Investing in Your Health and Future

 Banking for Women

Explore Your Options–Some traditional banks, such as PNC Bank, have specialized lending programs for women, while non-traditional enterprises, such as Lendio and MoolaHoop, offer small business owners a more flexible approach to funding.

Seek Out Women Mentors–The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) has a network of more than 100 women business centers across the country aimed at helping women who own small businesses. Don’t be afraid to ask lots of questions and always take advantage of any supplementary services.

Build Banking Relations— A banker can help you build strong credit, provide guidance on creating a business plan. and provide access to capital when you’re ready. Building a good relationship with her and educating her on the nuances of your business will help streamline that process.

 Using Tags to Manage Non-Profit Activities

Using an organization as an example, here is a tip on how to approach tracking program participants.

Enter participants as contacts and then use tags to put them in appropriate groupings that you can then use for targeted follow up.

For example, some participants start out as clients then become volunteers and/or interns. Others join the advisory council. By creating a tag for each role (e.g. Intern-2015), each event/training attended (e.g. 2015-09-15_Attend), and donor (e.g. Donor-Tier1), you can tell a lot about a contact by glancing at his/her tags. You can also create tags for specific skill sets (e.g. Skill-EventPlanner) and interests (e.g. Issue-Environment).

Using tags will make it possible for you do targeted outreach to individual people, too. It might get confusing to use projects for things besides a specific event, a grant, or a single training program. Opportunities are probably best for tracking potential events and grants for which you’re applying.

To create a tag, click the Manage Tags link at the top of the record.

Type the tag name and click the name from the list or press the space bar. You can remove a tag by clicking the X to the left of the text.

Note: If you have multiple words in a tag, you can use the underscore or some other character to separate them; for example: one_word_two_words or red.words.blue.words.

1. Click the Save button.

This week’s Insightly tip was provided by Jon Randall, director of operations at the non-profit organization, Our Voices Matter.

Handy Work

October 15^th was “Global Hand Washing Day,” a reminder to all of us that as we enter the start of the cold and flu season, now’s the time to ramp up our hand washing efforts and etiquette. Here are some convincing statistics provided by the US-based Centers for Disease Control.

Did you know that hand washing can reduce the risk of respiratory infections by 16% or that more than 50% of healthy persons have Staphylococcus aureus living in or on their nasal passages, throats, hair, or skin? Researchers in London estimate that if everyone routinely washed their hands, a million deaths a year could be prevented. There’s plenty of hard science to back these factoids up.

Here’s the recommended technique for hand washing:

• Wet your hands with clean, running water (warm or cold), turn off the tap, and apply soap.
• Lather your hands by rubbing them together with the soap. Be sure to lather the backs of your hands, between your fingers, and under your nails.
• Scrub your hands for at least 20 seconds. Need a timer? Hum the “Happy Birthday” song from beginning to end twice.
• Rinse your hands well under clean, running water.
• Dry your hands using a clean towel or air dry them.

Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial right now.

Send Us Your TipsWould you like to share your tips with Insightly customers? Send them to us! If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card!Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email.

About the author: Marta Bright is Insightly’s Content Manager. She’s been writing about the “business of technology” in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade.