Esperanza International provides hope to Haitian earthquake victims

On January 21, 2010, In Financial social media marketing, By Bruce

By:  D. Bruce Johnston, President, DBJ Associates

As we struggle with how to provide support for those suffering through the horrors of the earthquake in Haiti, my friend Dave Valle and his great organization Esperanza comes to mind. 

Dave has dedicated his post-baseball life to Esperanza International, a charity whose mission “is to free children and their families from poverty through initiatives that generate income, education and health, restoring self-worth and dignity to those who have lost hope”.

Just days after the Haitian earthquake hit Dave had accounted for his team in the area, mobilized them and sent the following letter to supporters of Esperanza:

Thank you all for your prayers, thoughts and support of Esperanza’s work in Haiti.  I wanted to give you a quick update on our progress on the ground in Port Au Prince.

All of Esperanza’s staff are safe.  The Esperanza office is located in the Northeast portion of Haiti which did not sustain much damage.  Carlos Pimentel, Esperanza’s VP of International Operations, is in charge of our Rapid Response Strategy.  He has served in the DR for 20 years on the Dominican Republic’s Disaster Relief and Mitigation team.  His knowledge and contacts on situations like this are second to none on the island.

We have begun a herculean effort on the ground last week as Esperanza leads a coordinated effort of relief through our large network of partners and churches who, along with Esperanza, have a history of work in the communities.  This is critical in the distribution of aid.  We are known entities, who have been serving the communities for many years.  This will prevent much of what you are seeing on the news reels…fighting for food and unorganized distribution, chaos.

Esperanza had 12,000 food packs in storage as part of our disaster preparedness plan for the island (tropical storms and hurricanes) that were sent immediately. There is more on the way.  We now have a warehouse on the DR border where we are moving supplies from Santo Domingo (where prices have not risen yet) to the warehouse, then from the warehouse to P AU P for distribution to our network.  As of yesterday, Esperanza opened a new office and distribution center in Port Au Prince in alliance with one of our partners that will serve as our base of operation.  We have 2 Doctors there also to provide medical care.

There are many people and organizations coming along side Esperanza to provide support.  We will need more.  

Pray for Esperanza’s leadership in this huge undertaking.  And Thank You for your support over the last 15 years, helping Esperanza to become an organization that has the capacity to respond in this manner and one that others look to for leadership in a time such as this!

Just getting started!

David Valle

Under Dave’s leadership Esperanza consistently invests over 97% of your donation.  If you are looking to help Esperanza has an immediate necessity, and is requesting from their partners abroad, gifts in cash, which will help expedite the arrival of relief to the region. A $40 donation to Esperanza´s Disaster Relief initiatives will provide a family with the basic necessities (food, bottled water, healthcare kits etc.) for ten days.

For more information on how to help, please contact the Esperanza Disaster Response Group at disasterresponse@esperanza.org. This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

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How are RIAs approaching social media?

On January 16, 2010, In Uncategorized, By Bruce

By:  D. Bruce Johnston, President, DBJ Associates

With hope and fear. If they can publish a few blog posts, advisors can extend the life of a public relations story nearly effortlessly. With social media and its ability to generate attention inexpensively, it’s hard not to consider it.

 The difficulty comes in when you ask an RIA what they are willing to pay for it. An RIA must opt for at least a minimal, consistent effort to communicate their subject matter expertise to their prospects.

So, while the vehicles underlying all that publicity are almost free, the talent to assemble content and distribute it is not.

And that’s the rub: RIAs need to make a commitment to reach out and sustain an effort to attract new prospects into their loop. Whether an RIA is ready to take the deep dive into social media, he or she needs to answer four questions.

 

  1. Do I like the idea of using nearly free marketing tools to attract prospective clients? This one is easy: “Yes.”
  2. Should I “do-it-myself” — or recruit professionals to help me? The RIA must decide whether they want to take time away from client-facing activity to master the web’s ins and outs. Caveat: Do-it-yourself errors can be a deal breaker.
  3. Am I committed to spending some money? RIAs don’t have to commit to hefty retainers, but they do need to commit  somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000 initially to dedicate to professional resources.
  4. Am I willing to experiment a bit, journey into unknown territory?  I have found that this is the most important question for advisors to answer. An experimental sense of social media’s possibilities is the key. There is no locked in blueprint for how to proceed. Social media strategies are a trip through a new frontier; the efforts are flexible, motivational and engaging when done well. And, if you make a mistake, they are pretty easy to correct.

 

Why is it that a prospect who won’t return an advisor’s phone call won’t hesitate to connect with that advisor on LinkedIn? Why is it that a prospect will unsubscribe from an advisor’s newsletter and then immediately start following that same person on Twitter?

I think it’s a matter of control: individuals like to pick and choose what they want from a service provider and who they want to have a conversation with — and that includes RIAs.

But advisors cannot join the conversation if their potential prospects don’t know where to find them.

 

 

 

 

  

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“Five of the Six Key Trends Other Than Aging” that will completely alter the marketplace for Wealth Advisory services revealed.

On January 15, 2010, In Financial social media marketing, By Bruce

By:  D. Bruce Johnston, President & CEO

According to a summary report by Doug Anderson, SVP, Research & Development, The Nielsen Company, growth will be hard to come by in the coming decade and there are “Five Key Trends Other Than Aging” at work which will make growth extremely difficult.  DBJ Associates provides questions wealth advisors may want to ask of themselves in order to benefit from these trends, along with the answer to: “What’d they miss?”

  • Growth is found in less-developed world.

By 2030, world population will have grown by around 20%. Only 3.2% of this growth will come from the more developed world.

In the U.S. nearly one in three households will be headed by someone over the age of 65.  Household size will decline across the board with a large share of the population living in one or two person households.  Middle and upper middle classes will shrink the share the most.

How are you positioning your firm to deal with multiple “heads-of-households” living under one roof?  How is your firm preparing to grow in an environment where the traditional source of new customers is shrinking and the power of the decision maker is becoming blurring across multiple generations?

  • U.S. based wealth advisors will be locked into market share wars.

The other side of the coin of an aging U.S. population is that the share of households that have children will continue to decline. By the middle 2020s, the share of U.S. households with children under 18 will fall below 30%.  This makes it important that wealth advisory firms create and implement client retention strategy’s that span more than two generation’s today.

With your firm’s future prospect pool guaranteed to drop by 30% what strategies have developed and/or implemented to strengthen relationships with your clients, their siblings and THEIR siblings?   

  • Multi-cultural marketing will be essential when selling to families with children.

The majority of population growth in the U.S. will come from new immigrants and the children they have in this country. Since most immigrants are young, families with children will become more ethnic, more quickly, than the total population. By 2025, the majority of families with children in the U.S. will be multi-cultural (Hispanic, Black, Asian, etc.). Less than half of families with children will be native born non-Hispanic White.  Your firm’s future growth potential lies in your ability to appeal to this emerging demographic.

What multi-cultural marketing programs does your firm have in place to appeal to this emerging demographic?  What are your plans for adding bi-lingual advisors to your practice?

  • Older Consumers Have New Needs

Baby Boomers will seek to rewrite what it means to be old exactly as they have rewritten what it means to be children and adults. Wealth Advisor’s willing to reach out to Boomers as they age can tap into a large and growing marketplace.  According to Daniel Pink, author of DRIVE, “The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us”, 100 Boomers turn 60 every 15 minutes and they’re all seeking “Purpose” for the rest of their lives.  Wealth advisors not willing to market to persons over the age of 65 will miss out. This is a demographic that research suggests is connected online 98% of the time.

What strategies has your firm put in place to reach this changing Boomer demographic?  What, if any, of the new social media applications has your firm implemented to reach this demographic? 

  • As population growth slows in the U.S., so will spending on consumer goods.

Household size will decline across the board and so will consumer spending. The impact of these two trends means that after 2020, per household spending on packaged goods will begin to fall. The current recession is already impacting spending in the short-term. Growth will be very hard to come by both now and in the coming decades.

With fewer dollars available for consumer goods how is your practice positioned to demonstrate why your clients should be spending even closer attention to their financial planning needs?

Social Media is the missing trend.  Those wealth advisors that have an experimental sense of social media’s possibilities will benefit.  There is no locked in blueprint for how to proceed. Social media strategies are a trip through a new frontier. The efforts are flexible, motivational and engaging when done well. And, if you make a mistake, they are pretty easy to correct, unlike the “Five Key Trends Other Than Aging”, they’re case in stone.

 

 

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