Author: miranda

Business Link adds two new services to help your business

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Business Link the government's resource for business has launched new services and tools aimed at providing easy to use, tailored information to help businesses start-up, improve and grow their business.

The sites will host a variety of interactive tools to help businesses in the UK but first you need to chose the service that is right for you. There's a Starting Up section and for those already running their own business, there's Looking to improve and grow?

Here you’ll find videos, tools and case studies to help take your business forward, helping you to find government support and information about business events. You can even share useful tips with other businesses.

Following on from our recent workshop Money Matters held in Manchester on 17 November and upcoming workshop in London on 1 December, you can go to the Improve Your Cash Flow page where there is a video and links to advice:

Carry out a cashflow forecast

Identify cashflow problems

Find ways to improve your cashflow.

Funky Finance November

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It may not be the end of the tax year quite yet but many freelances have just submitted their tax returns for HMRC to calculate tax owed before the 31 October cut off date. With this in mind, FEU Training will be rolling out two, one-day workshops Money Matters in Manchester on 17 November and on 1 December in London. This month's Hot Topic is finance. Yes, money, money, money. We all need to make it, save it and get it to work for us. After all, if we don't who will?

Following on from last month's Social Media October, we thought it would be helpful to point all you creatives to the growing number of people using crowdfunding platforms to finance creative projects. Whether you want to put on a play, make a film, record an album or exhibit some work, there are now some UK-based platforms. I recently wrote a feature about this from which I have taken a few snippets.

“We really accept all kinds of creative projects and try to be as inclusive as possible” says Sponsume founder Gregory Vincent. “That’s kind of the idea of crowdfunding; helping to support projects that are slightly out of the mainstream opinion find a niche that may be able to support them. It’s very important to the arts.” Projects are “lightly vetted” once they have been submitted to make sure they are “sound” while ”the real vetting is done by the public, which I’ve found to be very efficient”, says Vincent.

The first crowdfunding platforms were established a couple of years ago in the US with sites such as Kickstarter and Indigogo. In the last six months, a number of crowdfunding platforms with a creative and arts focus have sprung up in the UK and Europe including Sponsume, which was one of the first websites to go online in the UK last August, wefund and wedidthis. While Sponsume caters for creative and entrepreneurial projects, wefund considers all creative projects and wedidthis, which launched early this year, focuses solely on the arts.

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Free Webinar 8 November 5 Steps for Social Media Lead Generation

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There's plenty of help online to help freelance creatives generate business. For those of you who may be interested, there is a free live webinar taking place in the USA on November 8 at 18.00 (GMT). The webinar will last 60 minutes.

HubSpot's Kipp Bodnar will unveil a 5-step process for generating leads using social media. This process will dispel common misconceptions of social media marketing and serve as the foundation of a successful social media strategy.

During this free webinar you will learn:

  • The fundamental tactics to social media lead generation
  • Technquies for maximizing social media reach and lead flow
  • A framework for content discovery to drive leads
  • How to test a social media lead generation campaign

If you are interested you will need to sign up to the Webinar page.

 

Online Tips on photography from Open College of the Arts interview with Miranda Gavin

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In the summer I was invited by course leader and documentary photographer Jose Navarro from the Open College of the Arts (OCA) to be interviewed for its blog. Naturally, I said yes as I'm a great supporter of blogs and I like talking about and discussing photography and visual media. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the OCA - it offers open learning courses for personal development or a degree in the arts.

The first post is called Introducing Miranda and it will be followed by a series of short video snippets which will be posted over the next month or so. There are also quite a lot of comments in relation to the subject of artist statements. Feel free to comment here, or there.

 

Getting business savvy – Free online tools

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One of the biggest concerns for freelances is money and cash flow and when times are tight we have to make the most of the resources with have at our disposal. The online world is great for this, there are heaps of sites and tools that have been developed to make communicating simple and cheap. So why not get business savvy and start building a tool kit for free to help you run your creative business better?

To start you off, here are some of the applications and gadgets that I've found useful and ones that haven’t cost me a penny to download, see more for links to the relevant websites.

But if you have any more suggestions for free tools that you would recommend to other freelances, please use the comments box to write the name and link so that we can share resources and ideas.

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Finding your way through the jungle – the different types of social media

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Whether you're a big fan or a 'rabbit in the headlights' when it comes to social media, the phenomenon is here to stay and developing apace.

For freelances, it can be a productive and cost-effective way of marketing yourself - especially as many of your target audience will be using this form of communication. This means it's worth trying to get your head around the possibilities and keep up with the changes.

So, what about an overview as a starter for ten?

There are varied types of social media and it's become an umbrella term for a wide variety of online platforms and ways of communicating.

Wikipedia’s entry on Social Media is helpful here as it cites Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, who created a classification scheme for social media types in their article, Business Horizons (2010). The grouping of the different forms into types is particularly useful in thinking about social media platforms.

According to Kaplan and Haenlein there are six different types of social media:

  • collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia)
  • blogs and microblogs (e.g. Twitter)
  • content communities (e.g. Youtube)
  • social networking sites (e.g. Facebook)
  • virtual game worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft)
  • virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life).

Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few.

The following clip gets a little deeper into the idea.

If you are reading this and would like to comment, please let us know which types of social media you're using and which ones you would like to learn more about so that you can use them for your business? If we get feedback we can look at scheduling Lunchtime and Twilight training sessions.

Social Media October

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To launch the FEU Training Blog (FEUTB), we’re kicking off with a look at the world of online social media.

Love it or hate it, social media is here to stay. So to get you in the mood, sit back and watch the following video clip Can I be Your Friend? produced by the English National Opera to promote a play Two Boys. The premise is fun as it’s a humorous look at the language of social media asking what Facebook and Twitter would be like if we communicated like this in the real, rather than the virtual, world.

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FEU Training Time Management and Social Media workshops bring freelances creatives together

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FEU Training held two busy workshops 'Managing Your Business' on the July 23 and another on August 6 to cater for demand aimed at giving freelance creatives further training in relevant business skills. Following on from last year's highly successful

Make Impact and Maintain Momentum workshops, the sessions were held at the NUJ main offices in London and covered 'Time Management' and 'Getting Deeper into Social Media' using Facebook and Twitter.

Nathalie McDermott Getting Deeper into Social Media. Photo © Miranda Gavin
Stuart Worthington Time Management techniques and strategies. Photo © Miranda Gavin

Tutor Stuart Worthington took members through techniques for time management, including identifying the Time Bandits in your working life, giving time to sequencing and prioritising tasks and remembering his father's mantra, Plan, Do and Review while, for the afternoon session, Nathalie McDermott demonstrated some of the key social media functions and discussed the pros and cons of using social networking sites for generating work and interest.

Workshop participants 23 July. Photo © Miranda Gavin
Workshop participants 23 July. Photo © Miranda Gavin
Workshop participants 6 August. Photo © Miranda Gavin
Workshop participants 23 July. Photo © Miranda Gavin
Workshop participants 23 July. Photo © Miranda Gavin

FEU Training secures more funding and welcomes the Writers’ Guild to the fold

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FEU Training is thrilled to announce that it has secured funding for a further year from April 2011 to March 2012. It is also pleased to welcome the Writers' Guild as a partner union, replacing BECTU.

The next year's funding will be used to build on the success of the last two years of the Business Skills for Freelances project. A further series of free one-day workshops will be rolled out around the country and the website will be further developed as an online hub and resource for freelance creatives from the entertainment unions.

These workshops will be business focused and will build on the content of the previous workshops, Make Impact and Maintain Momentum, which were held in London, Manchester and Birmingham last year. See video snippets and previous posts.

Look out for further details on how to sign up for these workshops in the next couple of weeks. Please note: There will be a limited number of places, however, places will be evenly distributed across the collaborating unions so that all union members have a fair chance to apply.