Make Hay Ethical E-Media

New VAT Rate

As you’ve probably heard, the government has announced changes to the UK VAT rate which will be coming into force on Monday 1st December. The new rate will be 15% rather than 17.5%

Here’s how it affects you as Make Hay and Green Hosting clients

1. Any outstanding invoices sent to you before 1st December will need to be paid with the current 17.5% VAT rate. So, no changes will be needed.

2. Any new invoices issued after 1st December will state the new 15% rate

3. Any monthly subscriptions will be charged at the new rate from 1st December onwards

For our Green Hosting clients, who pay on a monthly basis, we will contact you all individually to give more details and re-start your subscriptions at the new rate. The good news is that you will be paying slightly less each month! Please look out for that e-mail from us as you will need to re-activate your subscription.

For further information about the VAT rate changes please visit the HM Revenue and Customs website: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/pbr2008/measure1.htm

Make Mail Downtime

For our Make Mail newsletter clients we have some great news.

The newsletter system is being upgraded to provide some new reporting features. The interface will look slightly different too but will be just as easy to use.

Whilst this upgrade is taking place you will not be able to log in to your Make Mail account on November 29th and November 30th.

However, subscribers will still be able to sign-up to your newsletter and the reporting features will continue to work in the background. You just won’t be able to log into your account over the weekend.

Next week you can begin to enjoy Make Mail’s new features!

The social networking site LinkedIn is often considered to be the more professional, sober alternative to Facebook.

Personally I use both Facebook and LinkedIn but always preferred the extra interaction that Facebook allows.

Well, LinkedIn has caught up. So as well as offering lots of scope to share your professional credentials LinkedIn Applications provides these goodies too (as well as many more):

• Blog Link
• Google Presentation
• Company Buzz
• Huddle Workspace

Visit LinkedIn Applications to find out more.

If you’re not already a LinkedIn user you can sign up now at www.linkedin.com.

When you’ve joined add us to your connections:
Vicky - www.linkedin.com/in/vickymakehay
Jez - www.linkedin.com/in/makehay

When Jez and I set up Make Hay we had two clear aims in mind. One was to do business our own (ethical) way and the other was to try to play some part in encouraging consumers to think about where they spend their hard-earned cash. Even a small business can be influential in helping consumers choose green and ethical products and services but simply existing as a green or ethical business isn’t enough.

There are many reasons why a consumer would choose a particular product over another and if we want consumers to make green choices then businesses have a very definite role to play.

I read a really fascinating report sent to me via the Floov newsletter which addressed this issue. According to the McKinsey article, called ‘Helping Green Products Grow‘, most consumers do have concerns about climate change and how their buying behaviour contributes to it but there is a definite gap between those concerns and consumer habits.

The article talks about the 5 barriers to buying green and how to break those down. They are:

• Educate consumers
• Build better products
• Be honest
• Offer more
• Bring the products to the people

Some very valuable marketing advice here…

Read the ‘Helping Green Products Grow’ report here

Nope, this isn’t a spelling mistake, its another cool new online tool to make bloggers’ lives easier.

This is a real goody if you’re working away from your regular computer or you don’t having image editing software and it is called Resizr.

Resizr lets you re-size images (and change a few other settings) online. You can either upload an image from a local computer or use one already on the web.

Simple yet effective!

Check it out at www.resizr.com

Talking to a client the other day about the joys of blogging, I realised that I’d broken one of my own number 1 rules - neglecting our blog.

Our client was interested in how a blog could enhance his online presence and as I went to show him how we use our blog to provide useful resources to our clients I felt a pang of shame…. I haven’t posted for weeks!

Well, I’m pleased to say that the cause of this lack of posting is because we are very busy. We’re also going through a period of change at Make Hay, evolving our services, approach and look with a re-launch in the New Year.

It seems that there is a general feeling of shift right now, with the very distinctive change in season, a new president in the White House and a new feeling of hope, so now is a good time for us to bring about positive change here too.

To make up for the lack of posts over the past few weeks I’m going to make a point of finding useful things to tell you about for the rest of this week. So please look out for those.

In the meantime, here is a great movie about positive change which I think is very pertinent right now, it’s called The Shift: