Change for Kids Changes Work

DBE has been providing pro bono support to a few small, non-profit organizations, including Change for Kids. This organization partners with New York City public schools to empower underprivileged children by providing them with a broad range of innovative literacy, arts, and music programs. Some of the measures we implemented when we took control of their Google Grants campaign include:

• Structure keywords into smaller, more closely related ad groups to build on the existing keyword list to significantly increase the number of keywords used
• Revamp ad copy and strengthen the calls to action.
• Keep the local advertising reach, but supplement it with a national component

We mention this now as we were very pleased to recently receive this update on the campaign from Colin Smith of Change for Kids on the performance improvements made by Rob Trautner, who heads our pay-per-click programs here at DBE:

Just wanted to let you guys know that in addition to our page visits going from about 200 a week before your help to 1,592 last week, we had a group that heard about us through the AdWords campaign just throw a fundraiser for their birthdays. They'll be donating over $1,000 to CFK from it (enough to provide a year of visual art to more than 5 children who otherwise have had all their art programs cut). And that's before we overhaul our website over the next 6-9 months. Thank you again for all your help.

Good Example of a Good Event

Last Wednesday I attended, and spoke at, Custom Media Day, a day-long event sponsored by the Content Marketing Institute and the Custom Content Council that promised to “focus on the content marketing industry specifically from a custom content providers view. Attendees will walk away with tangible ideas on how to monetize content marketing and learn new business processes that will lead to success.”

I’d been hearing great things about Joe Pulizzi, for a while and was pleased to be accepted as a speaker to this event. (My topic was SEO and Content Marketing. You can download the presentation here.)

It was a great event, absolutely delivering on what it promised--new insights for content publishers. The other speakers included Tom Stein of Stein + Partners, Chris Sullivan of Bunchball, and Nicholas Pavach of Zinio.

Others and I tweeted heavily the many great tidbits coming out of the presentations (#cmday2011). Speakers presented an interesting combination of new statistics, interesting spins, tested approaches and more. The questions posed by the audience were equally engaging and insightful.

But what impressed me most was the impressiveness of the entire experience. I admit, sometimes I get bored at events like this. Frankly, events seldom turn out to be as good as I want them to be. But the information and perspectives I gathered from this event, through the presentations, Q&A, and break-time conversations with other marketers, kept me energized and thinking for days. I’ve been sharing what I gathered at the event with my team, our clients, and our partner companies, passing along the value of the event and the time I committed to it.

And while all of those strategic benefits are the real value, I have to say that the logistics were well orchestrated too. The venue (Scandanavia House--lots of natural light, large conference room, patio on one side, Park Avenue on the other), the friendliness and helpfulness of the support team members, the food and beverages—it was all just so well done and obviously well planned.

If DBE decides to host an event like this, we’re going to host an event like this!

Thanks to Joe Pulizzi and the Content Marketing Institute along with Lori Rosen and Custom Content Council for a really great experience.