Have you embraced mobile marketing yet? SteamFeed recently reported that 37% of internet usage in the U.S. is on a mobile device – that is a huge demographic your good cause could be missing out on if it isn’t mobile-friendly. Our friends at 4AGoodCause compiled a list of the top 5 tools you need to use to make you mobile marketing strategy a success.
ECOlunchbox was founded out of a California eco-mom’s need and desire: a need for sustainable and non-toxic lunchware for her children’s school lunches & a desire to reduce lunchtime waste and our world’s increasing dependence on plastics. Chief Eco-Mom and Founder Sandra Harris says the company’s mission is to “reduce the world’s dependence on plastics by providing high-quality, plastic-free alternatives.” The unique lunchware line is designed to be the ultimate “free lunch”: plastic-free, waste-free, vinyl-free, PVC-free, sweatshop-free, lead-free and generally free of all toxins.
The widespread use of plastic is causing huge environmental problems and there is growing concern about plastic's health risks, especially for children. Evidence is growing that chemicals leach out of plastics used in food and drink storage. Scientists believe that these plastic chemicals are harmful to humans, especially in children whose systems are more vulnerable. The evidence of health risks from certain plastics is increasingly appearing in established, peer-reviewed scientific journals. Bisphenol A (BPA) is linked to behavior issues, obesity, hormone and thyroid problems, diabetes, and even kidney and heart conditions.
A lunch waste study commissioned by ECOlunchbox has determined that a typical American family, packing lunch with plastic baggies, disposable napkins and utensils as well as pre-packed snacks and juice sacks, discards approximately 4,320 pieces of trash annually! ECOlunchbox calculates the actual costs of all this lunchtime trash to be $400 annually per family. And that doesn’t include the external costs that this plastic does to our eco-system.
Going green at lunchtime with stainless steel ECOlunchbox bentos and artisan bags, napkins and other eco-friendly accessories saves money – plus it’s healthy for people and the planet. ECOlunchbox is grateful that through the use of its eco-friendly lunchware families throughout the United States and internationally have prevented the disposal of millions of pieces of plastic lunchtime trash. ECOlunchboxes has won rave reviews and has been featured in USA Today, Food & Wine magazine, the Today Show, Ode Magazine, Diablo Magazine, as well as many newspapers and online publications. Thanks Sandra, for seeing a need and creating a product that keeps toxic chemicals away from our food and keeps plastic out of a landfill! Dharma is thrilled to support ECOlunchbox and eco-moms everywhere!
Since Dharma Merchant Service’s inception, our intention has been to align ourselves with organizations that have made significant contributions to educating and promoting sustainable choices that benefit people and the planet. One such organization is Green America of which our founder has been a member for 20 years! (Even back when it was Co-op America). Now Dharma is a member of their Green Business Network and we offer our services to many Green America business members. You might even know them by their work - The National Green Pages, Green American Magazine and the Green Festivals in San Francisco, Chicago and New York.
Dharma has embraced their passionate efforts to do what is right and we wholeheartedly urge our community to become part of this powerful organization.
Welcome to the first ever support tip of the month! As the Support Manager here at Dharma, I learn something new every day and there’s never a dull moment. Every month I will be sharing the lesson I found to be the most influential and impactful for our merchants based on real-world support cases.
My first tip is inspired by one of our merchants who was recently the victim of online fraud on their website. This non-profit merchant was hit with 13,700 fraudulent transactions and the associated $2,065 in processing fees. This is a specific type of fraud where criminals use your website to test credit card numbers generated by a computer program. They can run an endless amount of transactions for small amounts (Sometimes for only $0.01!) to see if the numbers are valid, which will cause your authorization charges to pile up. In addition, once the fraudster discovers the legitimate card numbers, the actual credit cards are compromised and can be used for further fraudulent transactions. The cardholders are stuck with the nightmare of stolen credit card info and the merchant might get stuck with multiple chargebacks.
If you are processing through the Authorize.net gateway, this type of fraud can be prevented simply by setting your Daily Velocity Filter. This allows you to limit the total number of transactions received per day. All transactions received in excess of your established threshold will be processed according to the filter action you select, such as “hold for review.”To enable your Daily Velocity Filter, please follow the instructions here. For more helpful tips, please visit the FAQ section of our website.
There are a couple of things to note this month about the credit card processing industry. The first is that a number of states have filed objections to the proposed $7.25 billion settlement that is currently on the table against the Card Associations (Visa and MasterCard). Seems like they don’t like the fact that this settlement includes an exemption against further litigation if the court approves it in its current form. A final judgment is due to be passed in September. Meanwhile, the Card Associations have asked the court to rule that current Interchange fees are legal, which would prohibit merchants from pursuing separate damages beyond the proposed settlement. What does this mean for you? Nothing yet. We will keep you posted about further developments and what this judgment may mean to you.
Settlement update part deux – The second part to this lawsuit provides relief to all merchants who participate in the settlement in the form of a 10 basis point reduction in percentage rate fees for all Visa/MasterCard credit card sales generated from July 31, 2013 through March 30 2014. These amounts will be administered by a third party appointed by the court and paid to each merchant in one lump sum after that period. We will send more information in future newsletters.
One of the biggest questions nonprofits face when putting together their websites is whether to use Paypal to accept donations or get a merchant account with an ecommerce company. While PayPal has its strengths, it is not always the best choice for nonprofits. An account with an ecommerce company offers your nonprofit more advantages, fewer issues and the opportunity to raise more money online. Dharma partner 4AGoodCause offers the following 5 reasons to use an ecommerce company versus PayPal:
Planting Justice is an income-generating non-profit that is creating green jobs in edible landscaping and grassroots organizing, while increasing access to healthy food, building community, and offering environmental education and green entrepreneurship in economically disadvantaged communities. Their urban food forest program produces low-cost, organic, nutritious food in communities that structurally have little access to it. They empower urban residents to create sustainable, replicable gardens that demonstrate how it is possible to grow a complete nutritional diet safely and profitably in the city.
Planting Justice also works with local schools on programs that build skills in critical thinking, community organizing, public speaking, ecological entrepreneurship, and permaculture design, empowering youths to change the way they identify with the food they consume and strengthen their collective power to affect structural change in their communities. They work with community groups like The Canal Alliance, a comprehensive community resource center that has been serving Marin's low-income immigrant populations since 1982, to build sustainable gardens. They are also working with the Insight Garden Program at San Quentin State Prison to provide inmates with job-training skills on urban permaculture and organic food production.
Their "Transform Your Yard" program turns empty space into abundant edible landscapes and living classrooms for homeowners, creates green jobs for local youth that train them for a future in permaculture design and urban farming, and subsidies edible gardens for low-income families. Check out the fascinating pictures that show the remarkable progress over time of turning a plain yard into a thriving food oasis, and imagine this at your house!
In addition to sharing the magic of San Francisco's own Flora Grubb Gardens, we'd like to take this opportunity to say congratulations to Flora Grubb for being recognized as one of 11 recipients for Martha Stewart's first annual American Made Awards! It was a well-deserved honor, as FGG is not just a nursery but an oasis of creativity, beauty and innovation. With a mission of "introducing a real peace and joy in city dwellers' lives through the act of gardening", FGG accomplishes that by carrying delightful decor, beautiful pottery and radiant indoor and outdoor plants. There's even a Ritual Coffee (another beloved Dharma client) cafe right in the 28,000-square-foot solar-powered, open-air store. They offer garden design, horticulture and floral services but also specialize in free workshops where their expert staff teaches ways to cultivate natural beauty in gardens and homes. The Dharma team enjoyed a field trip to FGG to when moving into our new office, and we enjoy our beautiful plants every day. We're so grateful to be working with them!
Dharma partner SFMade is an organization dedicated to promoting and supporting San Francisco local manufacturer’s. Our friends at SFMade offered public tours of its member merchants this summer to highlight merchants who manufacture, create or bake products within the city limits. SFMade has over 350 members dedicated to creating job opportunities right here at home. We were surprised to learn how many food and beverage producers were headquartered in San Francisco. One of our favorites was San Francisco based single-source coffee producer Ritual Coffee. With 4 retail locations in the Bay Area and a new roasting facility located in SOMA, Ritual has brought the art of artisan coffee roasting directly to SF coffee connoisseurs and has quickly built an intensely loyal fan base.
“Coffee is a delicious, sweet, complex fruit. Plucked off its tree, it has a range of flavors that reflect its upbringing--cultivar, soil, pruning, and care,” comments Eileen Hassi, Ritual Coffee’s founder. “We work with producers who care for their trees as they would their children, giving them both the love and attention that they need to live up to their full potential. We walk with these producers through their small farms. We sleep on the farm, we breathe the farm, trying as hard as we can to understand how our producers make magic happen in our cups. Our continual mission is to present these coffees to our customers in the same sublime condition that we tasted them, both by serving them seasonally, to preserve their freshness, and by roasting them with the intention of accentuating the intrinsic qualities within.” Eileen Hassi shared her belief that conscious businesses can serve as anchors for communities, both for the employees and the customers. Eileen's goal is to see Ritual Coffee grow organically and in harmony with her community. "I enjoy when regular customers meet, fall in love, marry or bring in their children to the stores."
At right, a few of the Ritual Coffee community of employees: Bryce Navin, production Kaleena Stoddard, production manager Eileen Hassi, owner and Ben Kaminsky, director of Quality Control
Ritual is unique in its commitment to buying coffee direct from coffee producers. Of the 166,000 pounds of coffee Ritual roasted last year, nearly 90% came from producers they work with directly. Buying direct enables Ritual to source the very best coffees while ensuring that the quality-focused producers are rewarded for their hard work. It also means that when you're drinking their coffee, you're only one step away from the producer responsible for this exquisite coffee. Not only does this produce a delicious cup of coffee, but it also produces a fair and direct profit for the farmers growing the coffee beans. Hassi believes that it isnt necessary to give up integrity in exchange for great taste. In fact, operating conciously and buying direct from the source has helped Ritual Coffee build a dedicated following in the Bay Area and beyod. You can help celebrate Fair Trade Month in October by dropping by your local Ritual Coffee location or visiting there website.
By now, the idea of buying locally is imprinted on the minds of most sustainably minded consumers. Buying food and products sourced from local vendors and stores close to your home (and preferably within your city limits) is smart AND eco-friendly for many reasons;
1.Local manufacturing and production of goods is vastly more eco-friendly because the product doesn’t have to travel miles on a truck to get to you OR to be manufactured.
2.The money from your purchase stays in your community, allowing the business owner to reinvest in the community by hiring new employees and upgrading their facilities
Organizations like SFMade know this better than anyone. SFMade is an organization whose mission is to build and support a vibrant manufacturing sector in San Francisco that sustains companies producing locally-made products, encourages entrepreneurship and innovation, and creates employment opportunities for a diverse local workforce. Similar organizations have sprung up across the country in places as diverse as New York and Detroit to Chicago and Philadelphia; all dedicated to promoting local manufacturing jobs. Over the summer, I was able to tour several local SFMade merchants operating within San Francisco and was amazed to see the diversity of businesses operating and manufacturing products right here in the city limits. From food and beverages to clothing and accessories, I was amazed by how much actual manufacturing is done right here in San Francisco. I will be profiling a few of these local businesses over the next week to share how they use local resources to produce superior, sustainable products. Do you know of “Locally Made” organizations in your city? If so, please let us know in the comments section below.
Sungevity is a solar power installation company that revolutionized the market with a virtual quote system: you can learn about solar energy and get a free, personalized iQuote for a lease on a system within 24 hours--all online before you make a payment. They use satellite images and aerial photography to assess your roof remotely, and accurately determine your home's solar potential. Sungevity consultants then personally designs two to five system options for you, taking into account all available rebates and incentives in your area to provide you with the most accurate quote available. In addition, Sungevity offers leasing programs, so you avoid the large upfront cost of buying solar panels and instead pay a monthly fee to Sungevity, which owns and maintains the panels. The leases are structured so the home owner's electricity bills will go down because of the electricity generated by the solar panels.
We’re reading Danny’s book the Rooftop Revolution (How Solar Power Can Save Our Economy - and Our Planet - from Dirty Energy) right now, and will follow up with a book review in Books We Love on our blog. So far it’s incredible, and we highly recommend it! For more information check out the book's website, or purchase it on Amazon.
Thank you so much to all of you who participated in our photo contest. It was absolutely delightful to receive your entries and put smiling faces behind your familiar voices. It was also very difficult to decide on the winners - so difficult that we expanded the winners from the top three to the top seven! Congratulations to 100 Proof Press, Breathe Books, Ethereal Confections, Gracias Madres, Moonrise Jewelry, New Factory, Friend and Sarah Graham Metalsmithing, who are now on the homepage of our website. We love all of the photos you submitted, and they are in our new Beloved Clients photo album on our Facebook page.
We encourage everyone who didn't submit a photo to please send one in. We'd love to see you!
As we mentioned before, we're absolutely thrilled with our new website (thanks again to the folks at Earthsite!). We hope you're enjoying it too and welcome your comments to help improve it even more.
We have one great idea already: we think a huge improvement would be to have it feature amazing pictures of you! So we're having a photo contest where you can submit pictures of you at your business and we'll choose three lucky winners to be featured on our home page. We're really looking forward to receiving your photos!
Submit your photos by July 31 for a chance to win!
To enter for a chance to be featured on our homepage, submit up to 3 photos of you at your business. The picture will need to feature the business owner and/or employee(s) at your place of business. So pick your best side, smile and snap away!
Not able to submit your photos through our Facebook submission form? Feel free to use the alternate submission form!
Grand Prize
The top 3 photos submitted will be featured in the rotating photo showcase on the homepage of DharmsMS.com. In addition, each featured photo will link to a description of your business in our Featured Clients directory.
All valid submissions will be featured on Facebook!
All valid entries will be featured in an “Our Beloved Clients” photo album on our Facebook page. Valid entries are creative but professional pictures of current Dharma Merchant Services clients that feature either the business owner and/or employee(s) of the business at their place of business.
Contest Dates
The contest begins on July 1, 2012 at 9:00am (PST) and ends on July 31, 2012 at 9:00pm (PST).
The winners will be announced in our monthly newsletter and smiling back at you from our website in August!
Back to the Roots was founded by Alejandro Velez & Nikhil Arora two months before they graduated from UC Berkeley in 2009. A chance mention of the notion that mushrooms could be grown from recycled coffee grounds sparked an interest in growing healthy food and creating local jobs from what was otherwise considered waste. With their first successful batch, interest from Whole Foods and a $5,000 grant from the UC Berkeley Chancellor for social innovation, they decided to forgoe their plans for investment banking careers to be full-time urban mushroom farmers!
They have grown rapidly, and are now in over 300 Whole Foods Markets across the country. Their products and company have received multiple awards, and have a number of incredible achievements in a very short period of time. Since 2009, they have
helped families grow over 135,000lbs of fresh food at home in 2011
sustained 10 urban school & community gardens by donating BTTRs premium soil amendment
created 14 green-collar, urban jobs in Oakland (and are currently hiring!)
set a pace to collect, divert & reuse an estimated 3.6 million lbs of coffee grounds from Peet's Coffee & Tea in 2012, reducing waste and the release of methane, a greenhouse gas about 25x worse than carbon dioxide for our environment
Besides creating access to healthy food and reducing waste, another thing we love about them is their committment to their community. They are constantly teaching "hands-on-sustainbility" workshops in classrooms across the country and hosting school tours for kids to visit their urban mushroom farm. They also have an ongoing "1-for-1" Facebook Campaign, where they donate a kit & sustainability curriculum to an elementary classroom of your choice for every posted picture with your fully grown kit.
Alejandro and Nikhil are also great guys! We've had the great opportunity to hear them at our local TEDx talk, and Alexia got the chance to have breakfast with them at the spring 2012 Social Venture Network conference. They are conscious business leaders who are humble, passionate and really funny, and we're so grateful for their well-deserved success and the chance to serve them.
Did you know that Authorize.net offers a mobile application that is free with your Authorize.net account? This app is a great way to process transactions using your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch at off-site events (an Android app is coming soon!). All transactions are recorded in the Merchant Interface and your customers can receive a receipt by email. If you already have an Authorize.net account, here are the steps to get started:
1. Download the free Authorize.net mobile app to your iPhone/iPad
3. Once you log in successfully, the app will issue a prompt that your mobile device is "pending".
4. Log in to the Authorize.net Merchant Interface. Click on "Account", then "Mobile Device Management". You'll see your phone in the list of pending devices and can enable it from there (you'll need Account Administrator access to do this).
5. Go back to the "Account" tab and click on "Payment Form" near the top. Click on "Form Fields" and un-check all items under the "required" column. Scroll down and click submit to save your changes and you're ready to start taking payments!
If you get stuck or have any questions on the app, Authorize.net offers free support at 1.888.323.4289. If you have questions about whether Authorize.net is the right mobile solution for you, just contact us and we'll help you assess this option against other mobile payment options.
ECOlunchbox
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Since Dharma Merchant Service’s inception, our intention has been to align ourselves with organizations that have made significant contributions to educating and promoting sustainable choices that benefit people and the planet. One such organization is Green America of which our founder has been a member for 20 years! (Even back when it was Co-op America). Now Dharma is a member of their Green Business Network and we offer our services to many Green America business members. You might even know them by their work - The National Green Pages, Green American Magazine and the Green Festivals in San Francisco, Chicago and New York.
Welcome to the first ever support tip of the month! As the Support Manager here at Dharma, I learn something new every day and there’s never a dull moment. Every month I will be sharing the lesson I found to be the most influential and impactful for our merchants based on real-world support cases.
There are a couple of things to note this month about the credit card processing industry. The first is that a number of states have filed objections to the proposed 
In addition to sharing the magic of San Francisco's own 
customers in the same sublime condition that we tasted them, both by serving them seasonally, to preserve their freshness, and by roasting them with the intention of accentuating the intrinsic qualities within.” Eileen Hassi shared her belief that conscious businesses can serve as anchors for communities, both for the employees and the customers. Eileen's goal is to see Ritual Coffee grow organically and in harmony with her community. "I enjoy when regular customers meet, fall in love, marry or bring in their children to the stores." 
All valid submissions will be featured on Facebook!
another thing we love about them is their committment to their community. They are constantly teaching "hands-on-sustainbility" workshops in classrooms across the country and hosting school tours for kids to visit their urban mushroom farm. They also have an ongoing "1-for-1" Facebook Campaign, where they donate a kit & sustainability curriculum to an elementary classroom of your choice for every posted picture with your fully grown kit.
Did you know that Authorize.net offers a mobile application that is free with your Authorize.net account? This app is a great way to process transactions using your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch at off-site events (an Android app is coming soon!). All transactions are recorded in the Merchant Interface and your customers can receive a receipt by email. If you already have an Authorize.net account, here are the steps to get started:
