Showing: 1 - 10 of 11 Results

Healthier School Meals for All Children: An Interview with Ian Dunn

Ian believes passionately that children should be eating healthier school meals. He’s the driving-force behind https://selfsufficientschools.co.uk/ and https://vegschoolmeals.co.uk/

I first came across the Self Sufficient Schools account on Twitter last year. It had a post asking people to sign a petition to make School Food-Growing & Self-Sufficiency a dedicated subject area of the UK National Curriculum. I was curious to find out more about this initiative, which was started by North London-based Ian Dunn, because it immediately struck me as a very good idea.

I still have fairly vivid memories of school food, which, back in the 1960s and 1970s, wasn’t very good at all. This was a salad-free era. I remember great big tubs of mashed potato and baked beans, toad-in-the-hole at least once a week, and always fried fish, or fish fingers, on Fridays. If we ever saw any green vegetables they’d usually been boiled to within an inch of their lives. Desserts were stodgy and unhealthy – treacle sponge or spotted dick – and nearly everything was served with custard. Fresh fruit was a rarity!

Goodbye E.ON…Hello Octopus Energy

Home energy – an industry where customer retention no longer matters

Like so many people across the UK, I recently changed my home energy provider. You know the situation…you’ve been with your supplier for quite a while, and a few weeks before your contract is due to end, you get a reminder. You start looking at their renewal deals, because you know you’ll end up being whacked pretty hard financially if you do nothing.

My existing supplier was E.ON. I’d been with them for a couple of years and was reasonably happy with my dual fuel contract. But when I looked at their renewal offers, I was pretty horrified. I was going to be paying a lot more.

A Roadmap to Sustainability for SMEs

There’s little doubt that consumers care deeply about the environment and sustainability, and prefer to deal with businesses which care about these things too. According to a recent survey conducted by Accenture, a leading global management consultancy, 60% of respondents said that since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic they were making more environmentally friendly, sustainable or ethical purchases.

A societal shift towards making better environmental choices had begun well before the pandemic took hold and it is accelerating now that the world is returning to normal.

Top Tips for Better LinkedIn Posts

The first line of a LinkedIn post is critical

Give very careful thought to your first line, because as your LinkedIn audience reads it this is the moment when they will decide whether to continue reading your post or just scroll on past it.

Never underestimate the power of the visual

Creating content isn’t just about the writing itself. Use images that support the content. This improves the overall reading experience. And don’t forget to optimise your images. A high percentage of LinkedIn engagement is on mobile devices, so make sure your images suit small devices as well. Use video content where you can, as this also helps greatly to drive engagement. Videos should start with essential information and end with your call to action (see below).

Small Businesses Need to Up Their Game on Sustainability and Ethical Sourcing

A very good friend of mine, Julian Lyons, runs IMI Ltd., a long-established premium sourcing company based in Central London. Julian recently announced in a LinkedIn post that his company, which does a lot of business internationally, particularly with China, had updated the Sustainability and Ethics Policy on its website. It’s a very comprehensive policy and I know that Julian believes passionately that his company should operate sustainably and needs to avoid at all costs doing business with any suppliers which could be benefitting from the use of child labour or forced labour.

Small Business Websites – What to Include on an “About” Page

It’s important for every small business to give careful thought as to what it puts on the “About” page of its website. After the Home page it’s often the page that site visitors will go to next. It’s one which can strongly influence the decision about whether or not to do business with you.

In other words it’s about credibility and trust. A visitor to your site will typically go to your About page to find out if you’re a business of substance. People only buy from businesses that they trust.

Why Web Copywriting is a Bit Like Plastering

…. it looks easy, but try it yourself and you’ll struggle to get a perfect finish.

You’re looking at your website and thinking …it’s time it had a makeover. So you hire a web designer to do the design and development work for your new site. You quickly realise that web design work is expensive, so you try and reduce the project cost by writing the copy for the new website yourself.

Does this sound like you? Happy to spend lots of money on web design because you can’t do it yourself, but keen to write the copy because that’s the easy part, right?

Wrong!

The uncomfortable truth is that too many business websites fail to meet the basic expectations of their customers and it’s often poor writing that’s to blame. If the information on a website is poorly written, badly organised or just hard to find this is a sure-fire way to drive potential customers away.

UK Localisation

UK Localisation: What Is It and Who Needs It?

UK localisation is not some Government policy intended to ensure that only local people get jobs. It’s actually the process whereby products, services, software, websites and text documents are adapted to the language, culture and “look-and-feel” of a particular country, in this case the UK.

When localising any product or service for the UK, translation alone tends not to be enough. The ultimate objective of localisation is to make sure that the product or service appears to have been developed locally, by local people for local people.

UK English and US English are different

U.S. English v British English

I was recently asked by a client in the United States to review about 50 pages of content on their U.S. website and edit this so that it would be suitable for a British audience.

I’d assumed that this would be a fairly straightforward task involving making all the obvious spelling changes: making sure that words like “color” and “flavor” had a “u” in them; changing “center” to centre, “toward” to towards, “program” to programme and amending words like “organization” and “specialize” to the British spelling. But the work actually turned out to be a lot more time-consuming than I’d anticipated.

Interviewing tips from a copywriter

Conducting Successful Business Interviews

As a financial copywriter I must often interview people face-to-face in order to be able to complete my work, whether it’s for a magazine article, an annual report, a press release or anything else.

Face-to-face interviews get the best results

Although they’re harder to arrange and take more time, I’ve always found that face-to-face interviews get the best results. They’re far better, certainly, than interviews conducted over the phone or on Zoom.

Most people are happy to give interviews and will communicate freely and openly. I do though sometimes encounter interviewees who are a little reticent, perhaps through their natural shyness or concern about being misquoted.