Love what you do?
"creative, organized and enthusiastic"
"definitely exceeded all expectations"
"helped us find our niche"
"cooperative, inventive, creative"
"a way of thinking outside the box"
"amazing energy and passion"
"invaluable"
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We work with people we can love.
We love what we do, and we love our clients. We work with passionate intelligent people who respect others and have tolerance for the things we don't yet understand. When you're trying to change the world, a sense of humor also helps. We want to feel good while we do good.
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How about you? What are you looking for?
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We do things differently.
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You know your mission. So we don't start the conversation, we listen. We find out where you want to go and discover what matters to you on the journey.
Often it doesn't take much to help you over your hurdles. Sometimes we discover a missing key element and it's a quick, easy fix to get you back on track. But if things have drifted pretty far afield, we can help you redesign your success map from the inside out.
Even though we’ve got decades of experience in marketing, communications, and business development, these days that will only gets you so far. New business tools are emerging constantly and you have to respond to a noisy and challenging environment that creates unique demands every day. Our creative savvy can transform this pressure to "keep up" into boundless opportunities for impact.​​
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We know the social sector.
For more than thirty years, founder Valerie Vandermeer has been teaching small businesses, nonprofits, and social entrepreneurs how to express themselves well, achieve their goals, and feel good about their work. She's experienced in marketing, communications, small business development, nonprofit management, and educational and human development program design and delivery.
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Valerie launched and was Executive Director of a 501(c)3 and managed a $1.5 Million annual giving program for a major University. She's consulted to some of the planet's most wonderful changemakers and their organizations including SocEnt incubators, educational initiatives, arts organizations, grass roots and political activists, and a globally recognized leader in the nonprofit sector.
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Valerie has cultivated relationships with like-minded delightful professionals who add their skills and talent to the mix. This is particularly useful in high demand, high priced arenas that present significant challenges for smaller organizations like data analysis and website development.
"Her knowledge of strategic business planning and marketing was invaluable to me as a start up NGO."
"A bright, inspirational leader who brings out the brilliance in everyone and everything she touches."
"Valerie has a way of thinking outside the box that has lent a uniqueness to my organization that I don't think we would have reached otherwise. She helped us define our niche and solidified our ideas on branding.
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How does this work?
We'd like it to work well. That's why it's important our skills and interests complement your needs and passions. We carefully curate our clients and value the relationships we build together. If we can't help, we may be able to refer you elsewhere.
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Projects are generally accepted on a contract basis for a period of time. The fee will depend on the nature of the work. Our contract clients get favorable project pricing.
Want to know how this got started?​
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I'm Val and I founded PostParadigm in the late 1980's. Back then I was just starting out as a marketing consultant -- and I loved it! My clients were great people with wonderful businesses. They just didn't know how to find customers and tell their stories well. I showed them how. They were grateful and I was happy.
But then the phone started to ring.
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Clients wanted me to come back and do another brochure or help them plan out a pitch for a different offer. That's the way it's supposed to work, right? But I didn't think they should be paying me for something I already showed them how to do! So I took a step back and looked at things differently.
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I transformed my consulting practice into a training program. Instead of being the expert who swooped in to save them, I taught them to understand and apply the basic concepts of marketing and promotion for themselves. And it worked! This was a vastly different approach to consulting services delivery. But my "new paradigm" approach helped my clients feel more in control and better able to leverage their resources and grow their businesses.
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The landscape has changed dramatically since then. The impossible volume of information available online and the pace at which social media drives marketing have changed the formula somewhat. But helping you find your own way is still the core of what we do. We craft reasonable and easy-to-implement strategies and solutions that you can own and replicate. And we now focus almost exclusively on nonprofits, social enterprise, and projects devoted to making the world a better place.
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We all need to step back and see things differently sometimes. We get caught up in our perspective or the way things are "supposed" to be done. A fresh pair of eyes can give us an entirely new outlook on where we're heading and how to get there. If you need help with that, let me know!
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