Moral Environment

I have been inspired! Some weeks ago our local church was visited by a United Reform Church vicar, Jim Brown, and he gave a sermon that encapsulated what Yourtomorrow was about (http://www.yourtomorrow.co.uk/) . He said that we should not just be concentrating on the physical envronment, recycling, reducing our energy consumption, and travelling fewer miles. Additionally, in order to build a better world, what we needed to do was to improve the moral environment. That is exactly what I believe in! In order to make the world a better place we need to concentrate, not just on the physical, but also on the spiritual! He put it this way, we should not just focus on our heads, but also on our hearts. This does not mean that we have to be religious, or even follow a particular faith. We just need to concentrate on working together, resolving our difficulties, ensuring that we all get an equal chance and can express ourselves according to our beliefs. Let's stop arguing, focussing on our differences and trying to be better than one another. Let's work together to build a better world. His line, that might have been taken from the website, is "We need to act together if we're to change the world". I agree Jim!!!

I was so impressed that I asked for his text and now the sermon appears in our Features section of our website on the following page http://www.yourtomorrow.co.uk/kbase_category/13.php . Go and read it and see if you do not agree, even if you do not accept the "churchy" bits! I also owe tremendous thanks to Jim Brown for allowing me to put his thoughts onto the website; he did not have to and could easily have found an excuse!

Newsletters

I have just been writing my first www.Yourtomorrow.co.uk newsletter that will be sent to all registrants on the website and competition entries. I have found this difficult because I have a thing about unnecessary, and often very boring, advertising. It seems to me that there is a role for advertising to inform, to let people know that you have something they might want; it helps find a match between a customer and a supplier. But these days we are bombarded with so much repetitive advertising that it can become at best a distracting noise and, at worst, an annoying irritant.

I used to love watching the Tour de France cycle race, enjoy the scenery they rode through and be totally amazed by the cyclists' stamina. But this year, my hour's nightly viewing on ITV4 was really spoilt by the constant advertising of products, for which I had no interest or need, being constantly repeated again and again and .... How often has a film that you are enjoying been spoilt by being interrupted, just at an exciting or romantic moment, by tedious advertising? Surely the advertising professionals realise that they are annoying at least as many people as they are informing. It becomes more than just informing people when the same ad is shown several times in the same programme night after night.

People seem to be even more sensitive about unsolicited e-mails, so my Newsletter is trying to avoid being just another interruption. I want to make it interesting with news worth reading. I want to tell people about our new products and gift ideas. I want it to be amusing! But perhaps that sets too tall an order. I don't want people to see the newsletter arrive and just press the "unsubscribe" button without even opening the message, as I would!

Indeed I have also commissioned a small press advertising campaign trying to tell people about Yourtomorrow and the fact that we have a range of gifts that are not available in the high street. But that has forced me to recognise that the boundary between reach (the number of people who see the advert) and ensuring that the maximum number see it and becoming boring and tedious is very difficult to manage.