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Social media is an area where many .orgs come up short. In fact, it’s common for a lot of businesses to stumble with social media outreach. A new organization might have a handle on its social media campaigns, but as its audience grows, social media transforms into something that requires more time and attention.

Organizations often make the mistake of assigning social media to a volunteer or staff member already burdened with other tasks, and they don’t take the time to make posts geared toward the right audience..

Another common mistake is to split the duties across multiple volunteers. This can be effective, but only if you have a very precise and defined workflow, and a team with strong internal communication.

Finding the people with t...

Today’s Favorite Find: Polymail

Elevator Pitch

Polymail is “the most powerful platform for email productivity in a beautiful native app — on desktop and mobile.”

Why We Love It

Look, no one really likes email. In fact, people’s avid dislike of email has brought us everything from Slack to multiple apps trying to fix the problem that is email. And perhaps no one hates email more than startup founders, who spend even more time than the average Joe glued to their email inboxes.

And while I’ve written about quite a few solutions to the email problem over the years, I have to say that it looks like Polymail has finally, actually solved email. They’re still in closed alpha, but, from all reports, this is the email app we’ve been waiting for.

Ok...

Our startup's culture can all be mapped back to one person — us.

We are the cultural North Star of our startup, and everything we do, and how we act, puts our ship on a course for good things, and if we allow it, really bad ones. Our challenge is that we often don't recognize how even our simplest actions broadcast across the entire organization and poison the actions of everyone else. Our worst behaviors, even those that we think are positive, become the virus that infects everyone.

Toxic Politics? That's Us

All of that shitty infighting and toxic politicking — that's on us. Either we encouraged or we let it happen — either way, we're responsible. We may not see it that way though, we may think that "everyone else is being shitty" but that...

What is a B Corp?

Before we even dive into what a “B corp” is, we need to talk about terminology. Like a C corps or an S corps, people are often referring to a “benefit corporation” when they say “B corp.” But B corp is actually different from a benefit corporation, although they’re related.

A benefit corporation is…

A benefit corporation is a type of formal legal business structure, like a C corp or S corp. In addition to making a profit, shareholders hold benefit corporations responsible to contributing in some way to the public good. In some states, benefit corporations are required to produce proof that they’re contributing to the public good. They’re taxed the same way as C corps, which means they’re subject to double taxation.

Benefit...

Most people who start their own businesses must make a transition from employee to entrepreneur. There are some exceptions, such as people who are brought up in a family of business owners. For the most part, though, society trains us to be employees. This starts in school and continues as we begin to earn money with part-time and full-time jobs.

So when you decide to take the plunge and start your own business, it can be easy to unwittingly bring an employee mindset with you. Here are some pointers to keep in mind to help you make this crucial transition:

Consider a Gradual Transition

There are both pros and cons of leaving your job and putting all of your energy into your own business. On the one hand, you can devote all of your time to ...

Question: If you have an educational stipend for your startup employees, how do you decide what your company should pay for and what they should pay for out of pocket?

The following answers are provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs.

See if It Benefits the Client

We’ve chosen to pay for any continuing education, no maximum, that adds immediate value to our client roster. If it’s a service or skill set that will improve our client’s experience with our company, expand our service set or improve the quality of the campaigns we run, then it is quickly approved. We also provide a free book library of management and self-development for al...

There’s a limited number of colours and shapes in this world, so your logo isn’t your whole brand. Your colour could remind a potential customer of a completely unrelated business (I recently thought of a well known auto care shop when looking at the website of a debt refinancer) and you need to rely on more than just that one aspect of your company to raise brand awareness.

If you have a marketing campaign, do you use just one channel? Only one ad image? Of course not, any campaign is more effective with multiple channels. It’s the exact same principle for “startup branding”.

Have you ever answered the phone without looking, heard “hey it’s me” and known exactly who it was? This is essentially what you want for your company. You want your...

A weird thing started happening about five to ten years ago. In cities across the country, coffee shops rapidly made the transition from lively spaces full of chatter, dates, friends, and books to libraries inhabited by intense humans staring into screens, each in their own earphone-isolated world.

I was one of those people; one of the first to start working remotely when I wasn’t able to get a “real job” during the Great Recession.

Back then, even as the coffee shops filled to a breaking point and people waged passive aggressive evil eye wars over the too-few plug points, we were still in the minority.

Today, however, we’ve added coworking spaces in every major city and more than a few minor ones, but coffee shops are still packed to break...

These days, culture is paramount for having a strong team to execute your business’ vision. Ideas are worthless on their own; without a strong team, you won’t succeed. When building a business, you want employees who deeply about the company. A big piece of that is recognizing that, at the end of the day, they’re just people with normal daily stresses and worries.

My company TheSquareFoot is an unconventional business—we’re taking commercial real estate into the digital age—so we’re used to alternative practices. But like our business model, our unconventional ways have a purpose and rely on three major points: team building, nourishment and fun. Throughout our growth, I’ve recognized a few unconventional ways (that anyone could try) to pos...

Founders won't change people's personalities, we can only manage them. And that's where we fail over and over.

How often do we get frustrated by someone in our organization that we just wish we could change? They lack motivation, discipline, or they just don't play well with others. In our Founder minds, we just need this one inspirational heart-to-heart talk, or some Karate Kid montage, where they come out the other end a changed and improved human.

We have a hard time believing we can't "manage" our way into the outcome we're looking for, but what we're actually missing is that there are certain aspects of humans that go beyond what we can manage in the first place. And our lack of recognition of this boundary creates a colossal waste of ...