We’re proud to announce the newest addition to our Car Chase Workshop portfolio: http://www.jevanselectric.com/.
This was a fun site for our designer. It has a lot of fun graphics and a great layout. Technically I was able to extend our nice jquery navigation menu script to include support for a location state graphic.
Jordan is based in Pensylvania. Jordan is the son of Bill Evans who is the president of Evans and White Ace Hardware.
I’ve had the wonderful opportunity the past few days to work with the Potsdam Helping Hands. I had done some pro-bono work for them in the past to automate a lot of how they produced their postal mail newsletter. If you are a media contact a press release on this story is also available.
In the middle of using the automation their donated used inkjet printer failed. This couldn’t have come at a worse time because this particular newsletter was advertising a Pancake Breakfast fundraiser that is very important to the Helping Hands. Earlier when I was working on the automation we had discussed purchasing a laser printer to print the envelopes faster and with far fewer paper jams (and other unexpected failures). We had dismissed the idea since we had a working printer and we couldn’t see using the organizations budget when we had something that worked. With the old inkjet printer now dead, I wanted to see if I could get some other businesses on board to help contribute for a refurbished laser printer.
I was very excited to be able to get 7 local businesses on board in one business day to chip in for a new printer. Starting at 8am I had checks and pledges for the entire cost and the actual printer in hand by 2pm. Thank you very much to the other businesses involved, most notably for how quickly you reacted in a crunch time situation.
The old setup for their mailing list was a label file that had over 700 addresses with no way to sort or remove duplicates. I was able to take their old file and write some script programs to get that data into excel where we could sort and remove the duplicates. We were able to shrink the list down to under 450 actual addresses. With every piece of mail holding a measurable cost this reduction saved money, time, and frustration.
After getting our data into Excel we were able to do a mail merge with Word and add the return address. This saved voluenteers from stamping 450 envelops with this information. We were able to print directly onto the envelop cutting out the cost of the address lables and the time to affix 450 of them. These mailings are sent with a bulk mailing permit and must be sorted by zip code. We were able to do this sort in the mail merge and also include a postal bar code so that the stack could easily be run through a mail sorting machine cutting lots of volunteer time needed to sort. The final piece of the automation we were able to add was printing the bulk mailing permit “stamp” directly onto the envelop.
With the automation and the modern printer we can produce a completly ready to mail (and sorted) envelop in about 7 seconds. This used to take over 2o hours with a 3 person crew. This time can now be voluenteered to more directly help the community.
