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WORK WITH SHEL

Marketing, Consulting,
and Copywriting

“For organizations that want to combine making a difference and making a profit, I’m your Success Sherpa, your ‘Transformpreneur℠.’ I find opportunities for you to make money doing good in the world, and walk you through the steps to make it real.”   —Shel Horowitz 

Develop and disseminate the right messages to the right people

Note the plurals: “messages” and “people”:
to reach different audiences effectively, you need different messages. Every interest group—every market—needs an individual approach. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work. Get expert help from Shel as you:

 

1) identify your markets;

2) determine the best approaches for each;

3) write copy that will get noticed. 

  • How can you get your story out through mainstream media most effectively? 
  • How can you “borrow others’ authority” to get bloggers, podcasters, social media influencers, and marketers to tell their tribe about what you’re doing? 

Testimonials

"Shel is amazing. In 10 minutes, I learned more, and specifically how to get my product financed and to market, than I've learned in all my college courses that included the subjects. If my product "takes," Shel Horowitz will be my advisor in marketing and other matters. An expert in his field and a mensch to boot."
Dani GannonInventor of a forthcoming product that solves a problem for people in wheelchairs
"I’d like to offer my highest possible endorsement of your services… Your skills are formidable. You simplify ideas and find the right tone… You are unparalleled at singling out accurately the exact focus or theme that best captures ideas.…great at discussing options for presenting my message… and no one is better at choosing the clearest, briefest written language. "
Mary L. Ford 4-Term Mayor of Northampton, MA
"When we tested your writing against our in-house attempt, your writing yielded 5 times more opt-ins than ours. We think your work is top-notch and will happily refer clients who need to clearly and concisely convey what they do and who they are. "
Marylou TylerCEO, StrategicPipeline.com
"Thanks for yet another competent and clearly assembled product. It’s a pleasure to say it’s a pleasure doing business with you."
Ira Bryck Director, University of Massachusetts Family Business Center (14-year steady client)
"Wow, your client-oriented attitude is very refreshing. Shel, you did a great job — I love your work! Thank you, and we’ll definitely have many more projects for you soon."
Simon K. Grabowski CEO, GetResponse.com, Poland
"What a wonderful job—and you did it so quickly and efficiently! I appreciate your quick turnaround so very much. I’ll definitely use you again."
MJ Rose Author of “Lip Service,” the first self-published book picked up by a major book club and co-author, How To Publish and Promote Online
"I had Shel Horowitz tune up some copy for me, and was very pleased. Excellent value for the money! (And that’s high praise from me.)"
Marion Gropen Gropen Associates
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Shel can help you with:

Strategic Marketing Analysis

Shel will help you: spot ways to reach new markets for existing and new products and services…analyze your/your competitors' strengths and weaknesses…develop powerful win-win partnerships with complementary (and even competing) organizations...

Website Review

Shel will check whether your approach matches your target audience and flag areas where the site could be more user-friendly. He'll also look at the copy (the words) to make sure it moves people to action and avoids several common traps—from non-inclusive language to "we-we-we all the way home."

Document Review

Similar to the website review, but for individual documents.

Social Media Strategy

Shel will analyze your current social media program, determine which platforms you should concentrate on, and with what kind of messaging. Shel can also write sample posts for your staff to model as they execute your social media efforts.

Maximizing Your CSR Report's Impact

Use social media to maximize the impact of your corporate social responsibility report (please click here to learn more).​

Renewable Energy Assessment (through one of our partners)

In-depth analysis of your site's potential for deep conservation and various types of renewable energy, slashing your energy bills and carbon footprint.

Copywriting (marketing and informational materials)

A story-behind-the-story approach that combines emotional and rational triggers to create a powerful desire to buy.

Green/Social Good Marketing Audit

Shel will look at how you're marketing your environmental and social commitments.Are you preseting them to the world in ways that bring the most benefits? Are you effectively reaching audiences with different levels of interest? Are there easy fixes you could make that could vastly increase your impact?

Informal Green-Your-Processes Walk-through
(in-person or via videoconferencing)

Shel will actually go around your business, looking for ways you could do things more greenly, more efficiently, and possibly how you could repurpose to build in profitable social change or partner with new types of companies. He'll ask lots of questions and perhaps find some "low-hanging fruit" that you can correct easily, cheaply, and profitably. In the rare case where Shel finds nothing to fix, Going Beyond Sustainability will give your company a Great Job Going Green award that you can publicize and display.

Solid Waste Audit, Paid Out of Savings (through one of our partners)

Work with a leading expert to streamline your solid waste management and lower costs. You pay only a percentage of what this expert saves you, zero upfront cost.

Assessment of What’s Holding Your Company Back and How to Get Through the Stuck Places (through one of our partners)

An appointment with an expert coach who has uncanny ability to cut through mental clutter, pinpoint your stuck places, and help you overcome them. Working with her, Shel realized he didn't have to wait to do the crucial work of helping the business commuity understand the need for environmental and social change through a profitability lens. She helped him become ready.

Discuss your goals with Shel

Go Deeper—Tools to Create and Market
Profitable Social Change:
Review or Tune-Up of Your Marketing Materials

In-Depth Audit/Review/Critique 

Discuss your goals with Shel

Get It Done!

Social Entrepreneurship “Solar-Powered Rocket” Jumpstart

The done-for-you option. Shel will… 

  • Spend time learning your business—he will:  
Interview you 
Read public and internal materials you’ve created 
Review your news coverage and public interviews 
Optionally visit your facility 
  • Brainstorm at least 5 to as many as 10 product or service ideas that you can implement 
  • Provide a synopsis for each of plusses, minuses, audiences, and other stakeholders 
  • Work up detailed implementation summaries of your top two choices 
  • Create a marketing plan for your go-ahead top choice 
  • Write your first marketing document (typically the copy for a web page or a press release) 
  • Write 10 Tweets (posts of 280 characters or less, usable on any social media
    platform) to launch your new product’s social media marketing 
  • Check in weekly during the project 

$4995 Or three payments of $1995 each: at the project start, at one month, and on completion.

Any required travel expenses are additional, at actual cost.
Work With Shel

Identify Values and Opportunities for Profitable Social Change

Let’s take a look at the core values and operating systems of your organization from its founding to today.

Together, we’ll examine key doorways to link those values and operating systems with offerings that address one or more of the big social issues (such as hunger, poverty, racism, war, catastrophic climate change)—while helping you increase revenues and decrease costs so you become more profitable. 

  • What core values does your organization embody? 

  • How can those values relate to larger social goals? 

  • What organizational processes facilitate this integration, and how can they be nurtured? 

  • What organizational processes interfere with this integration, and how can they be modernized? 

  • What are the profit opportunities in incorporating these values into your products, your services, your marketing, and your corporate culture? 

  • What untapped markets could these new products, services, and marketing approaches open up for you? If, for instance, you created something that created a ladder out of poverty while restoring the environment, could you market it successfully to new audiences? 

Profit More by Going More Deeply Green

Imagine a luxurious 4000-square-foot home—with a $5 average monthly electric bill. How about a modern factory where every bit of waste is turned into a raw material, and nothing goes to the landfill? A solar farm whose PV (solar electric) panels consume so little land that crops grow underneath them? 

All of these are real-life examples of Deep Green design—and they’re only the tip of what’s already possible. As one example, the Empire State Building began saving $4.4 million per year following a “deep energy retrofit” in the early 2000s—and is saving even more now that fossil fuel energy prices are so much higher. 

Using design thinking systems such as Net Zero/Net Positive, Circular Economy, and Biomimicry, you can: 

  1. Save money: lower the cost of energy, water, raw materials, waste disposal, transportation, etc. 

  1. Increase productivity: create a more conducive work environment, a sense of empowerment and “we’re all in this together” among employees; this, in turn, lowers absenteeism, increases workers’ health, and decreases health care costs. 

  1. Increase revenue: reach new market sectors, introduce new, green, products and services, market differently to existing clients or customers, and sometimes command a premium price for being green. 

Shel Horowitz of Going Beyond Sustainability can help you:

  • Examine your existing practices 

  • Find new opportunities for savings and revenue 

  • Green your supply chain and distribution channels 

  • Scale up or roll out green products and services that build on your current capabilities and strengths while expanding revenue possibilities 

  • Involve employees, community leaders, neighbors, customers, and/or vendors in ways that help them feel a part of your new mission 

  • Understand, reach, and expand your core markets, through powerful benefit-focused “story-behind-the-story” copywriting, developing partnerships, and other methods 

  • Create and enlarge powerful business opportunities hidden in the intersection of your core expertise/competencies and your desire to bring about a better world 

  • Reach the three different markets for green products and services: deep green, light green (the fastest growing sector, often overlooked), and nongreen 

  • Take you beyond just green to create and market profitable products and services that actually make the world better—helping you turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance 

  • Harness the good you’re doing and turn your CSR and sustainability reports into marketing talking points 

  • Create and tell the story of what you’re doing in ways that make allies of former enemies 

  • Defend you against false accusations of “greenwashing” or “purpose-washing”

     

Green and Regenerative-Related Clients (partial list)

Services/Training

  • Better World Club (national auto/bicycle club, green alternative to AAA)
  • DwellRight (holistic space management that combines eco-architecture, resource maximiation, and Feng Shui
  • Co-op Development Institute (national trade organization for co-ops)
  • Healthy House Institute
  • Energy Management Consultants (commercial and residential conservation)
  • Montague Retreat Center (green conference facility)
  • Sweet Consultants (B2B natural products sales and marketing)
  • Good Neighbours (Canadian green social network for apartment dwellers)
  • Pollinators Welcome (natural/edible landscaping)
  • Amherst Area (MA) Chamber of Commerce
  • J.L. Slattery, Inc. (environmental services)
  • Independent Consultants Network
  • Lawn Jockey (environmentally-friendly landscape design and landscaping)
  • Donna Brooks (holistic yoga instructor)
  • Network Chiropractic Northampton
  • Dave Ratner, speaker on local economy
  • Amy Mager, acupuncture/Chinese herbal medicine
  • Ruth Rootberg, Alexander Technique practitioner
  • Northwestern District Attorney’s Office (conference on housing and diversity)
  • Dr. David Alpern (smoking cessation/workplace environment)
  • Dependable Business Alternatives
  • Sustainable Step New England
  • HorticulturalJobs.com
  • Greener Cleaners
  • The Repair Collective
  • Builtspace (environmentally friendly building management software)

 

Activist Organizations/Community Service/Politicians

  • Green America
  • National Environmental Hall of Fame
  • Teens Opposing Poverty
  • Save The Mountain
  • Lionel Delevingne, documentary photographer of the safe energy/no nukes movement
  • Jewish Activists for Immigration Justice
  • Northampton, MA Nonsmokers Rights Campaign
  • Town of Hadley, MA Long Range Plan Implementation Committee
  • Mary Ford, four-time Mayor of Northampton, MA (press release writer). Mike Kirby, City Councilor, Northampton, MA (campaign manager and publicist), and many other successful local-office candidates
  • Rhode Island Clamshell Alliance
  • New York Public Interest Research Group (employee)
  • Homesharing in Hampshire County
  • Mass Aid
  • Brooklyn Anti-Nuclear Group
  • Brooklyn Alliance for Survival
  • Valley Dollars (alternative currency)
  • Appeal to Reason (safe energy group)

 

Natural and Wholesome Foods/ Restaurants/Other Retail

  • Salsarita
  • Jittery Joe’s
  • Barstow’s Bakery and Dairy Store
  • River Valley Market
  • Bart’s Homemade
  • Northampton Food Co-op
  • 1-800 GRANOLA
  • Valley Bicycles 


Arts/Culture/Crafts/Gifts

  • Eco-Artware
  • Heidi Hanson (visual artist)
  • Michihiro Yoshida (visual artist)
  • New Song Library
  • People’s Music Network
  • Rhode Island Folk Music Society

 

Authors and Publishers

  • Wrote the back cover for my own two books in the Guerrilla Marketing series (the best-selling marketing series in the history of publishing): Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (John Wiley & Sons) and Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (Morgan James); also published marketing and environmental books with Simon & Schuster, Chelsea Green, Stackpole, and my own imprint.
  • Worked with hundreds of authors and independent presses on anything from writing a book cover or press release up through complete publishing project management, including many environmental, educational, and social change titles. Clients have included Glacier Publishing (eco-responsible mining books), Autodidactic Press (self-education), Leadership Garden Legacy (leadership/empowerment/parenting), Imaginator Press (visionary/environmentalist YA fiction), Collaborative Competition Press (books for women leaders), and many others. Focus on environment, simplicity, social justice, and wellness.

 

Some Among Many Media that have Published my Work 

  • Green Purchasing Asia 
  • World.edu (regular contributor)
  • FastCompany.com (regular contributor for two years)
  • Greenbiz.com (several pieces on marketing to the green consumer or green business)
  • Triplepundit.com (several profiles of green businesses)
  • Related Matters (UMass Family Business Center) (more than 70 articles on business leadership)
  • Daily Hampshire Gazette (More than 100 articles including in-depth supplement on alternative energy businesses in the Pioneer Valley and ongoing green business column for four years)
  • Leisure (natural foods businesses in Franklin County, Massachusetts)
  • Hypergridbusiness.com (go green with virtual meetings)
  • Boston Globe (Los Angeles on the public bus system)
  • Sustainablog (not-so-green aspects of bottled water)
  • Providence Bulletin (nuclear is not safe energy)
  • The Folio (monthly column on energy issues)
  • Guerrilla Marketing Association (several articles on green marketing)
  • Green And Profitable (internationally self-syndicated column on green business)
  • PR News (green marketing)
  • Clean and Green Monthly Newsletter (profiles, tips, book reviews, 1997-present, in various forms)
  • WXOJ-FM (4-year host of a show interviewing green and ethical businesses)

Ready to Effectively Combine Social Justice, Environment and Profitability?

Ready to Effectively Combine Social Justice, Environment and Profitability?

Let's Work Together

Check out more of what Shel can do for you

Turn CSR Report Into A Marketing Win!

Imagine how the world might “beat a path to your door” if your best prospects could easily discover your CSR, social entrepreneurship, and sustainability achievements—as Tweets, blog posts, newsletter articles, and presentation points. How much did your company spend to create your last Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or sustainability report?
Fix My CSR Report

Avoid Greenwashing/
Purposewashing Accusations

You’ve slashed your waste, your energy use, your raw materials—which you’ve shifted largely to organic and fair trade. And yet…here are those pesky protestors again, criticizing you in the press, presenting shareholder resolutions at your stockholder meetings, and claiming you’re not green enough or focused on social equity enough. What’s a company to do?
Learn More

Let's work together

Shel is Ready to Help You!

Get your monthly Clean and Green Club Newsletter at no cost—and cool bonuses, too!

Seven Weeks to a Greener Business – Once a week for seven weeks, you’ll receive an action-oriented article with tips for greener printing, energy saving, waste reduction, water conservation, transportation, going deep-green, and concluding with green marketing. You’ll also get a subscription to Shel’s award-winning monthly Clean and Green Club Newsletter, one of the longest-running marketing newsletters online, published under various names since 1997.
FREE BONUS GIFT: We’ll also send you Shel’s “Seven Tips to Gain Marketing Traction as a Green Guerrilla”

Ready to Effectively Combine Social Justice, Environment and Profitability?

Shel is Ready to Help You

Let's work together

Newsletter

Seven Weeks to a Greener Business – Once a week for seven weeks, you’ll receive an action-oriented article with tips for greener printing, energy saving, waste reduction, water conservation, transportation, going deep-green, and concluding with green marketing. You’ll also get a subscription to Shel’s award-winning monthly Clean and Green Club Newsletter, one of the longest-running marketing newsletters online, published under various names since 1997.
FREE BONUS GIFT:
We’ll also send you Shel’s “Seven Tips to Gain Marketing Traction as a Green Guerrilla”

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Ana Pinto
Copyright © 2022· Going Beyond Sustainability