But it's not good enough

Harry's gone now to that great Toastmasters meeting in the sky.  He honored me once by asking me to advise him on one of his speeches.  "It sounds unrehearsed," I said.  "How many days did you practice it?"  He told me that he'd only practiced it for a couple of days.  "Why didn't you give it more time?"

He didn't rehearse it more because he was still writing it, he said, right up till the end.  He could always make it better.

I sympathized.  You can always improve and tweak.

I feel now about the fundraising cookbook the way Harry felt about his speeches.  I felt the same way about the low-budget mailers I sent out as a realtor.  I wrote them.  I laid them out and printed them.  I prepared the address lists and printed the labels.  I folded and stamped them.  By the time I did all this, they irritated me.  Who'd want to look at junk mail like this?

Nonetheless, imperfect marketing is better than none at all. 

The same is true of imperfect fundraising.  Now I'm up to my elbows in the cookbook.  Without the cookbook committee I'd have given up long ago.  Still, it doesn't look good enough.  It looks as if a volunteer laid it out in Word.  I want it to look better!

At some point you have to say, "This is as good as it's going to get."  Boy, it's hard.

you mean I can do this with Word 2010?

I know it's not beautiful (yet).  Still, I'm amazed that I'm able to create this cover art for my fundraising cookbook using only Word 2010.  I used to crave Indesign, but maybe I don't need it, given the awesome power of Word.  Thanks, Microsoft!

Another postage rate increase in April 2011?

By accident I stumbled on this announcement of the US Postal Service's intention to impose "new prices for mailing services" next month. 

Can't find any news stories about it.  The latest press release about prices in the USPS newsroom is from June of last year.

I'll keep you "posted."

Co op and Marketing Development Funds

Haven’t blogged for a while. A new job is taking up quite a bit of time—yay!


One of my responsibilities there is a lot of fun. I’m the person who gets to spend the Marketing Development Funds (MDF) and co-op marketing money.

The way MDFs work is that if you sell a certain dollar amount of the vendor’s product, the vendor offers you marketing money to sell more product. The amount of money is based on your dollar sales. You have to spend it by a certain date, or the credit goes away.

Now I understand why there are so many branded tchotchkes out there. Oops! Your claim date is coming up and the boss’ll be irritated if you don’t act on it. So you order a couple thousand pens with the company logo on them just so you can say you spent the money. Bo-ring.

The perfect promotional item would be the one that delights the customer or prospect. It would make her or him say, “I didn’t realize how much I needed a radiation dosimeter. I’m going to wear this everywhere, with the logo facing out. I’m going to show it to my friends and colleagues and tell them what a great relationship I have with Katharine’s company.”

To evoke that enthusiasm, it better be a darned good gift. Spending MDF money right is obviously a challenge—one I’m looking forward to embracing.

Skirting Reproduction Issues

About those family photos I wrote about in the previous post, I just had a devious idea.  If I donate the whole box of photos to the Summit Historical Society, I'm sure that they'll grant me reproduction rights to the two or three I want.  Then their provenance on eBay becomes irrelevant.  :)

I found lots of interesting illustrations, including the ad below, at the Historical Society.  When possible, I do follow up.  In this case, PSE&G was kind enough to permit me to use their images and recipes however I wanted in the cookbook.

I do try to observe the proprieties, but what kind of a researcher would I be if I gave up immediately and said, "Oh, I'll probably never be authorized to use that?"

For one thing, the cookbook wouldn't have as many pictures.  Remember, order your advance copy now for $20.

Will these pictures get me in trouble?

Please don't bid against me, but yesterday I bid on a lot of photos on eBay.  They're supposed to show a family in Summit, NJ, in the '40s and '50s.  According to the seller, there are a few of the kind I want, that is, photos of kitchens, dining rooms, and of people eating home-prepared food in Summit.

What if I win the bidding?  Can I use the pictures in my church cookbook?  Obviously, I can.  I have a scanner.  But may I?  I'm hoping the seller can either get the subjects' permission or give me permission as a family member.  What if he doesn't know the subjects because he bought a box of snapshots at an estate sale?

Who holds the copyright then?  If you have any helpful thoughts on this, please let me know.  Otherwise I'll do my customary desultory research.  Then I'll probably conclude that I'm running out of time because I need to get the file to the printer and run the pictures anyway, hoping that the subjects or their descendants never notice.

What was I saying about ignorance of the law being no excuse?

Webmasters need expertise--technical, graphical and legal

It's not enough to be able to buy a domain, design a style sheet and know how to transfer your files to the internet.  As my friend Alan Norton, a writer for techrepublic reminds us, webmasters need to stay abreast of legal developments that affect their sites. 

His article Do Webmasters need to add lawyer and legal counsel to their job description? points out that a morass of legal issues lurks to bedevil innocent internet publishers, especially online retailers. 

Asked and answered, your honor.  The question Alan addresses in the article above is one that people are still grappling with, for example on LinkedIn, where someone recently asked "Does an ecommerce retailer have to file taxes in each state it sold a product in?"


Unfortunately, as John Selden wrote in the 17th century,

Ignorance of the law excuses no man: Not that all men know the law, but because 'tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to refute him.

That means the short answer to Alan's question is, yes, webmasters do need to add legal counsel to their job descriptions, at least if they want to avoid legal hassles down the road and sleep easily at night.

All these heavy responsibilities on the webmasters' heads are one more reason why they should engage copywriters--lots of them.  After all, even webmasters can't be experts at everything.