AMPERAGE Marketing & Fundraising

One-Minute MarketerHow About an Italian Tour Right Now?

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How About an Italian Tour Right Now?

Italy has been devastated by COVID-19. And so has the tourism business. Yet some companies are doing their best to hang on and stay relevant.livitaly tour of Luca living room in Rome

My wife and I used LivItaly Tours during our visit last year to Italy. (My heart sinks when I think of the kind, generous people we met along our travels.) Last week, LivItaly tours launched an “Inside the Homes of Tour Guides During Lockdown” which according to the website “garnered quite an audience.” They are now extending the concept to include more homes. Each features a “lockdown” tour guide who is out of tours so out of work.

According the LivItaly website, “We will be interviewing a different tour guide each time to get an inside look at what life in lockdown is really like across the globe and share a bit of hope for the future.”

It’s such a wonderful way to keep the tour guides and company connected. It gives people a look inside the homes of tour guides and gives the tour guides hope there is employment after the crisis is over. livitaly tours logo

We are all looking for ways to connect and keep marketing for the future. So what do out-of-work tour guides do? They give tours of their homes and keep the connection alive. So if you travel to Italy, try LivItaly Tours. You can meet their guides online today — something I hope they continue doing after the crisis. You really get to know the tour guides with these home tours.

Toilet Paper Wars: In my last week’s blog, I talked about the toilet paper brand wars. but I needed to share this with you. HowMuchToiletPaper.com was created by Ben Sassoon, based in London. The tool calculates how long your stash of TP will last during the quarantine.  I won’t tell you how many days we have, but let’s leave it I won’t be in line for the next pallet that is delivered to the store.

Written by:

Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle.

After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant.

He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.”

Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.”

One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College.

Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board.

Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.