Wishing you the very merriest of holiday seasons this year!
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Toys for Tots – Scottsdale
LetterStream is participating in a local Toys for Tots event this year in North Scottsdale.
The event includes food, live music, Marines and the big-guy wearing a red suit. Yes, Santa will even be there and available for pictures.
It’s at the Pinnacle Peak General Store and Village, in the courtyard between 11:30 AM and 2:30 PM, Saturday December 15th.
It will be a great outing for family and friends.
If you join us, be sure and bring a toy or two for the Marines to distribute to children.
*Pictures in this post are from the event last year.
Saving Trees and Securing Data
While reviewing our bills today, I noticed our Certificate of Destruction receipt from our shredding service. It now includes a nice little notice of how many trees we’ve saved by our shredding efforts.
The receipt shows 36.4 trees saved so far this year. I’m not exactly sure how they calculate it, but I’m guessing it has something to do with the weight and/or volume of paper that we present to them for onsite shredding.
The primary purpose of our shredding efforts is to protect private data from falling into the wrong hands. Shredding helps us comply with HIPAA and PHI rules and keeps our data private.
Our internal policies state that everything we print and even documents that we receive be shredded unless we are mailing them. As an extra precaution, all shredding takes place at our facility with our staff supervising the process.
That’s good for clients…and good for trees too, it seems!
Now where did I put that green card?
If you send Certified Mail, you know what sort of pain it is when the attorney asks for the green card (PS Form 3811) and it can’t be found.
I know, I know….we all like to put our highest paid employees on the task of filing the green cards so they are always where they need to be. Well, ok…..that’s not exactly true. In reality, they stack up on the receptionist’s desk, then they get moved to the mail room, then they may make it back to the collections department, with each department attempting to file a few whenever they get an idle moment.
Sound familiar?
Wish there was a better way?
Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t need to worry about hanging on to those pesky green cards? Instead, what if the green cards were electronically delivered to us with the name and address of the recipient and the signature of the person who received the certified letter. Then, what if the signature was instantly and accurately filed, just the way we like.
While we are dreaming, let’s make it one better. What if, when the green card is needed — even if it’s years down the road — all we need to do is type in the name or the address of the person who was sent the letter and we’d immediately see the certified letter, the tracking information and the signature, all available to be printed and handed over to the person who needs it. Now that would be ideal!
And it would also be an explanation of how our Certified Mail process works.
Don’t file green cards, use LetterStream.
Neither snow nor rain… But Hurricanes…
There’s a reason the postal slogan doesn’t mention hurricanes when talking about the conditions in which they deliver mail.
It turns out that Hurricane Sandy is already effecting postal deliveries all along the eastern shores. As we write this, most retail (post office counter) and BME (business mail entry unit) centers in Long Island, New York and along the New Jersey shore are closed. Many other states are reporting retail operations being affected and/or closed along the coast.
For the latest information about current mail delivery status, visit the United States Postal Service (USPS) Mail Service Updates page.
And, in case you wanted to know, the saying “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” is not a motto or creed of the post office, but it is an inscription from the James Farley Post Office in New York City.
Sending Mail on Postal Holidays
Can you send mail on USPS postal holidays? Sure you can!
Let’s face it, we don’t all get the same paid holidays that the United States Postal Service (USPS) employees get. In 2012, the USPS is closed for 10 holidays.
However, if you are working and you need your mail to go out, LetterStream has the ability to mail your letters on many postal holidays. While the post office front counters are closed and mail carriers are off, there are some holidays that the post office back office is still on duty.
So, “Yes”, the USPS accepts and processes our mail on President’s Day (Washington’s birthday), Columbus Day, Veterans’ Day, MLK Day and Juneteenth.
If you are like us and are working those days, feel free to send your mail to us and we’ll get it mailed on the Holiday for you!
Certified Mail by the Thousands!
We were contacted the other day to help one of our customers with a fairly large Certified Mail job.
It wasn’t our largest USPS Certified Mail project, but with more than 23,000 certified letters, it was still a lot of certified letters (see actual picture).
In addition to printing, folding and inserting the certified mail for our client, we also licensed a cobranded version of our website so their clients could log in and check the status and retrieve signatures of any piece of mail.
The job went out quickly and easily and provided everyone involved complete USPS tracking information as well as electronic signatures, matched with the mail piece.
Big or small, whether you’ve got a single certified letter or thousands, our automated processes will make it easy.
Copier – Death by Crane (Video)
I just received this video from our friends at ProCopy Office Solutions. It shows a copier that they dropped from a 75 foot high crane in 2011. Pretty awesome!
This year, they are doing it again, and are having a contest for a free copier and a trip to the Bahamas if you can tell them why you have THE worst copier. You can see the details at http://www.procopyoffice.com/.
They are also allowing local businesses to drop their worst copiers for a $25 donation to the local Big Brother Big Sister organization.
Did LetterStream want to drop a copier? Absolutely! But not because we have any bad ones… all of ours make excellent copies and we don’t want to lose any of them. So instead we made a donation as though we were dropping our 8 biggest and best copiers… we can’t wait to see the ProCopy video for this year!
Social Media Promotion Winners!
Thanks to all who participated in our social media promotion for $100 in Starbucks gift cards!
We had four winners, one for each platform that we launched:
Facebook: Justin A.
Twitter: Kayza H.
Google+: Christal W.
LinkedIn: Jessica I.
Thanks again to all who entered! Keep following us for more fun contests. And if you haven’t explored our website, please check us out… especially if you send First-Class or Certified Mail.
LetterStream Does What?
LetterStream is a printing and mailing company. Whether you need to send a single letter or one hundred thousand, LetterStream has a quick and easy solution.
Most of the time our customers create their entire mailing in less than 2 minutes on our website.
So, if you’re not a fan of licking your own envelopes or have had one too many all-night mail stuffing parties, you owe it to yourself to give us a call or explore our website to learn more. I’m sure we can help!
Want to give us a try? Use the following promotion code to get up to $20 off your first order. Hurry, the code is only good for 10 more days! (First order needs to be placed by Oct 31, 2012 or credit disappears)
*Promo code: 10daypromo