The Clean and Green Club

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Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company

He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).

“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”

That can take the form of numbers  — so for a newsletter, how many/what percentage opened the newsletter, spent at least so many seconds,clicked a link, or forwarded it. This is objective, fact-based information: *quantitative feedback*  — and it’s quite useful.

But it’s not enough. You also need *qualitative feedback*: information that looks at how people interact with your products or services. Qualitative feedback looks at much more subjective factors: people’s likes and dislikes, their willingness to take action, and so forth.numbers

Right now, I have a need to examine this newsletter’s usefulness to you and to me, and to think about whether I want to switch to a different delivery mechanism or shut it down.

So I’ve put together a very simple eight-question survey, using Survey Monkey.com — where surveys up to ten questions cost nothing: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DNR9Z6W

And I decided to make the survey itself the subject of my column. Notice how some of the questions determine what you find useful — and others probe the benefit to me, such as whether you’ve ever bought a book or attended a call I told you about. Notice that the questions are a mix of multiple-choice with any number of answers, multiple choice with only one answer allowed, and open-ended.

And notice that most questions allow a comment. That’s because I want it to feel personal. In the question about article length, this lead article and the book review demonstrate the new, shorter articles I’m thinking of switching to. They’re about 1/3 the length of my typical articles.

Notice also that I’m using incentives: I will give away three 15-minute marketing or publishing consultations to people who give me the best reasons, and I’ll also give away two of my marketing e-books to random participants. (You’re eligible if you haven’t won something from me in the past year, and if at least 20 people complete the survey). What can you learn from this process and incorporate into your own marketing?

Book Expo America, June 4-6, 2013, NYC.

REMEMBER: If you get me a paid speaking gig, you earn a commission. 25% on my standard rate of $5000.

experience and insight on the transformational power of words. With one word each day of the year, you can change your world. So, every day of every year, you can tune into a word that will infuse your life with new creative energy. Goodies include what looks like a really fun one-month membership in her Take 5 and Cook Club, a copy of my own Painless Green e-book with 111 tips on saving water and energy, and more.

Mission, Inc.: The Practitioner’s Guide to Social Enterprise

“The next time someone asks whether your mission is more important than your margin, tell her…that you started your business because you had a yearning to change the way the world operates…that the most effective institution impacting the world today is business, and that you are going to use that power for good… Tell him that you run a social enterprise–where mission and margin are *not* an either-or.” (pp. 37-38)

An interesting collaboration between a former addict who came to socially responsible business for all the wrong reasons and an ordained minster who took the helm of a large, socially conscious bakery–with stories from many other social enterprises, too.

Social enterprises, say Lynch and Walls, see their role as adding value to the entire community, not just to stockholders. Their mission and business operations are completely intertwined. And they succeed when they incorporate both business and humanistic principles into all phases: creating a climate where blame is supplanted by responsibility to improve…where there’s no room for mediocrity but plenty of room for anyone, from line employee to CEO, to admit mistakes and extract the lessons from them…and where good planning creates sustained growth in both the social mission and the financial metrics.

The authors talk a lot about the need to scale up. In their view, successful social enterprises must become big players. Thus, Walls’ Greyston Bakery, founded to create jobs for disadvantaged workers and selling to customers like Ben & Jerry’s, has staked out a position as the only “nationally branded premium brownie” (p. 151). Here, I disagree. I think there’s plenty of room for small, local companies to have big impact; a great example would be organic fair-trade coffee roaster Dean’s Beans, in Orange, Massachusetts, which has pushed the entire coffee industry toward sustainability. And I am working, through my books, my syndicated Green And Profitable column, and my speaking, to have big impact while staying small.

However, beyond that small disagreement, I find much good advice for CEOs and managers looking to start, grow, and successfully run companies whose social mission is just as integral as their bottom line.