Celebrate America - Fall & Spring
Priority News - August & September
How Good Is Your Packing Crew?
Automated Data Capture
School Survey Services
Internet Fundraising
What Kind of Technology Should AFRDS Offer?
Web Design
How Much Are Color Copies?

4-Page

• 34 items - 17 @ 4.76 x mark / 17 @ 5.56 x mark “to the piece”
• All Product Made in USA
• Home Delivery Friendly
• Great Day Care brochure
• Good for Fall 2003 AND Spring 2004
• FREE Internet Sales if we tally/pack*
• Super Heroes Bible Promo**

The 4-page version is the outside sheet of the brochure, or pages 1-2 and 15-16 of the complete version.

* See article on Internet Fundraising.

** Pay for 250 brochures @$.40 or 150 @$.50 and receive FREE Dennis Jones-illustrated and Zonderkidz® published The Super Heroes Bible. We’re not allowed to "sell" the Bible, by contract with Zondervan, so we will donate them with brochures. The idea is that you can go into a church day care (better if bright red Super Heroes Bible in hand) and tell them you’ll DONATE that to their day care library. Check out http://www.brotherjonesartworks.com/publications.htm.

8-Page

• 74 items
• All Product Made in USA
• Good for Fall 2003 AND Spring 2004
• FREE Internet Sales if we tally/pack

Includes retail raising candles, cheese and chocolates. If you’re looking at the complete brochure, these are the outside two sheets, or pages 1-4 and 13-16.

12-Page

• 107 items
• Good for Fall 2003 AND Spring 2004
• FREE Internet Sales if we tally/pack

You don’t have to be quite as conservative in your Fall ordering when you know you can carry a brochure into the Spring semester. Add a single-sheet Easter flyer or one of Scott’s new specialty fliers to target Day Cards, Athletic Groups, Bands or Cheerleaders.

16-Page

• 136 items - 4 @ 3.85 x mark, 115 @ 4.76 x mark, 17 @ 5.56 x mark "to the piece"
• FREE Internet Sales if we tally/pack
• 85% of Top 10 Sellers are DOMESTIC
• 65% of Top 25 Sellers are DOMESTIC
• Recommended Tag Possibilities
  • Magazine Mania
  • Cookie Dough Mix
  • Gift Wrap Insert

Brochures mailed with this letter are 16-pg.

September’s PRIORITY News (still in the works), will likely include:

• More on Collaboration. I’ll share some ideas that came from my 6-hr meeting with a couple that owns a playground equipment business. In that story, I’ll probably include some experience competing with a school picture/fundraising collaboration, and a band uniform salesman.
• Telemarketing – insource or outsource? I’ve been doing some significant reading on setting up a call center and have also spent time interviewing a number of non-fundraising-related call centers.
• The Supplier/Distributor lines continue to blur. QDP is one of the early examples, but there are so many more now. Increasingly, distributors are becoming manufacturers or manufacturers’ reps.
• Hiring: Which is better; Distributors, Contractors, Employees, considering sales tax, withholding, etc.
• An advantage out of state telemarketers have in your state.

August issue of PRIORITY:

• Copyrights & Trademarks, an article that gave an overview of when you can use the ©, SM and ™ symbols and when you had better never use the ®. What had better be in place before using the phrase "patent-pending" – and some links to official government sites for more information. PS – Did I tell you my partner is a Patent/Trademark attorney? He’s available.
• Do Not Call/Fax info, included with AFRDS permission, that included a response to AFRDS’s inquiry to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
• School Survey Services was the introduction of a concept. Read more in this letter.
• Technologically Speaking was a modified version of an AFRDS Advisor article. I couldn’t include QDP-specific plugs in that article, but did in the PRIORITY version. It included suggestions on computers, printers, networks, scanning and tally software, bar code scanners and software, accounting, data entry training, CM and CRM software, UPS & USPS software, telephone & voice mail, web site updates and enhancements, special forms & supplies, establishing merchant services and sales & kick-off presentations.

When we started packing orders in 1984, one of our first employees was my partner’s mother and already senior citizen, Ruth Garwood. We hired retirees Clotene, Eleanor, Don & Jeanette, Bob & Pauline, and Lila (mother-in-law). In 2002, they were almost all still here. Yeah, do the math.

For Fall 2003, Ruth and Lila have re-retired.

I highly recommend seniors. What you lose in speed you will more than make up for in work ethic.

We’ve posted a recipe submitted by Ruth Garwood for "Scripture Cake". To see it, visit www.qdpcorp.com/news/humor.htm#Other.

Other Sources for Tally / Pack Help

Interns. Our younger son is spending Fall Semester at NYU and also interning as part of the "Duke in NY" program. Students had to find, contact, interview, and select or be selected for an internship. Our older son is required to do a 6-month internship for his major. Interns need experience. Contact your local university for intern potential. Our state has an internship coordination program.

College students can be good, but in addition to money and experience, they also require flexibility.

Senior Citizens. (See Retirement article).

Home Schoolers / Parents. "School" only goes about half a day, and so parent and m/s or h/s child could be available to work half days.

Churches. Call pastors in town asking for recommendations of people in the congregation who "need" a part-time job. That’s a good reference.

Data Capture is used to define methods of collecting data other than manually typing and normally refers to the concept of scanning forms and "capturing" the data.

American Express uses TELEform® to enable a single operator to process over one million forms a year and reduced their data entry requirements from 17 down to 1, using automated data capture to conduct customer surveys.

Arizona State University integrates document capture and workflow to reduce bottlenecks in their graduate admissions process, processing 20,000 multi-page applications faster.

Edcor increases Data Processing for Tuition Assistance Programs by 300%. They also reduced keystrokes by 60% and improved turn around by 80%.

GMAC Financial Services uses TELEform to process over 32,000 forms per day.

Moorestown Visiting Nurse Association implemented TELEform to reduce processing time by 90% of forms up to 25 pages in length from 20 minutes to 2. They experienced an 80% reduction in full-time data entry staff.

QDP -- and a growing number of cutting edge fundraising distributors are replacing manual data entry operators with scanners and a combination of software programs from Cardiff TELEform Software and QDP to quickly and accurately get data from order forms into the WinUltra Order Tally System.

When we first took this concept to an AFRDS show a few years ago, the hesitancy and objections centered around 1) price, and 2) fear of poor accuracy.

Price. QDP is recommending a transition based on a single-user setup of Automated Data Capture in addition to your manual data entry capability. This approach will save several thousand from the original multi-station setup we were recommending.

And, if you consider that automated data capture is at least twice as fast, you can consider the cost (and frustration) of at least one additional manual data entry operator as you factor that savings into your total ROI (return on investment).

Accuracy. Sometimes I think we put fundraising in some unique business category where only our business cannot have mistakes. American Express uses this technology. So do Fed-Ex, GMAC, hospitals and banks. How many mistakes are they allowed to make? You can (if you want) look at each fundraising entry and, even though that will slow the system a bit from its capability of showing you only what it thinks is questionable, it is still faster and less fatiguing (another contributing factor in manual data entry errors).

We can help you transfer the data that was scanned (@ 40 sheets per minute), read (automatically) and verified (much less tiring than manual data entry) into a variety of file structures, including, but not necessarily limited to, our WinUltra Order Tally System or just about any system.

For a pretty good list of name brand companies using this data capture technology, scroll about halfway down the page at www.qdpcorp.com/products/tallyscan.

For more about automated data processing, go to www.qdpcorp.com/data-processing.

Once you commit to Automated Data Capture, you can start looking for additional ways to use it, benefit from it and reduce ROI time.

One thing that happens at the beginning of every school year are those registration cards that every child (or parent) fills out for the school. They want all that critical stuff like address, phone numbers, work numbers, emergency numbers, medications and allergies, etc. Many ask parents to list or select areas where they would be interested in helping.

AND THEN.... what happens to those cards? In many schools, they go into a file and are manually accessed only when a child is sick and mamma has to be called. But since they have no funds to pay someone to do all that compilation, NOTHING HAPPENS with the rest of the info.

It doesn’t have to be that way. WHAT IF... as part of your service package to your schools, you could offer (even if after peak season) to put together a questionnaire/survey and offer to use your high-speed document scanner and data capture software to scan those forms and print a report of the results? (See sample). Here’s an example from one school system that uses the system internally.

What makes one student stay in school and one drop out? If there is a behavior problem, what disciplinary actions should be taken? Are school leaders doing their jobs? Which teaching strategies are most effective? Is the grading system fair?

These are just a few of the questions educators are faced with daily. The answers are critical if schools are to provide students with a quality education. But obtaining timely, accurate answers can be a challenge.

The research department for the Durham Board of Education supports 60,000 students in 113 schools. The schools routinely conduct surveys to gather information about a wide variety of school-related issues such as curriculum, student attitudes, and evaluation techniques. "For an average K to 8 school of 500 students, the thought of conducting a 25-item survey can be overwhelming," says Dr. Michael Lancaster, Research and Assessment Officer. "A 25-item survey returned by 400 families can yield 10,000 item responses to enter, analyze and report."

The Survey Process

"We do at least two surveys a week," notes Lancaster. Survey topics include student attitudes, literacy assessments, teaching practices, violence and drugs, and safety issues. "The list goes on and on," says Lancaster. "People want information -- and they want it instantly. TELEform is a wonderful tool for gathering needed information quickly and accurately," adds Lancaster.

When a school requests a survey, a research analyst briefly assesses their needs, then designs a form to collect the information.

Last Modified:& 09/29/2003