Check out the new website http://www.kidsout.org.uk/home

Held at the ExCeL centre, London, Ben will be running 5K, cycling 20K and lastly swimming 750m. Ben, who has been training since January this year, hopes that he can conquer the challenge in a good time. Good luck Ben!

If you wish to donate to Ben's cause and give him a few words of encouragement please go to his JustGiving page.

By keeping your website up-to-date it is not only good practice, but also shows that the charity is active and that you are putting your supporters’ donations to good use. It is also very good for search engine optimisation.

We know it is not always easy to do, but the results are worthwhile for those who update their websites consistently.

We recently created a new brand for TazZa Coffee, a Sutton-based coffee shop. Rather than the typical approach of focusing a coffee shop brand around coffee, the TazZa brand centred on bringing the community together. The new brand needed to form a strong foundation that could be taken forward as a franchise if needed. The brand incorporates a new logo, bold colour palette and a collection of illustrations to achieve its message.

The new logo incorporates a coffee cup, with a speech bubble and mark, combining coffee and community. Artwork was then produced that reflected the community DIY ethos of TazZa Coffee.

Your local library is a good place to see flyers and promotional cards from other charities. It's good to note the type of language they are using and how heavily they are using their website for fundraising and how they utilise social networking websites.

This will help you look into new initiatives for your charity to keep it moving forward.

Keep your language clear and precise, and keep away from industry phrases as you may know what they mean but your supporter probably won't.

The last thing you want to do is put off someone looking into supporting your charity because you make them feel there is no way they are ever going to understand what you do.

On the down side, newsletters are traditionally quite time-consuming, expensive to design, print and mail but one great idea we came across recently was a postcard newsletter.

These newsletters take the form of an A5 card that give brief snippets of news from your charity. One side can be dedicated to news articles whilst the other can contain the supporter address and postage stamp.

For more information they can point towards your website. This is a good way of letting your supporters know you are still active while giving them a gentle nudge to keep supporting you.

Printed newsletters are a great way to send information: however they take time and can cost a significant amount. When you take into account the design, copywriting, printing and mailing costs, it can be hard to justify sending printed newsletters as often as you’d like. But that’s the beauty of email! Email newsletters don’t have any printing costs, and the distribution costs are tiny compared with price of postage. This makes it possible for your charity to regularly update your supporters via email, letting them know the latest news. Your email list can be of great help when it comes to a specific cause, such as an emergency flood appeal, where contacting your supporters quickly can make a huge difference.

Once you decide that an email newsletter is the way forward for your charity, you need to start compiling an email list. Permission is needed to send someone a promotional email: sending unsolicited email is called spam and is taken very seriously by the law. Even if you are keeping within the law, it’s still vital to take care with what you send and how you send it. Email service providers can block your emails if they receive too many spam complaints – you must avoid this at all costs.

If you already have an email list, that is a great place to start. Ensure that each time you collect information from people – such as when they make a donation to, or a purchase from, your charity – you ask permission to add them to your mailing list. Another option is to have a newsletter signup button on your website for people who are interested but have not yet had any dealings with your charity.

When it comes to producing your email newsletter there are a number of options you could choose. The cheapest way is to do it all yourself: use an email service provider and build your own email newsletter template using their resources. This is good if you need to keep costs low. However, if you want to get the very best from your email newsletter, it is important to ensure the design of your template keeps in line with your charity’s brand and other marketing items. Having your email template professionally designed and produced can give much better results, and also gives you greater flexibility on what you can include on your template.

Adept have designed and produced many email newsletter templates for our charity clients. We can either produce one-off templates which our clients update each month with new text and images via our Content Management System; or our team can produce the entire newsletter each month ensuring a professional end product. The emails are then distributed through our SmartWeb platform which ensures maximum deliverability. It also provides detailed tracking information such as open rates, click through rates and bounce rates.

If you want to know more about our email marketing services or to discuss your charity’s email marketing strategy with one of our experienced team, please contact us and we’ll be very happy to help!.

Your charity’s homepage must load in an acceptable time, so avoid Flash animations or heavy graphics that will make your website slower than it should be unless there is a very good reason for having them. Never ever have a video that plays automatically when someone arrives at your homepage. It will be slow to load, and I’m sure only about 1% of your visitors will want to watch it – the rest will find it very irritating.

Don’t make your homepage too wordy: the important points need to stand out to allow visitors to navigate to other pages. Have interesting images which relate to your charity on the homepage to help show what your charity does.

Your homepage should be kept up-to-date to keep the interest of repeat visitors. A standard paragraph about your organisation is helpful for first-time visitors, but repeat visitors don’t want to keep seeing the same thing. You could include latest news items or details of future events, or feature any new campaigns or promotions run by your charity.

The best way to check the effectiveness of your homepage is to monitor the navigational path your users take from your charity’s homepage. You can use something like Google Analytics to gather this information.

If you don't have these challenges, a folder could be something that you simply don't need and you can put the money saved into other items, especially as the price per item on folders can be quite high.

Here are some tips to help you get the best from your charity flyers:

Adept have recently created the 2010 Christmas catalogue and gift packages for the charity. Using a design that showed off the beneficiaries rather than the gifts themselves, we aimed to highlight the work that Send a Cow do and the chain of giving the gifts start.

The catalogue was supported with the gift packages comprising of a DL wallet containing a free-standing information gift card and pledge card with a detachable bookmark to continue the giving chain.

New case study to be featured soon.

Only recommend suppliers who have received high ratings from their existing clients through a research and online ratings system are accepted onto the register.

After submitting our client list to the system, we were approved very quickly as our customers sang our praises enough for the register to accept our application.

We want to thank all of our clients who took part in the survey and for being so lovely.

Here are some of our tips for designing a good web banner:

Keep it simple
It is proven that simple banners have a much better click through rate (CTR) than cluttered/wordy banners.

Make it stand out
There is no point doing a banner ad if no-one is going to notice it. By using strong colours or bold pictures it can really make your banner stand out on the page.

Make the link direct
If you are advertising a particular campaign for your charity make sure the link from the banner advert goes straight to the page it relates to. You may lose a potential donor if you send them to your general home page.

Call to action
Give people a reason to click: for example "Click here and help make a difference" or "Just £3 a month could save a life". Adverts with a strong call to action have a much higher CTR.

Animation
If you have the option to animate your banner make sure you don't go too crazy. As a general rule, the more animated the banner is, the larger the file size and the higher the time it takes to load. In short, the visitor to the website where the banner is shown may not even see it because it has not loaded by the time they click through to another page.  Our advice is that animating the web banner will help increase the CTR but make sure each frame is clear and the file size keeps as low as possible.

Your logo/brand
Let’s not forget who you are: try and keep your brand colours and use your logo if possible. If the banner is too small for your logo to work effectively, try building your charity name into the text.