Women Empowering Women

The Women Empowering Women Summit

I Dare to Succeed, It's My Turn!

Want to have happier and stronger relationships?

Ready to advance in your life and career in 2010?

Need balance and organization in your life?

Do you desire to start your own business?

Want to get in control of your finances?

This Powerful summit teaches women to tackle their personal and professional challenges and plant their feet firmly on the path to success. A panel of amazing women will gather to share their fascinating stories and life lessons, inspiring you to obtain the financial, physical, mental, and spiritual growth and freedom you deserve.

Proceeds from ALL tickets sales benefit Junior Achievement of New York and New Jersey

Our 2009 Women Empowering Women Maverick Award Honorees are Wendy Williams and Elisabeth Hasselbeck

Visit www.wewevents.com for more information!

McDonald’s Reins In Chicago Pride to Keep Rio Olympics Fans Happy

Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics puts McDonald’s Corp. in a pickle.

McDonald’s is a corporate citizen of the Chicago area, with 2,000 employees at its headquarters in suburban Oak Brook, 20 miles (30 kilometers) from downtown. Chairman Andrew McKenna served asco-head of fundraising for the Chicago 2016 organizing committee. A Summer Olympics in the city would offer opportunities for marketing to U.S. consumers.

Yet McDonald’s, the world’s biggest restaurant company, is forbidden by the International Olympic Committee from actively campaigning for Chicago. The IOC will pick the winning bid for 2016 from Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid and Tokyo on Oct 2.

“They have to be cool,” said Rick Gentile, who supervised CBS Corp.’s television coverage of the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan. “If the games are in Rio, they don’t want people in Rio to be mad.”

McDonald’s isn’t endorsing one of the four candidate cities over the others, said Dean Barrett, senior vice president for global sports marketing.

“We have a great McDonald’s presence in any of the cities,” Barrett said. “We have stayed totally out of the decision-making process.”

McDonald’s involvement with the Olympics stretches back to 1968, when it airlifted hamburgers to homesick athletes during the winter games in Grenoble, France. The company signed on as an official sponsor in 1976 and a TOP partner in 1998, and has served as the official restaurant of the games seven times. TOP, for The Olympic Partners, gives sponsors exclusive worldwide marketing rights.

Backyard Favorite

A possible hometown bias surfaced a year ago when John Lewicki, McDonald’s director of alliance marketing, suggested at a symposium in New York that the decision on whether to extend the company’s role as a TOP sponsor to 2016 might depend on the city selected.

“They were comments that he deeply regrets and he knows that they don’t represent McDonald’s position on the Olympic sponsorship,” said Walt Riker, a McDonald’s spokesman. The company hasn’t yet decided whether to be a TOP sponsor for 2016.

McDonald’s may not have to officially say a word about its city preference. Its size and headquarters location speak louder than its neutral position, saidDarren Tristano, senior vice president with Chicago-based restaurant consultant Technomic Inc. About 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants are in the U.S. out of a global total of 32,000.

“They’re a large corporation based in an area that’s hoping to get the Olympics,” Tristano said. “That’s indirect support for getting the games.”

Salt Lake Scuffle

The IOC has guarded against perceptions of favoritism since a bribery scandal erupted involving cash, gifts and scholarships given to its members by some supporters of the bid for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. The IOC in 1999 banned its members from visiting cities that were bidding to host the games.

“It wouldn’t make it a fair process” if sponsors tied themselves to one bid city, said Mark Adams, an IOC spokesman.

Supporters of the Athens bid for 1996 complained that Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co., another TOP sponsor, helped bring the summer games to its city that year instead.

Coca-Cola “marketed like crazy” after Atlanta was chosen, and undertook a similar campaign during the Beijing games last year, said Susan Stribling, spokeswoman for Coca-Cola North America.

“It was great because it was our hometown, but we would have loved any of the cities because we’re a global brand,” Stribling said.

Private Roles

In Chicago, McKenna, 79, is a board member for the Lyric Opera of Chicago and Children’s Memorial Hospital, and a trustee for the Museum of Science and Industry. He was involved with Chicago 2016 as a private citizen and is no longer on the committee, said Heidi Barker, a McDonald’s spokeswoman.

McKenna declined to comment, citing the potential conflict between his roles, Barker said.

“He’s a member of the community who happens to be chairman of McDonald’s,” said Gentile, who is now director of the Seton Hall University Sports Poll in South Orange, New Jersey. McKenna’s son, also named Andrew McKenna, serves on the Chicago 2016 committee, said Lance Trover, a spokesman for the younger McKenna’s campaign for Illinois governor.

President Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, is leading the U.S. delegation to the Oct. 2 IOC meeting in Copenhagen to support her hometown’s bid. Fellow Chicagoan Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, and television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey also will attend. The White House sent an advance team to assess security in case the president joins them.

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Being a Brand

To get support and sponsorship dollars, an athlete can no longer be just an athlete.

What's an amateur athlete worth these days? In marketing terms, winning competitions in your sport is only a small piece of the equation.

In an era of marketing frugality, when corporate sponsorships at all levels are being cut or heavily scrutinized, an athlete's exercise in personal branding -- building up a fan base by touring community events and going viral -- is becoming as integral a part of the weekly routine as squeezing in long hours of training.

The most pressing issue for athletes now is fundraising, says Canadian snowboarder Jeff Batchelor, silver medallist at the 2009 world championships. Speaking during a recent panel discussion at a Canadian Marketing Association conference looking at the value of the upcoming Vancouver 2010 Games, the athlete said travel and training budgets for snow-boarders are especially lean in recessionary times.

Industry giants such as Burton Snowboards Inc., for example, are making cuts to the number of athletes they sponsor on their global teams.

To carve out a marketable identity, Mr. Batchelor said, athletes need to define themselves as personal brands in addition to winning competitions, and must go "above and beyond" what they did a few years ago to be noticed and supported.

"Without a decipherable personal brand image, you're just another athlete," he said. "[The] companies that are out there looking for marketing opportunities are not looking for just another athlete.

"By investing dollars in that athlete, they are making a bet that they will bring home gold, as well as high returns on their invested dollars. In an economic downturn, consumers want the best for what they pay for, and let's face it, nobody is going to buy Wheaties from the guy who came in second place."

The snowboarder promotes his own brand on a website and blog, JeffBatchelor.com,which documents his life in competition through a blog and photographs. "I started my website to keep my friends back home in on what I'm doing and then it turned out to be a way to allow companies to see what I'm all about." While Mr. Batchelor said he did not set out to create a specific image to win more corporate sponsors -- other than "try[ing] to make [the website] look really cool" -- he admited he has had "to sort of tame the snowboard style and lingo" on the site to have a broader appeal to marketers.

Beyond websites, an athlete can drum up a bigger fan base and public awareness by pressing the flesh, as they say in the world of politics, at a wide variety of social and community events tied to the Games and key sponsors such as Hudson's Bay Co.

The retailer, a national Games sponsor that designed Team Canada's uniforms and sponsors 200 Canadian athletes in its Olympic program, believes increasing the athletes' public profiles can help ultimately to sell clothes, said Mark Kinnin, the company's vice-president of global sourcing at the Olympics, corporate sales and e-retail.

"If the athletes don't do well, I don't get a return [on the marketing investment]," he said. "But if people don't know who the athetes are, I also don't get a return."

To that end, Hudson's Bay, one of Mr. Batchelor's sponsors, organizes events to bring athletes across the country to do events with Canadians, such as pop-up street hockey games.

"Until you've seen a kid go up to an athlete and touch their medal ... they have stars in their eyes. If I can help the athlete do what they do, if I can help them win more gold, I can help them get more connected to Canadians, we are all going to benefit," Mr. Kinnin said.

People like to compete with athletes at events that do not highlight an athlete's expertise, he said. They get a thrill from trying to "beat them at something, like a video game."

Indeed, the presence of athletes at public events helps raise a lot of money for amateur sports, said David Bedford, executive director of the Canadian Olympic Committee. "Athletes are the kind of people that corporate citizens will pay money to go meet. We use our annual golf tournaments to raise money for the athletes, and they sell out every year."

Such grassroots marketing efforts have been a big asset in the recession, he said. While the revenue base from licensing and sponsorships tied to the Olympics is agreed upon far in advance and pretty much guaranteed, the downturn forced the committee to cut its budget by $17.9-million. "We are hopeful that the market continues to grow over the next couple of years," Mr. Bedford said.

In addition to sponsorships, the Winter Games' operating budget of $1.62-billion is funded by sales of tickets and merchandise.

The price tag for Olympic sponsors is hefty: Global sponsors pay an estimated US$80-million for the top tier, and several global sponsors of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games did not renew for Vancouver, including Johnson & Johnson, Manulife Financial Corp., Lenovo Group Ltd. and Eastman Kodak Co. But official sponsors like Samsung Electronics Co. insist the high price tag is worth it for the prestige.

"Olympic marketing has played a very important role in building up the company's corporate image," said Gyehyun Kwon, head of worldwide sport marketing at Samsung, saying it helped to cement the Korean company's image in the competitive electronics field as a trusted brand.

"The Olympic movement is the most premium spot among all sport platforms. Our position is very clear in the case of Olympic Games. We believe it's really silly to abandon the platform; we have to take full advantage of the platform."

Nevertheless, Samsung does not invest in specific athletes, perhaps wanting to steer clear of the risk of loss, injury and other behavioural gaffes -- witness the Michael Phelps bong scandal and the resulting fallout, including Kellogg Co. dropping the athlete as a spokesman.

"We stopped; it's too risky," said Mr. Kwon. "They have to perform well, and if we sponsor one very good player and the next day they go down, we lose all of our investment. It's very risky."

Non-profit Inventory

Thank you to Michele Savoldi at the Columbus Non-Profit Business Examiner for these great tips!

When creating non-profit fund-raising and development programs think of ways to create an inventory of benefits.

In order to strike interest and a commitment from a corporation or business, consistent and professional branding for each fund-raising program combined with an inventory of tangible benefits is needed.

Corporations and business alike get involved with a non-profit organizations for many reasons.

• They like to give back to their community
• They like to engage employees through involvement
• They like to get a little something back in return

What can your organization give back in return? Non-profit organizations have more to offer than they realize. Some benefits you can create around an event or corporate giving program are:

Media Mentions - Secure media sponsor(s) early on so the title/presenting sponsor can be mentioned in PSAs.

Brand placement - Position the corporation or business logo on everything from invitations, t-shirts and brochures to signage and website.

Unique Visitors - Use your website's unique visitor count as a selling point. Monitor your web analytics and use them as a benefit to the donor. That's the number of times their brand will have additional exposure.

Social media creates new opportunities for inventory benefits:

Facebook - By creating a Facebook page for the organization or event and including the sponsor logo you can use number of fans to the page as inventory.

Twitter - By posting a tweet on Twitter about the sponsor involvement you can use the number of followers to your profile as inventory or the number of times a tweet was retweeted.

You Tube - By adding a video on You Tube with the sponsor logo you can add number of views to the video as inventory.

Linked In - By creating a network update you can announce a corporate or business partner with a reciprocal link. This will create awareness and drive traffic to their site.

The inventory benefit possibilities are endless when thinking "beyond the box".

ING Awards $100,000 in Grants to Combat Childhood Obesity

This is truly a small step in the right direction for our economy!

ING today announced that it has awarded 50 schools across the U.S. with $2,000 grants to help students combat childhood obesity. Through its ING Run For Something Better School Awards Program, financial services leader ING, in partnership with the National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE), is helping to introduce fifth- through eighth-grade students across the country to the benefits of running through school-based running programs.  Fifty schools will receive $2,000 in funding to support its new ING Run For Something Better program, offering students a minimum of an eight-week running program that will conclude with a culminating running event in celebration of the students' achievements. NASPE has developed unique running lesson plans, based on the National Standards for Physical Education (NASPE, 2004), and specifically targeted for fifth- through eighth-grade students. These activity plans, coupled with other program materials such as distance logs and a running journal, will aid in the development of running skills and preparation for a culminating running event.    "We are pleased to offer schools a grant that encourages healthy lifestyles changes, personal development, goal-setting and group participation," said Rhonda Mims, president of the ING Foundation and senior vice president, Office of Corporate Responsibility and Multicultural Affairs. "ING is committed to making it easier for schools to not only close the gap in student achievement, but also advance student physical well being through ING Run For Something Better."  Grant awards were available in all states to public elementary or middle schools for running programs that targeted fifth- through eighth-grade students. Over 300 schools applied for the ING/NASPE School Awards Program. A NASPE review board consisting of 100 teachers and education administrators reviewed all applications.   Nearly one-third of U.S. children and teens are now overweight or obese. Inactive and obese children risk multiple consequences including reduced bone strength, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol levels and asthma. If addressed at an early age, many of these conditions can be avoided. NASPE Executive Director Charlene Burgeson said, "NASPE is appreciative to ING for helping our efforts to promote the importance of children's physical fitness and provide teachers and coaches with the resources they need to create fun and practical running programs for their students."  

Source

Chicago 2016 Opens the Books on Bid Spending

Chicago 2016 offered up additional details Friday on its plans to finance an Olympics, as well as on its own financials, in an effort to reassure aldermen ahead of a key City Council vote in two weeks.

Patrick Ryan, CEO of the bid committee, spelled out various types of insurance that he says will protect against the need to use taxpayer dollars to fund the games, which organizers predict would cost $4.8 billion to host.

But the primary taxpayer protection remains Mr. Ryan's ability to keep the project on budget over the next seven years if Chicago is awarded the games by the International Olympic Committee on Oct. 2. He's counting on a $450-million cushion built into the budget, which the Civic Federation of Chicago declared this week is “fair and reasonable.”

The City Council will be asked Sept. 9 to authorize Mayor Richard M. Daley to sign a contract with the International Olympic Committee that guarantees Chicago will foot the bill for whatever it takes to put on the games by 2016 and to absorb any financial losses.

The city agreed to put up $500 million and the state committed $250 million if the games show an operating loss on paper, something that Mr. Ryan stresses hasn't happened before when a U.S. city has hosted the Olympics. But previous games have been plagued by cost overruns and, in the case of Vancouver recently, funding woes for projects such as the athletes' village.

Mr. Ryan detailed various types of coverage against specific risks, from liability for accidents, catastrophic acts that would cancel the games or financial default of a corporate sponsor, as well as policies related to construction delays, cost overruns or funding shortfalls.

He laid out commitments for $500 million in public liability coverage and another $500 million in “all risk” umbrella coverage to cover the deductible on such coverage that would be used before the city or state money.

However, there is no insurance if Chicago is unable to meet its goal of selling $1.8 billion in corporate sponsorships, something labeled “optimistic” in a report this week by the Civic Federation, which analyzed the plan at the aldermen's request. Chicago 2016 intends to purchase $100 million in insurance against sponsorship default, essentially enough to cover the loss of one of the top-level sponsors after a contract has been signed.

The other big area of concern is construction budgets, which have a history of being overrun both in Olympic and Chicago history.

The bid committee plans to guard against cost overruns on nearly $1 billion in venue construction with a fixed-price building contract. It remains to be seen whether a developer would agree to such terms, which could drive up the cost of the venues. If the developer doesn't agree, Mr. Ryan will use cost-overrun insurance. He anticipates a limit of 10% or $75 million.

The $1-billion Olympic Village, the most expensive portion of the tab for hosting the games, is a major risk. Like Vancouver, which is hosting the Winter Olympics next year, and London, site of the 2012 Summer Games, Chicago intends to let private developers shoulder the risk and cost of building athlete housing in exchange for being able to sell it later as private condominiums or apartments.

But when Vancouver's developers lost their funding in the recent recession, the city had to step in with $600 million to keep the project going. London also had to step in with financing because private investors weren't willing to take on the project.

Mr. Ryan, founder of Chicago-based business insurance giant Aon Corp., says he will employ so-called capital replacement coverage that would provide up to $250 million to keep the village project going if the developer's funding sources dried up. Mr. Ryan says he has lined up a “commitment,” though he didn't name the carrier. Such coverage would cost about $17 million, said Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation.

Mr. Ryan intends to pass along the cost to the developer or pay for it with the more than $250 million in private funds that the bid committee intends to raise if Chicago is awarded the games.

So far, Chicago 2016 has raised $76.9 million in the three years since Mr. Daley launched the bid with Mr. Ryan, according to a report provided to aldermen Friday in an effort to demonstrate the group's ability to meet financial targets. The bid committee raised $3.7 million more than expected, it said. Twenty-nine donors gave more than $1 million apiece, and another 20 contributed more than $500,000.

It has spent $48.3 million in pursuit of the games, including $10.9 million on consultants and $10.5 million on full-time staff. Its four highest-paid executives are paid $250,000 to $300,000 per year. They are President Lori Healey; David Bolger, chief operating officer; John Murray, chief of bid operations, and Doug Arnot, director of sports operations. Chicago 2016 said the pay reflects the median among not-for-profits in Chicago and ranked well behind organizations such as Easter Seals Inc., the Art Institute and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Mr. Ryan takes no salary. He also paid for 70% of his travel expenses, which amounted to about 250,000 miles, out of his own pocket, according to the report.

Most of the Chicago 2016 budget was spent on outside consultants with expertise in preparing previous Olympic bids or other related work, such as advertising. The top five contractors to the bid are: public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, $3.1 million; architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill L.L.P., $1.3 million; HOK Sport Facility Group, $1 million; fundraising consultancy Patricia J. Hurley & Associates, $635,000, and digital-media agency Ogilvy, $530,770.