sleek, and Modern Website Designs - http://bit.ly/3IeGxx

50 Clever, Creative Logos - http://bit.ly/3wnyzA

Ten great Twitter bird design tutorials - http://bit.ly/5D0Y0

Fonts Used In Logos of Popular Websites - http://ff.im/-b05Fv

Photoshop Brushes • Free Hi-Resolution Paint Stroke - http://bit.ly/KfkX1

Photoshop Tutorial: Dull Color Fix: Duck girl - http://bit.ly/KRSCh

A-Z of Free Photoshop Plugins and Filters - http://bit.ly/2VP6Xs

Mega Drop Down Menus w/ CSS & jQuery - http://bit.ly/30f6Ic

Continue reading →

The crowdSPRING message is all over the place - we have a blog, we use Twitter, we have Facebook, we have email, we have customer support tickets and oh yeah, we even have phones. We’ve tried to cover all our bases on how to get out our message and constantly work on ensuring you’re able to talk to us as well. We think we’ve hit all the angles, but being the matchmaker that I am, I want to make sure you’re 1. getting information from us that you’re looking for and 2. able to contact us any way you want to.

We want to know:
- what news/information do you want to hear from us?
- how do you like to get that news?
- how do you like to share information about your experience with crowdSPRING?
- what is the easiest way for you to contact us if you have accolades or concerns?

As you know, a relationship can only work if there’s open communications and you’re on the same page. We want to make sure we’re not that annoying girlfriend sending you non-stop emails about things that you could care less about or that emotionally distant boyfriend who will only communicate with you the way he wants to and when he’s good and ready.

Let us know how we can make our communications better for you. Come on–we want to hear you!

Would your small business benefit from reducing costs, improving product and/or service quality, more effectively competing with bigger companies, innovating more, enhancing your expertise, and better managing your own capacity and the capacity of your small team? You bet!

In this post, I discuss 10 ways that your small business can leverage crowdsourcing. I’ll explain each suggestion and will recommend ways that you could take advantage of the service for your small business. I’ll include examples for each suggestion to show how a small businesses can leverage each service.

First - a short background. For the past 20+ years, many companies have outsourced certain types of work - such as product design, manufacturing, or customer service - to a third-party. Often, the third-party was located overseas (India, for example). Historically, outsourcing was the done mostly by larger companies. Although outsourcing continues to be a popular option for companies in many different industries, the diminishing savings from outsourcing, coupled with some of the disadvantages (quality, communication issues, turnover, etc.) have made outsourcing a less attractive option.

Over the past 6-7 years, some companies have found new, more creative ways to leverage others - through crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing involves taking a task which is traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to a large group of people - rather than to a specific third party (like one would do when outsourcing). Some large companies have been leveraging crowdsourcing for years (see Innocentive below).

How can your small business leverage crowdsourcing? Here are 10 suggestions:

1. uTest.

What it is: uTest is the world’s largest marketplace for software testing services. A community of 20,000+ quality assurance professionals from around the world help software companies test their web, mobile, gaming and desktop applications.

How You Can Leverage uTest: If your company develops software, you can leverage uTest to provide functional, usability, load and performance testing. Companies that develop software know that testing is time consuming and tedious. And while larger companies often have quality assurance staff - or entire departments focused on testing - small businesses must rely on their own employees or third parties to thoroughly test their software products. By crowdsourcing software testing, you can both control and reduce your costs, and make sure that your products are thoroughly tested before they are released, without putting tremendous strain on your small development team. You pay only for the services you need/use.

2. Innocentive.

What it is: InnoCentive is an online marketplace where organizations in need of innovation can leverage a global network of over 160,000 people to solve technical and business problems.

How You Can Leverage Innocentive: If your company runs into a business or research and development problem, Innocentive could be a great alternative to help you overcome that problem. You set the challenge reward (these are typically in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars). While the cost to post a problem to Innocentive and attract a robust community of people to help you is not small (you set your own reward amount), many small businesses developing complex chemical or electronic products incur much higher costs when working with third-party contractors. And while Innocentive has traditionally been a great option for large corporations - it is equally attractive to smaller companies that must find ways to overcome complex and expensive problems that are delaying product launches.

Continue reading →

Thinking about leadership in crisis, I was remembering the story of one particular venture. The leader who put together this tiny company was a visionary, a learner, and an insatiably curious individual. The venture was not his first; he had already served as a founding member of one team which launched a successful enterprise; had started another successful enterprise himself; and had eventually gone on to found a third triumphant (though almost disastrous) venture three years later. I have been pondering the success of this last venture and considering why, against incredible, fierce odds it was (ultimately) successful.

Like many founders, this particular leader was driven by his own ideals, by his own curiosity, and by his own fiercely competitive nature. For this third startup, he raised almost $4 million from a small group of private investors and, along with a Government contract worth another $700,000, he was able to assemble a team of 27 motivated individuals from a widely diverse set of backgrounds. The Founder used unusual methods when interviewing and selecting his new employees: he believed that character and temperament were as important as experience, and he hired some team members based on their appearance and his first impression of them. He was also known to ask unusual questions when interviewing and one report even had him requesting that an applicant sing during his interview. The Founder also had an unusual approach to traditional job definitions and roles and was resistant to establishing typical organizational hierarchies; everyone on the team had to perform menial chores, regardless of their primary responsibilities.

Like many startups, once it was launched the venture quickly ran into some enormous challenges. Events completely outside of the team’s control unfolded, and it became virtually impossible to execute their plan and meet their schedule. The situation became progressively worse as their technology failed and they found themselves in a position that all such ventures fear: they were stuck, with very few options. The Founder’s instincts, leadership, and methodology were instrumental in the venture’s survival and serve to instruct many of us who are engaged in the world of startups. If we don’t wisely use our limited resources, our imaginations, and every ounce of our team’s collective ability it is sometimes simply not possible to find a path to success.

Continue reading →

Fete

This week’s small business is a full service event production company. They provide meeting planning services for special events, corporate functions, galas, weddings (hint, hint Pete), corporate meetings and seminars. Not only can this company plan your next event, but they can cater it and offer your corporation concierge service as well. I know what you’re thinking, “Bethany, this sounds like a HUGE company, not a small business.” Well, my friend, you are wrong. This powerhouse events company is run by two people out of Canada and has been in business for about two years. They are now in need of a logo that will be used to help brand their company.

We recently asked business partners Rosie and Anthony some questions about their business and needs and here’s what they had to say:

1. Before crowdSPRING, what method did you use for creative service work?

We relied very much on our own creative abilities in writing and photography and resources in the printing/marketing/advertising/design industries, but mainly, all our creative work was designed and implemented by us - the principles of the company.

2. What made you decide to use crowdSPRING?

We felt that our current logo did not accurately represent the different entities of the company and wanted to have help from some of the best creative designers to re-create our logo so that it is a better reflection of our company as a whole.

3. What is your small business bible? As in, what is a must-read every day for all small business owners and employees?

In the events industry, “Biz Bash” magazine publication is a must-read, every quarter. Also, constant sourcing using Internet and special events directories is imperative in this business in order to remain competitive and to generate creative ideas.

4. If your best friend told you they wanted to start a business and asked for your best piece of advice, what would it be?

Believe in your product or service above all other products or services of similar nature. Believe that no one can do what you do better than you can - and make it your mission to prove it!

Click here to visit Fete’s website.

I was reminded today from Tal (a developer at crowdSPRING) that a new version of Ubuntu is out today. Code-named “the unoriginal banana” version or something, I don’t know. Ubuntu has great, but ridiculous, naming conventions.

Now, Ubuntu isn’t exactly known to be friendly with designers. There are certainly people who use The Gimp and think it’s a perfectly suitable replacement for Photoshop, but you (probably?) don’t see these people working in a studio, needing to crank out high-quality deliverables yesterday.

Ubuntu took a pretty big steep in the “looks” department with this latest release. Up until now, fonts rendered in any flavor of Linux always looked… ugly. Really, really ugly. Slap-your-grandma ugly. With this newest version, they’ve released a new font smoother that puts Ubuntu’s font renderings up in the same league as Windows and OS X.

In fact, the following image has the same text rendered in Windows XP, Ubuntu 9.10 and Mac OS X. Can you tell which is which? First person to guess correctly* gets … a crowdSPRING slinky and …  half a book of stamps.**

* According to the INSANE AMOUNT of comments (zero) my latest blog posts, this competition should be non-existant. At least leave me a comment with a joke or something. Hockey related gets you bonus points.
** Gimmie a break. I’m trying to move to Chicago and everything’s slowly getting packed. Enjoy your book of stamps. Send your grandma a letter.

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

500+ Free Download High Quality Photoshop PSD Files For Designers - http://bit.ly/23Ix0x

80 Stunning Background Patterns For Your Websites - http://bit.ly/4zFjYI

20 Do’s and Don’ts of Effective Web Design - http://bit.ly/nnSaf

Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design - http://bit.ly/32jaDQ

Coffee Stains: 25 High Resolution Photoshop Brushes - http://bit.ly/2OdGKL

20+ Best Psd to XHTML/CSS Tutorials - http://bit.ly/4A9bn2

Creating Product Advertisements with a Flowing Aesthetic – Psd Plus Tutorial - http://bit.ly/1si3dB

Prepress tips for graphic designers - http://bit.ly/EsN1O

50 Photoshop Tutorials For Creating Poster Designs - http://bit.ly/36fx2m

Top Ten Spooky Fonts - MyFonts Blog - http://ping.fm/VjPTg

Over 80 Social Network Icon’s from Komodo Media - http://su.pr/2Bg2hW

17 Wordpress Theme Design Tutorials - http://bit.ly/3jWEFq

Web Dev App Reviews from the Pros – Part 1, Mac - http://bit.ly/21dtRi

10 Must-Read Design Roundups You Might Have Missed Last Week - http://bit.ly/1iB1W9

Continue reading →

Last week I wrote Part 1 of this post - 10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips, (Part 1 of 2)
- focusing on ways that small businesses can leverage social media. In part 1, I discussed the first five tips.

Mashable, one of my favorite technology & social media blogs, offered to publish the entire post, including part 2. You can find that post, including suggestions 6-10, on Mashable.com - 10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips.

If you have additional resources to share or other helpful advice that’s worked for your small business (or thoughts about things to avoid), please take a minute and leave a comment here or in the post on Mashable. I’d love to hear from you.

Umm, Ross?  Yeah, I’m gonna need you to go ahead and get me a new monitor.  Mmmkay?