About Me - My Biography

Sara Hood is a director of The Morton Group which manages and advises incorporated associations and not-for-profit organisations.  Clients are mainly in the wider music industry including the Australian Music Retailers Association, Record Store Day and the International Society for Music Education. Tasks range from strategy development and succession planning through to trade shows, conferences, publications, websites, social media and consumer events.  The company also manages association finances and membership activities.

Sara also runs marketing4writers.net which coaches writers of fiction and non fiction how to build a sales funnel that helps to them to sell more books.

She is a Fellow of the Australian Marketing Institute and has tertiary marketing and management qualifications from the University of New South Wales and Monash. She was a panellist at the 2015 Face the Music conference in Melbourne, was a member of the curriculum advisory committee for the Australian College of the Arts (Collarts) and a member of the Music Matters ANZ steering committee.

Born just outside London, went to university in Bristol, lived in London for ten years, and then was transferred to Australia with work. Realised within a couple of weeks that she wasn’t going back to Britain to live. Ever.

Sara knew she’d gone native when she realised she was barracking for Australia in the Ashes.

My Expertise

Association management including corporate governance, strategic planning, administration, and managing volunteers and volunteer-led boards.

Website development: project management. I don’t code.

Events including trade shows, conferences and public events.

Social media.

Integrated marketing communications planning and implementation.

Building a sales funnel.

 

My Passions

I love creating order from chaos, putting systems into place where they have been none, showing people how to get the monkey off their back. In so many volunteer-led associations, the organisation has grown and developed in a very higgledy-piggeldy fasion, and has been like that for so long that members think that’s how it should be. And often it’s just consuming time and money and energy for no good reason except no-one knew it could be better.

It’s often the same for writers of fiction and non fiction, who in this 21st-century always-on world need to manage their own marketing, but often don’t know how and don’t know they don’t know how. So it becomes a horrible burden and time-suck, and they don’t sell any more books from it. It doesn’t have to be that way, so I run workshops and webinars to show writers how to create an accountable sales funnel to sell more books, and free up their time to write the next book.

My Interests

Mac and Poppy, our dogs.

The quest for the perfect chocolate brownie recipe.

How I Can Help Other Members

I can help other members build a sales funnel that delivers, in particular if it’s related to selling fiction or non fiction books.

I can also provide advice, a sounding board or brainstorming about managing associations and working with volunteers.