Seemed to be a trend over the last few days as some great posts popped up about what the US election and in particular the Obama campaign means for marketing professionals, charities and nonprofit organisations. Here’s the best:

Seth Godin kicks off with a great take on what the elections meant for marketing professionals. He definitely believes that online is the place to be for campaigning.

Kivi was quick off the mark with what nonprofit organisations can learn marketing wise from the election. She focuses on the ability of the Obama to fundraise from a whole spectrum of people, small amounts building to one huge total. She also links through to the Getting Attention blog which has a good piece about what the election taught us about email marketing.

The Charity Place has a piece about what nonprofits can learn from the Obama campaign, and it’s more of the same. Engagement, make friends first and then ask for money - not the other way round. I think that’s an important one, build a connection and then ask for the money.

Fantastic blog I stumbled across today, it’s all about communications and marketing for nonprofit organisations. So if you’re in that sector or even if you aren’t then go and check it out. It’s written by the brilliant Kivi Miller. Go and check out nonprofitmarketingguide today, you won’t be disappointed.

We’ve recently been collecting a lot of data about students where I work and we know want to make use of that data by sending out targeted email messages to students about the subject they’ve asked for.

To do this we need some sort of decent mass email operation. Currently we can use the HTML editor and mass email function on the University server (NovellClient Groupwise) but we cannot track very well the results of the emails and what users do when receiving it.

Been told to look into SugarCRM, an open source platform, that costs around £1,000 for an annual licence. Does anyone know of anything?