Thursday, June 1, 2017

Álvaro Almeida acusa Rui Moreira de ser “traidor” e não ser de confiança

AUTÁRQUICAS 2017

Álvaro Almeida acusa Rui Moreira de ser “traidor” e não ser de confiança

27/5/2017, 20:39793

Candidato do PSD ao Porto não poupou críticas a Rui Moreira: traidor, déspota, populista. Cerca de 700 candidatos autárquicos do PSD estão reunidos na Maia, na Convenção Autárquica do partido.

Álvaro Almeida é o candidato independente apoiado pelo PSD no Porto

JOSÉ COELHO/LUSA

Autor

Agência Lusa

Mais sobre

O candidato independente à Câmara Municipal do Porto, Álvaro Almeida, acusou este sábado o atual presidente da câmara do Porto, Rui Moreira, de ser “traidor”, populista, déspota e um independente sem enquadramento político e ideológico que não oferece confiança.

“Fez um acordo, ou um projeto comum, como lhe queiram chamar, com esse partido [Socialista] que incluía uma candidatura única, mas não resistiu a uma nova traição prescindindo do seu apoio. Negoceia lugares e oferece cargos à esquerda e à direita, conforme seja mais conveniente para a sua ambição pessoal. Em conclusão, governa conforme lhe apraz, sem orientação política, assente apenas no princípio de quem tem o poder, tem a razão“, declarou Álvaro Almeida, durante a sua intervenção no púlpito do Fórum da Maia, onde decorre a Convenção Autárquica Nacional do PSD.

Álvaro Almeida recordava o caso recente em que o movimento independente de Rui Moreira – Porto, O Nosso Partido ter anunciado que prescindia do apoio dos socialistas à recandidatura do autarca, e como consequência a 06 de maio Manuel Pizarro anunciou que ia ser o candidato do PS à Câmara Municipal do Porto nas próximas eleições autárquicas.

Um independente deste tipo, sem enquadramento político e ideológico, não é confiável. Como os eleitores que nele votaram já se aperceberam e, mais recentemente, o PS veio a perceber”, referiu Álvaro Almeida.

Para o candidato social-democrata, a forma de atuar de Rui Moreira não é de independência. A “isso chamo populismo, aliás se forem ao dicionário, podem ver que essa é a definição de despotismo. Não é por acaso que ele tem trazido para o debate o regresso da ditadura para Portugal”, declarou o candidato independente, referindo-se a declarações proferidas a 4 de maio, e noticiadas pela Lusa, onde Rui Moreira considerava que o modelo de voto em Portugal é “completamente anacrónico” e avisava que o futuro poderia passar pelo regresso da ditadura ou da democracia direta ou pela reorganização dos partidos.

“Um independente deste tipo é um bom exemplo de como não pode haver democracia sem partidos políticos e, por isso, quando decidi intervir na política do Porto, não podia deixar de o fazer associado ao maior partido português. Associei-me ao PSD por afinidade ideológica e porque o PSD representa os valores que me caracterizam e que são os valores autênticos das gentes do Porto”, enumerando o “espírito solidário” e a preocupação com o próximo”, a defesa do trabalho e acima de tudo da “ética e da liberdade”.

Os candidatos do PSD às eleições autárquicas de dia 1 de outubro vão assinar hoje uma carta de sete compromissos, como o rigor na gestão e a transparência na decisão, e que vão entregar ao líder do partido durante a convenção autárquica nacional, evento que encerra esta noite com a intervenção do presidente do PSD, Pedro Passos Coelho.

Na quinta-feira, a Comissão Política Nacional do PSD aprovou 58 acordos de coligação, 42 dos quais em exclusivo com o CDS-PP e apenas cinco com outros partidos.

Das 58 coligações aprovadas, apenas cinco não incluem o CDS-PP: em Leiria o PSD concorre coligado apenas com o MPT, na Covilhã (Castelo Branco), Felgueiras e Porto (distrito do Porto) avança coligado com o PPM e no Cartaxo (Santarém) apresenta-se às autárquicas em conjunto com o partido Nós, Cidadãos!.

Rise Above the Healthcare Debate – With Self-Insurance

How Small Businesses Can Rise Above the Healthcare Debate – With Self-Insurance

Jun 1, 2017 by Rob Starr In Finance 0

134
Shares

Print This Article

Email this Article

How Self-Insured Health Plans Have Become a Small Business Safe Harbor

Did you know there’s an alternative to the traditional route small businesses take when looking to get healthcare for their employees. You can pay an insurance premium to an insurance carrier and transfer the risk of covering any claims. However, there is a viable substitute.

“Self-insurance is an alternative,” says Mike Ferguson, CEO of the Self-Insurance Institute of America. “Instead of paying that premium up front to the insurance carrier, some companies decide they’d be better off paying the claims themselves as they are incurred.”

Simply put, the focus for a company’s healthcare costs gets shifted and becomes another operating cost of the business. Make no mistake, this isn’t a stop gap between Obamacare and Trumpcare. It’s a third option that takes the place of both.

Self-Insured Health Plans for Small Businesses

Standalone Option

Small Business Trends spoke with Ferguson and got the ABC’s of this standalone option. He suggests that although there’s really no magic number that self-insurance is limited to for a SMB, the 50 to 500 employee range is where this option is used most often.

According to the website, siefonline.org, self-insurance covers around 60 million individuals. Some of the benefits include giving the employer the ability to lower overall healthcare costs by avoiding the bumps in commercial insurance premiums and allowing for more direct and effective claims management.

Customized Plan

“Under a self funded model you can customize the plan to best meet the needs of your workforce as opposed to purchasing a more traditional group health policy that’s a more off the shelf kind of arrangement,” Ferguson says.

On the downside, there’s no surety of the claim’s costs without a set premium that doesn’t fluctuate over the year. This can make a difference in cost over the short term of one or two year periods, but over the longer run they tend to even out.

Stop Loss Insurance

That said, small and mid sized employers can purchase what is known as stop loss insurance which acts as a buffer against some of the higher claims costs that crop up through unexpected illnesses like some kinds of cancer. If claims exceed a certain amount the stop loss insurer covers the difference.

However, this option does require a more hands-on approach—you need to monitor the claims and take over the administration of any self-insured plan.

“The companies that are the most successful with self-insurance plans are the ones that realize this is a long term approach,” Ferguson says.

There are some small businesses better suited to the self-insurance model than others. Some of the characteristics that are a good fit include: the bigger you are the better. That way you’ll be able to spread risk out and manage claims.

Ferguson explains how a strong balance sheet makes your small business a good candidate.

Good Cash Position

“You want to be a company with a good cash position because you need to be prepared to write a check when claims come in.”

Professional organizations like law firms and accountants fit the bill for self-insurance. Ferguson also points to work force stability as another litmus test. With employees that plan on staying, it’s easier to forecast the self-insurance costs.

If your small business is interested in setting up a self-insurance plan, the first step can be contacting a broker/consultant or third party administrator.

Woman at Desk Photo via Shutterstock

Ways to Use Automated Marketing for Your Small Business

6 Killer Ways to Use Automated Marketing for Your Small Business

May 31, 2017 by Matt Mansfield In Marketing Tips 1

291
Shares

Print This Article

Email this Article

6 Killer Ways to Use Automated Marketing for Your Small Business

If you believe that automated marketing and email marketing automation are the same thing, you’re not alone. However, as you can see from the chart below, the use of marketing automation extends beyond email. Pulled from the pages of the Email Marketing & Marketing Automation Excellence 2017 Report, this chart reveals the top six ways marketing automation is being used today:

Source: Email Marketing & Marketing Automation Excellence 2017 Report

Automated Marketing Techniques to Consider

Let’s take a closer look at each of these automated marketing techniques and how you might use them to promote your small business.

Email Automation

While automated marketing does extend beyond electronic mail, email marketing is by far the most popular use of marketing automation and the top digital marketing tactic used today. Much of this is due to the benefits of email marketing including more leads, higher conversions, and lower marketing costs.

Click here to discover eight things you can do with automated email marketing.

Basic Profile Based Targeting

Profiles, for both your leads and customers, are the basis of the next four automated marketing techniques.

Targeting is the practice of focusing your marketing efforts on a specific group of people called a target market. Thanks to automated marketing tools, targeting, down to the individual level, is easier than ever, even across multiple channels such as email.

The power under the hood here is the profile. In recent years, marketing automation tools have gained the ability to learn a lot about your leads and customers from their behavior on channels including:

Your website: the products they browse, put in their carts, and buy, the content they read, and where they come from (e.g. a specific social media platform); and
Your emails: the emails they open and the links within those emails they click.

Based on these data points, you can hone your marketing efforts to a fine point by sending offers for the products and services in which they’ve implicitly expressed interest. In addition, you can use these profiles to target your customers using one of the four techniques below.

Personalization Using Dynamic Content

Whether on your website or via email, personalizing the experience is an effective way to market your products and services.

The best example of website personalization is Amazon’s recommendations. For each customer, they select the both genre and book recommendations based on your past purchase and browsing behavior. In the case of the image below, the customer buys a lot of science fiction and fantasy book and therefore, that’s what’s recommended to them for their next purchase:

When it comes to email marketing, the numbers show that segmenting your email list, sending different emails to different recipients based on their profile, is very effective.

Broadcast Timing Based on Location, Sign-Up Time, or Other Criteria

Timing is everything and then same is true for both email marketing and social media. If you don’t time your marketing messages correctly, there’s a good chance your email or social update will end up lost down in an inbox or social media stream respectively.

How do you know when to market? By using a customer’s profile which should contain all the clues you need including the time(s) they:

Signed-up for your email marketing list;
Most often visit your site and make purchases;
Open your emails and click on the links inside.

In addition, make sure to account for a customer’s time zone when configuring your automated marketing. For example, if you want to hit folks with an email first thing in the morning, use time zone targeting to stagger the email broadcast.

Advanced Segmentation

Segmenting your marketing efforts, especially your email marketing lists, is an important step to take when growing your small business. While there are a number of common segments to consider, you can break up and target your efforts in many different ways including:

Age;
Seniority;
Industry;
Content topic or format; and
Call-to-action clicks.

Every point of data you gather in a customer’s profile can be used to create an email segment. And use them you should – the more specific the segment, the more effective it will be.

Lead Scoring

Scoring your leads is an advanced form of segmentation, both for email marketing and beyond, that enables you to target the leads who are most likely to buy your products and services.

Many automated marketing systems include this feature which creates a lead score based on certain behaviors such as:

Emails opened;
Email links clicked;
Site visited;
Content viewed; and
Products viewed, added to cart, and purchased.

Each time a behavior occurs, it demonstrates the engagement of the lead and, the lead’s score goes up.

6 Killer Ways to Use Automated Marketing for Your Small Business

From on-site targeting to personalization, and lead scoring, you can use automation to more effectively market your products and services to both leads and existing customers. This automation extends well beyond email marketing and is worth considering as your build your marketing arsenal.

Marketing Automation Photo via Shutterstock