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Lately I have been trying to come up with one or two tag lines for my email newsletter service. The product is Green Wave Email Marketing, and it handles email lists, e-newsletters and e-vites, and helps the environment.
I have been working on the PlanetThoughts.org site for nearly three years, first developing the software, and then maintaining and creating content (and meeting lots of great people along the way). Gradually, the idea dawned on me that it may be necessary to earn some income with all the time I am spending on this important issue, instead of only relying on my traditional software development business for income.
Why should I not be part of the new green economy? If we are going to change world culture and world greenhouse gas emissions, business change will be an essential component. So, I took my existing email marketing (e-newsletter / e-vite) software, which has served companies well since 2005, and I designed a number of carefully thought out methods to have it help the environment as well as help non-profits and companies that believe in the green economy and in cultural improvement such as "co-opetition". The Web site for promoting GWEM is still in development, but, OK, take a peek – Green-Wave-Email.com. Meanwhile, the software itself continues to run for its current clients.
What I want to share here, in addition to the thought process of moving into the green economy, is the process of choosing a slogan (tag line). I have gone through about 40 of them in the past month, and have asked the opinions of 5 or 6 friends and colleagues whom I know rather well and whose opinions I value highly. Although each person tended to make different recommendations, there was some overlap and concensus on the style and content of the slogan. It has been an interesting process of discovering what speaks to my original inspiration as well as what resonates in the hearts and minds of others.
For me, after more than 20 years running my small company and more than 25 years in the working world, I am mostly motivated these days by having my actions also represent something about what is important to me. Strangely, I did not start that way at the beginning of my career, but I guess we all learn along the way.
A central belief of mine is that people want what is good. Some, due to terrible early conditioning, or due to head trauma (proven to be a causation for many violent criminals), or simply due to bad genetics or karma, do not express the desire for good properly. In fact, they can make a real mess of the search for meaning (the late Victor Frankl expounded that thought rather well). The gross errors we can make in our search for expressing meaning does not change the central thesis – we all want to find meaning. Now, how does that relate to business, email marketing, and slogans?
In expressing my desire to have some meaning in the "business" aspect of my life, I want my product as well as its associated language to be consistent with my own goals and values. So, the product name is Green Wave Email Marketing. It gives revenue to environmental organizations that I am picking out from the Wise Giving Guide (I used to use their paper version of the guide, years ago). It supports, through product features, joint campaigns across multiple organizations. There are also incentives for becoming carbon neutral in your business, namely automatically showing of the CarbonFund.org seal in their newsletters after paying the annual fee using their calculator to determine the proper offset amount. And there is sharing of environmental quotes and information, and some community aspects to the product. Once the programming is done later this year, users of the service will be able to choose how these various pieces of the product will show in their own e-newsletter broadcasts. Some of the features are already fully available.
Back to the slogan. Here are some of the slogans that have come from the efforts so far:
Build Green from the Wave Up
Communicate Your Values
Email Marketing for You and Your Planet
Email Marketing for You and the Planet
Ride the Wave
There were many others, but these are some of the favorites among my "review panel". My goal is to link the efforts for personal success with the inherent need to give to the larger society. Do you want to suggest to me your favorite tag line for Green Wave Email Marketing?
Note: this blog is part of Blog Action Day 2009. Have a blog and an interest in the environment and climate change? Join up.
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