Promo-Gifts (UK) Ltd - Blog

How to Teach Young Entrepreneurs the Concept of Corporate Branding

Leanne Dawson — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:17:14 +0000

Seasoned entrepreneurs know that a proper corporate branding strategy is critical in developing a product or service to bring to market. They know that building a successful brand is a multifaceted task that takes time.

But suppose your ingenious eight year old has come up with a promising idea…

How do you teach the concept of corporate branding to a budding young entrepreneur like him?

You need to begin with the basics of corporate branding

First, you need to explain the definition of a brand. Next, explain the four main building blocks of a brand using age-appropriate terms and examples. The building blocks are

Identity
Reputation
Quality
Value

You can use the following explanations as a framework for your discussion:

Brand Definition:

Simply put, a brand is a combination of building blocks built over time. These building blocks define your business and make it different than any other business. The four main building blocks of a brand are identity, reputation, quality and value.

Brand Identity:

Brand identity is the first building block of a brand. It is represented by the packaging, logo, design, image or name that you give your product or service. Your Brand identity makes your business different than any other business.

We all know the Coca-Cola brand with its unique red and white logo and know the drink it stands for. The Nike brand, with its wing logo on athletic shoes and sport clothes, is also very familiar. Another example is Apple with its bitten apple logo.

Most people know that the Apple brand stands for computers and smartphones. Your brand identity could also be represented by a slogan or short song, especially if you provide a service instead of a product.

Brand Reputation:

Brand reputation is what people think of your brand over time. You will continue to build it until you sell or quit your business. You build a good reputation when you make sure your customers are happy.

Happy customers will buy more and tell their friends about your product or service, too.

Some of these friends will try your product or service and tell more people about it. The more happy customers you make, the better your reputation will be.

A good brand reputation helps you sell more over time.

Brand Quality:

Brand quality is important because you want to keep building a good brand reputation. Your customers bought the first products from you because they liked them on that first day. They want to know the products they buy in a few weeks or a month are going to be just as good as those first products were.

To keep good brand quality make sure that what you are selling does not change over time. In other words, your product or service must have the same good quality every time you offer it. If your customers are not pleased, give them another service or product for free or offer to give their money back.

Brand Value:

Brand value is how much your business is worth in the eyes of your customers and the rest of the world. Like brand reputation, brand value is built over time. It depends on how much your customers and others like your product and service. When many people like your brand your value gets higher.

This is important if you ever decide to sell your business. You will be able to sell for more money if your business has a high value. Don’t confuse value with how much it costs to make your product. Cost is easily calculated.

Brand value gets bigger as your business grows and is not as predictable or easy to calculate as cost.

Start with the basics to teach your young entrepreneur the concept of branding. Go over the definition of a brand. Next, discuss the four main building blocks of a brand: identity, reputation, quality and value.

Use examples of brands your young entrepreneur is familiar with. Apple, Coca-Cola and Nike are three famous brands that most young entrepreneurs will recognise.

Some useful links in relation to corporate branding.

Who We are: Promo-Gifts (UK) Ltd

We are a Wholesale Promotional Products Supplier. Our Blog touches on many different subjects from marketing to charity fundraising even to promotional items ;) - Please do visit our blog or website to make any comments or get a quotation.

How Important Are Perks of the Job?

Leanne Dawson — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 12:08:18 +0000

So you’re advertising for a new job, you mention the businesses benefits in general – the pension scheme, annual leave entitlement, salary, progression or training opportunities.

But what about those hidden extras which are often so important.

The things you don’t mention in interview but staff will find out about once you start. How important are these seemingly small creature comforts?

Tea and Coffee?

Many businesses provide tea and coffee as a benefit to staff.

This is of great important to many staff and some workers just won’t function without that early morning coffee or mid afternoon tea to go with their biscuit.

But in a time when businesses are cutting costs this is one of the area’s businesses are choosing to take away from customers.

And it’s not a big saving anyway. A few £’s a month per staff member probably. But businesses are challenging staff benefits and taking away their creature comforts. And is this worth it? Well in my opinion it isn’t.

What will employee’s do instead?

They will club together, in what my office calls a ‘tea club’ and buy this amongst themselves, but the collection of the ‘tea club’ money is done during work time, so administration of the club takes time.

As does popping to the shop for milk during work time.

So it’s a case of employee’s time vs making a small saving.

And in many cases, taking away a benefit like tea and coffee will unnerve employee’s.

It will be perceived as cost cutting and a sign that the business is struggling through the recession.

Which in turn could demotivate staff and leave staff worried about their future employment status.

Other Perks

Now it’s not just tea and coffee that people expect in the workplace, but being the nation of tea drinkers it’s probably the best example to give.

But many workers will expect some perks of the job, whatever the business environment.

Some examples are:

Car parking
Subsidised canteen
Opportunity to work from home
Cost of living pay rise
Free dental / medical care
Access to free advice / counselling lines
Access to shopping discounts
Employee of the month schemes
Salary sharing

Now some of these cost a lot of money to implement so tea and coffee is probably an easy perk to provide.

The list can go on and on. For example, check out Google’s staff benefits, this has to have some of the country’s best job perks around.

Perks on a Budget

There are some small creature comforts you can give staff on a budget to help them settle in and feel at home. Some examples are:

Tea and coffee (mentioned above)
The right equipment for the job – may sound silly but you will be surprised how many small cost items people need but don’t have in their office. Where I work I have no document stand to rest my papers on so I can type straight from these, instead I balance papers until I convince the stationery orderer that I really need one.
Clean office and equipment – sounds silly but my phone was dirty when I started in my last job. Actual finger marks ground in dirt on every button and the ear piece was revolting. Having access to simple screen and telephone wipes so staff can take control of the hygiene of their desk is always nice
Discount savings schemes – these are low cost and available by searching the internet. They offer staff in businesses that have signed up the opportunity to gain discounts at many major retailers.
A staff uniform – debatable whether this is a perk but for the most parts staff like having a uniform, an identity at their workplace. It saves on clothing costs and as long as it’s a nice uniform it will be a welcome addition to workplaces.
A present at Christmas – staff work hard all year long, why shouldn’t they get a present at Christmas. A hamper of goodies, or a bonus – whatever you choose it can be packaged and prepared to remind them who it’s from with your logo.

So think of how you reward your employees, how you provide them with some basic needs and wants within the workplace.

It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money but the thought goes a long way in employees perception of the business.

Providing nothing just adds to the doom and gloom that exists at the moment, so brighten up their day!

Who We are: Promo-Gifts (UK) Ltd

A Quick Guide to KPI’s

Leanne Dawson — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:43:15 +0000

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are commonly used to act as a benchmark for performance.

Most people associate KPI’s with large businesses as a way of checking businesses are performing to a required standard but it’s not just large businesses who can benefit from using them.

Small businesses too can set KPI’s to look at how areas of the business are performing and where improvements need to be made.

Being able to use KPI’s effectively can help businesses plan for the future and learn from the past and here’s how.

What are KPI’s?

Quite simply, KPI’s are a quantitive way of measuring how different areas of the business are performing.

It gives a written and graphical representation of productivity of certain areas of the business.

You will already have an awareness of how key areas are performing but being able to show this and ha

ve this data to compare to year upon year will give you guidance in prioritising work areas for improvement.

As a business grows it’s important to be able to keep control over functions.

Having KPI data will give you a quick overview of how areas are performing and where areas aren’t per

You can then use this information to develop thriving areas more and prioritise under performing areas. This can give a good guide to where to spend your money in the next financial year.forming.

Using KPI’s

KPI’s need to be used correctly.

They aren’t targets or competitive figures that departments need to hit.

If they are seen as such the staff will use them as a reflection on their own performance and view them as managements way of checking people are doing their job. Instead, they need to be seen as a way of monitoring and improving performance, they are progress monitors.

They need to be targets which are realistic, reviewed regularly and not viewed upon negatively if not achieved.

If a department achieves a KPI then it should be looked at positively but also looked at in terms of if it wa

s a realistic target and how can this be improved even more.

For unachieved KPI’s there needs to be some planning around why this wasn’t achieved and what extra support needs to be put in place to achieve the next review.

When reporting on KPI’s don’t view anything as negative, look at the positive side of it.There are a multitude of reasons why a KPI might not be achieved, the same as why it might also be exceeded and the reason behind this need to be taken into consideration.

Choosing KPI’s

Every business will have different KPI’s.

Businesses may choose to have overall KPI’s or department level KPI’s and this will depend entirely on size and business type.

Whatever you choose to measure make sure it’s worth measuring.

You want to choose KPI’s that have an impact on the overall business strategy, outputs and profits.

KPI’s that don’t appear in the end of year accounts but reflect on the business will provide management useful information which can aid business planning.

KPI’s can focus on various areas of work.

Examples are:

HR related – absence rates of staff, staff turnover

Profit related – Sales figures, profit margin, return on investment, loss of sales

Performance related – Sales enquiries received, new customer orders, repeat orders

Other KPI’s will be determined by the type of business and the departments within a business.

Being able to know what information you want to measure is important – there is no point measuring KPI’s that have no input on how the business will run.

Setting KPI’s is often a daunting task at first. And Your first set of targets might not be as realistic as you think whilst setting them.

So set up a constant review of the KPI’s. Different KPI’s will be monitored over different time periods as well.

Some are better measured over a year and some over a week. So having a clear process in place is important in being able to manage KPI’s.

Also make sure staff are involved in setting the KPI’s, this will help you set them realistically as well as helping them to be perceived as a positive means of measuring performance.

And where possible look at incentives to achieving these – this could be as little or as big as you want. For example, absence rate amongst staff can be incentivised by giving staff an extra days holiday or a payment if they don’t have any days sick for a certain period of time.

However you want to manage KPI’s it’s up to you and the way your business operates.

But remember KPI’s need to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely)!

Who We are: Promo-Gifts (UK) Ltd

January Blues and its effect on Staff Holidays

Leanne Dawson — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:36:37 +0000

Christmas is well and truly over and staff are definitely in that January Blues mood.

Nothing to look forward to over the next few months and no bank holidays often contribute to the rise in holiday bookings at this time of the year.

This makes it all the more important for businesses to look at how they are preparing for the influx of annual leave requests and how to cover the holiday periods.

Focusing now on planning holiday cover will decrease the panic of holiday cover later in the year and will give staff guidance on their entitlements.

Annual Leave Entitlement

All employees, by law, are entitled to holiday and this is set to a minimum of 28 days per year.

Public Holidays do not have to be given as annual leave but if they are then this can be taken off the minimum number as it counts as holiday.

So for an employee working full time and having bank holidays off the minimum annual leave is 20 days.

And this is pro rata for part time staff.

Staff need to know, and often like to have written down, their holiday entitlement.

Having a simple annual leave sheet that staff can use to record and get authorised will give employees control over their time off and give them a clear picture of the days off they have remaining.

Staff also need to be clear on what this holiday entails so having a statement which covers the following is helpful:

Number of holidays in the 12 month period
When the 12 month period runs from e.g Jan – Dec or April to March
Public Holiday working arrangements
How part time leave is calculated
How leave is calculated for staff on contract / maternity leave / term time / bank staff etc

These details could even go on the back of the annual leave card as a constant reminder.

Recording Annual Leave

There should be someone central that staff can go to regarding their leave, this will usually be the person who deals with HR or their manager, but clear guidance on this person should be given.

This person then needs a system of being able to monitor this.

The last thing any business wants is half its workforce booked on annual leave for the first week in August.

For small businesses, having a large wall planner is helpful for staff to be able to check when team members are planning on taking leave.

This will provide some guidance for staff prior to them booking a holiday.

But for larger business that can’t fit this onto a wall planner, an excel spread sheet accessible by all is a good idea. However you choose to monitor it be sure staff know where to look for this information.

Set Staffing Levels

It’s good for staff to know what level of staff is required.

For some teams its fine for 2 members or more of staff to be off at the same time – but for others it would create a problem.

Within teams set a minimum staffing level which may vary through busy times of the year.

Let staff know if only 1 person can be off at a time during summer months – this way staff have awareness of what’s expected of them and will look at current staffing levels before going ahead with a holiday booking.

Accrued Holidays during Time Off

The European Court of Justice ruled that statutory holidays accrue during periods of sick leave.

They also accrue during periods of maternity and paternity leave. So staff returning from this type of leave must be given any holiday entitlement.

This could cause some problems with staff who are off for long periods of time as they will return to a lot of annual leave, but this must be given to them by law.

Staff Who Don’t Want Leave

In rare cases staff don’t like to take annual leave they must take it.

Working Time Regulations forces this on employees to ensure health and safety and work life balance.

In some businesses, employees may wish to carry some leave over or sell this back to the business but employees must have taken the minimum holiday on 28 days in the year to be able to do this.

So this can only be done in businesses that offer more than just the minimum annual leave.

So to combat those Winter Workplace Blues, get your new year leave cards out and remind staff about annual leave procedures – this will prompt them to get booking leave in advance and allow you more planning time for staff cover.

Who We are: Promo-Gifts (UK) Ltd

Why Should I Recycle?

Leanne Dawson — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:26:17 +0000

So we’ve all heard about recycling and how everyone has a responsibility to recycle as much as possible.

But from a business perspective this can sometimes be costly in terms of both time and money.

So why should you invest in creating an ethos of recycling in your workplace?

We see many businesses now claim to be ethical and green but what does that really mean?

And how far do you have to go to be able to make that claim?

Recycling Facts

Let’s start with the reality – the reasons why recycling is important to the environment. Here are some recycling facts:

Every 20 boxes of recycled paper you buy saves 17 trees, 7000 gallons of water and 4100kwh of energy
Recycled paper produces 73% less air pollution than paper made from raw materials
60% of rubbish that goes in dustbins could be recycled
Glass is 100% recyclable yet most commonly ends up on landfill sites where it will never decompose
1 recycled bottle could power a 60 watt light bulb for 3 hours

So that’s just some of the reasons why not only individual but businesses should recycle as much as possible.

But in reality is that possible?

Buying Recycled Paper

Recycled paper has a reputation for being an off-white colour and having a certain look about it but that’s no longer the case.

Recycled paper now comes in all shapes and sizes so can meet the needs of your business without compromising on quality.

But buying bright white paper should be avoided, whether it’s recycled or not.

Its bright white because its bleached – and bleach a toxic chemical linked to a whole host of health problems.

Getting into the habit of buying Recycled

The internationally recognised symbol for recycled or recyclable goods is a triable of arrows symbolising continuous recycling.

Any recycled goods will have this symbol on somewhere.

With paper, you want to look for the highest amount of post-consumer content.

This will be written somewhere on the paper as a percentage.

But beware, ‘environmentally friendly’ and recycled are not the same thing – this just means they way it is produced is environmentally friendly but not necessarily recycled.

What about other forms of waste?

Businesses spend 4% of their turnover on managing waste.

Imagine if you could reduce this and at the same time become more corporately responsible.

There’s a simple process you can go through to help you reduce this cost:

Eliminate – do you really need that in the first place? Printing is often the biggest area you can eliminate – create a more paperless office environment, reducing paper wasted.
Reduce – reduce the amount of waste you produce. This can be done in many ways such as reducing printing, buying reusable containers or buying products with minimum amounts of packaging
Re-use – So many business waste could be reused which reduces costs and reduces waste. Items such as printer toners and cartridges, stationery supplies, boxes or furniture. And if you can’t use an item again, look at who might be able to – there is likely to be someone who can make use of your unwanted items
Recycle – Legislation is becoming increasingly tight on businesses, forcing them to recycle but this shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing. Recycling as much as possible will decrease waste and decrease your businesses impact on the environment.
Dispose – if none of the above are applicable, then dispose of the item, but first make sure you dispose of it correctly.

Local Waste Management

There are many local waste management businesses who will be able to advise you on what you can and cannot recycle and they will be able to work with you to bring in a recycling scheme into the workplace.

They will be able to provide you with bins suitable to your recycling needs and pick up recyclable materials at convenient times.

Recycling isn’t something that is initiated by just one person – every single staff member needs to be on board.

An environmentally friendly ethos needs to be instilled in a workplace, and this can take time.

Don’t make it a chore for people to have to recycle. Instead, get staff involved in the decisions you make about recycling, and ask them where they see the biggest areas of waste – you will often find they can see big areas of wastage that you can’t.

Who We are: Promo-Gifts (UK) Ltd

Winter’s here – and so are Winter Promotional Products!

Leanne Dawson — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 18:52:55 +0000

So Winter is well and truly upon us. The cold weather has arrived, snow has come down in most parts of the country and people are starting to stock up on their winter essentials.

And there are many promotional products you could use to help customers through these cold, cold nights.

Items they would truly appreciate with the weather getting colder by the day.

So here’s my top 5 winter promotional items.

1.Thermal Mugs – Hot drinks in the winter never fail to warm your insides. A nice hot chocolate or energy raising coffee and sure to make you feel better whilst your out and about. And being double walled helps keep the drink hotter for longer so you can enjoy a drink on the go.

2. Ice scrapers – An essential for any motorist during the winter months. And a durable ice scraper can save you a lot of time in the morning when you are stuck in the freezing cold trying to get that ice off your car. Check you these credit card ice scrapers, they are small and handy to keep in your wallet so you will never lose it.

3. Fleece Blankets – Get your logo printed on these and let your customers wrap themselves up warm. These are great winter essentials, warm and soft for a cosy night in in front of the TV. And with your logo on they won’t fail to impress customers with your thoughtfulness.

4. Umbrella’s – The trusted umbrella. Everyone should have one but not everyone does. Giving these to customers will give them protection from the rain. Practical and a perfect way to promote yourself. They come in all shapes and sizes too so whatever your business, executive or funky, there’s an umbrella to suit you. And this is an item that when used, is advertising your business far and wide and everyone can see.

5. Winter Jackets – There are a variety of winter jackets available as promotional products. From fleeces to heavy duty wind proof jackets. And these can have many uses, they can not only be used as gifts for customers but can be used as giveaway or as uniforms for staff. And like umbrellas, however you use them they will be visual out in the community for all to see.

So however you choose to spend your promotional products budget this winter, make it suitable for the season and choose something the customers can make good use of.

There are loads of different ideas for winter products as well as Christmas gifts. For more ideas why not phone one of the sales team on ……………. And they will be able to advise you.

Who We are: Promo-Gifts (UK) Ltd

Selecting a New Cloud Based CRM. What We Learned. What We Chose.

David Dawson — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:39:22 +0000

Having spent the past week or 2 with 9 spread sheets full of supplier, customer and all our past order data and no where for them to go. I set about selecting a new piece of software for us to use as a CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

The term CRM is used very broardly in the tech world to describe a whole maner of things. Usually anything to do with tasks and opportunities and project management etc is scooped into the term CRM.

Something we have been careful not to do with our new order process system is bulk it out with loads of features that go beyond what we originally designed it for.

ProMart is brilliant for managing orders start to finish and knowing where everything is upto. However we needed to look at a database system that could look after customer interactions and was fast and easy to search for contacts and viewing all the extra information about a client that can be stored.

So far we have tested 4 different options.

SalesForce
Sage CRM
Insight.ly
Pipeline Deals

A very quick review of SalesForce

A friend of mine swears by this software. He’s a real salesy person though and understands all the terminology and features. Salesforce is (I believe) the No1 Sales CRM software in the world.

I spent a lot of time importing in contacts and working through parts of the software. But I’ll be honest it’s just a bit elitist for me, I could not figure out a lot of how the processes work and the terminology that is used for a lot of the processes. It’s unfamiliar ground for me and I didn’t find the learning curve all the fast. The interface is busy and confusing, too much information on the page. Just too much to take in all at the same time. The google apps integration was a little flakey too.

Having said all that… I’m sure it’s brilliant. I didn’t really give it much of a chance.

A very quick review of Sage CRM.

I spent very little time looking at this one. It looked extremly dated not all that pretty to look at. I’m a real fan of simplicity and order to any cloud based software. There was little or no sync with google apps. Which was one of the things high on my list. (although I did receive a phone call from a nice lady that said there would be forthcoming google apps integration) The only reason we looked at this in the first place is because promart links upto Sage accounts to process orders and invoices etc. + we use sagepay and sage payroll. I’m sure their CRM would have been very functional if I had given it more of a chance.

One thing I will say about Sage, their support is second to none. Top quality everytime you call them.

A very quick review of Pipeline Deals.

From the offset. This piece of software is slick and well built. The customisation options gave it the edge over any of the other systems I looked at. It was still really salesy though and if your from that background and get all the terminology then this software is for you. The reports in it are awesome, so slick start to finish.

My only issue really was the cost ($15 per user and I needed 7 @ $105 a month) and the fact our sales team have not had experience using sales software like this. I also thought that with ProMart we didn’t really need that level of pipeline tracking and we would be duplicating a lot of information in both systems. I can’t remember how far I got with the google apps integration but I believe it does have a high level of syncing on both calendar and contacts.

If I had no other system and was setting up a sales team to use something from the offset this would be it.

What we went for… Insight.ly!

I liked this from the start. It was simple and did not push all the really salesy terminology onto you. The google apps sync is brilliant. Everything bounces back and forth with ease. There is a gadget that plugs into google apps mail that you can use to access the customer record and you can create tasks and projects and opportunities from the email page in your inbox. It can be slow at times but it’s definatly usable.

One thing I thought it was slightly lacking with is the fact it does not scan all the information from incoming emails in anyway to add new users into insight.ly it’s self. You can click the button to add a new contact but then you have to add in all the address information manually. What a Mission! Would be good if we could taylor the forms on our site to send email from data in a certain way so that insight.ly could just pick it up automagically.

However we found a good way round this by using writethat.name to automatically gather the information from incoming enquiry emails and add them to our google contacts. Which are in then in turn synced to insight.ly automagically. Brilliant! I also managed to import all our extra customer and supplier data such as PO’s and Sales orders as notes against each organisations accounts. now we have all our historical data at hand and instantly accessable.

I like the tagging system and the task management is beautifully simple. The cost to run it is relitivly low at $29 a month for the account we have at the moment. I wanted to keep the costs low as we only just moved from one expensive piece of software.

You can save google drive files to the user along with linking thier linkedin and twitter accounts. + attaching emails to customer or organisation records. You can also add events and reoccuring tasks that send email reminders. It does a lot of stuff!

I’ll probably post up a follow up review after we have been using it a few months.

Are you looking for a new CRM? Tried anything Different to what we have? What do you use at the moment?

Who We are: Promo-Gifts (UK) Ltd

How Promo Gifts is Innovating and Setting a New Standard in the Promotional Products Industry

David Dawson — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 10:00:05 +0000

Over the Past 3 Months Promo Gifts has moved onto a custom built order system, we have developed ProMart specifically for our company and the way in which we work.

It’s so far taken us 3 years to get to this point and the project has snowballed into a highly automated user friendly system that can provide quotes to our clients far faster than we have ever been able to do before.

If you have had a quote off us you will see:

Interactive HTML and clickable links within the PDF quotes and sales orders you receive.
Clients can now process their own orders online after a customised quote has been sent.
Our products are being updated on a daily basis. Offering our clients some of the most accurate prices on the web.
We currently have 2315 PDF visuals uploaded to products on our website to make it easier for both ourselves and our clients to setup artwork proofs. These can been accessed from both the category pages and the product pages themselves.
We have automated our approval system to speed up order processing. Click a link in an email and a clients proof is approved instantly.
All payments can now be made online or over the phone for sales orders.
Clients can now see a list of all their enquiries, quotes and sales orders from their account page.
Many of our suppliers now automate our despatch process, our clients are then automatically updated with courier and tracking information.

Whilst we have endeavoured to make our new system semi e-commerce we have been carefull not to force it on clients. Placing orders online is a great feature, but we still offer the same level of customer care and hand holding through an order.

Goals for 2013

A PDF artwork template with print areas for every single product on our website.
Provide ALL quotes to clients within 15 minutes of them making an enquiry.
Provide a PDF proof with every quotation.
Have 100% of our suppliers despatching goods on our system with tracking information.
Update or Add 25 New Products per day.
Improve our mechanism for discontinuing products and displaying stock levels.

We are confident that our streamlined processes are second to none in the promotional products industry . All of our systems are cloud based and we finally ditched our internal server last week. This means that in the event of any unforseen disasters at our offices we can still manage emails and process orders and provide our clients with uptodate information about their orders at any time from anywhere.

Into 2013 we will continue to innovate and push the boundaries of our business. We will improve our service to our clients through a deep understanding of our industry and though a pratical yet innovative approach to day to day business.

Who We are: Promo-Gifts (UK) Ltd

How to Remove all the Spam Users in a Virtuemart Database with the same First and Last Names

David Dawson — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 19:51:08 +0000

Just wanted to publish this article as a Mr Preson Moore just emailed my to give me the answer to a problem I had been searching for some months back. We had many many spam registers on one of our pages and I had nearly 3000 users to manually delete from the database.

The one thing they all had in common was the fact they had the first and last names. Gotta love spammers!

So thank you Mr Preson Moore of http://www.one7media.com/ suppliers of small business web & print solutions. For sending me the solution that your friend Perry gave to you! You earned yourself a mention for taking the time to email me a solution to an isue I was trying to resolve.

This is the solution that I received via email for virtuemart.

Warning! Backup your Database before making any changes!

DELETE FROM `jos_users` WHERE `id` in (SELECT DISTINCT `user_id` FROM `jos_vm_user_info` WHERE `last_name` LIKE `first_name`) DELETE FROM `jos_vm_user_info` WHERE `first_name` LIKE `last_name`

Failing that checkout this answer on stack overflow. Apparently Nico has the answer

Sorry if this is not all that relavant to our blog but hopefully it will help someone!

It’s always a nice pleasant surprise when someone goes out of thier way to help others.

Who We are: Promo-Gifts (UK) Ltd

Free Promotional Merchadise Websites for Charities – A Fantastic Free Fundraising Idea

David Dawson — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 09:06:10 +0000

We are offering a totally free design and hosting service to all UK Registered Charities

Whether you are revamping an old site or are a totally new Charity our service is totally free of charge.

What… Completely Free Website Design for Charities??!

Yes absolutly free! You just need to either register your .org website address or point your current URL to our servers.

We will Setup your Joomla CMS
(Content Management System)
Install Search Engine Optimisation Components
Install an Advanced WYSIWYG Editor
Setup your Menu System
Install Paypal Donations Module

We will Design you a Logo if Required
We will Design you a 728 x 90mm Banner
We will Setup the Colour Scheme of your Website
We will Design the Front Page Layout for You

We will Setup your Hosting Package on our Servers
We will Provide you with Control Panel Access
You can setup Unlimited E-mail’s
You will have Unlimited Bandwidth
You will have Unlimited Hosting Space

We use a system called Joomla that is used on over 3 million websites across the world. There is a large support forum and thousands of free extensions that are freely available.

How does it work?

Our company supplies promotional products to various companies across the UK. We will build you a website that you can use to raise funds for your charity via paypal donations and we will also build you a shop where you can sell any promotional merchandise that you buy off us.

You are in no way obliged to buy any products off us. There is no contract to sign and you are 100% welcome to move your site at any time.

We of course would love to be first on your list should you ever have a requirement for promotional merchandise!

Who We are: Promo-Gifts (UK) Ltd