Category: ART

Museums, Gardens and other cultural sites

DFW Metroplex, Memory Keeping, Photo Organization, Photo Organization Coach, Photography, Scrapbooking

Put the FOREVER Club to Work for You

Jane Sadek

MEMORY KEEPING 101: BUDGETING YOUR MEMORY KEEPING EXPENSES

It’s Like Layaway, but in Reverse!

Remember Layaway? I’ve got something better.

There was a time when only a few of us carried credit cards. Hard to believe, I know. But we also used paper maps rather GPS, as hard as that is to grasp. Not everything from those days-gone-by was awful. Take Layaway, for instance! You’d see something you liked, but couldn’t afford. If you put it in layaway, the store would hold it for you and give you several months to pay it off. The plans varied, but they let you stay in your budget and still get special items you couldn’t afford otherwise.

Then we all got credit cards and the debt just keeps adding up. The flip side of the coin is that when you see something you want, you can get it immediately. The downside is that you may still be paying for a purchase long after the item you bought is useful to you.

The FOREVER Club is like a mashup of credit cards and layaway. It’s a tool you can use in several ways to make Memory Keeping affordable.

The Layaway Plan

I know Memory Keeping is not cheap. It’s worth every penny and every hour, but it’s an investment you make in yourself, your family and your future. Let’s say you do want to get started, but you really can’t afford it right now. Could you afford $25? Especially if that $25 would spend like $26.25. Sounds better doesn’t it.

So, join the Club! Invest $25 a month. Charge it to your credit card or put it on your debit card. Forget about it for a few months and soon you’ll have paid for a lot of Memory Keeping. In fact, in about a year, you’ll have saved up enough money for a large digitization box, one that holds 20 VCR tapes or 500 photos. During the year you can be organizing your media, so that when your box comes, you’ll be ready.

Don’t need digitization, just a safe place for all your digital images. Great, start putting that $25 a month away and in a year, instead of a large digitization box, you’ll have enough saved for about 25 GB. What will that hold? Up to 25K digitized images. Would that help?

Using The Club as a layaway plan can help get you to any of your Memory Keeping goals without getting into deep debt. You want Artisan 6 Scrapbooking software – less than 6 months of savings. The same with Historian. Save up for Family History Research or Video Streaming. You don’t get the 5% discount on Family History Research, but you can use the Club to save up for it.

The Credit Card Plan

If delayed gratification is outside your wheelhouse, then The Club can still help you. Not everything in FOREVER can be purchased today and paid out over time, but some of the large ticket items can. Take that Video Streaming Plan for instance. You can get it now with the 60 month Payment Plan and use the The Club to cover your payments. That way, instead of incurring $1600 on your credit card today, you’ll be charged about $26 a month and can cover it with the Club. Imagine the interest you’ll save.

Or how about that storage? Step up to 50GB and pay it off in 24 months, covering your payments with The Club. You could even join Pixels 2 Pages, the amazing online community of digital scrapbookers and let The Club cover your monthly payments.

The Automatic Discount Plan

So, perhaps you don’t need to save up for your Memory Keeping Purchase, but don’t believe you should pay a penny more than you need to for anything. You want a TB of storage, a video streaming plan and a large digitization box. Cool. You’ll need to spend about $7800, but with The Club you can save about $300. Just join The Club, invest your $25 and get 5% off everything you buy. After your shopping spree is over, just get out of The Club and enjoy your purchases. Or stay in for future purchases. It’s up to you.

The Budgeting Plan

Another great way to use The Club is as a budgeting tool. Let’s say you’ve got several Memory Keeping Projects you need to do, but you don’t want to spend more than $100 per month on your projects. Welcome to the Club!

You sign up for The Club and choose the $100 level. Job one is digitizing some precious memories which are at risk, so you invest in a small FOREVER Box. Using your Club Membership and your $20 Off Welcome Coupon, you order your box and use about $35 of the money you invested in the Club, leaving you about $65 in the Club.

You get your photos and videos together while waiting for your box. When it arrives, you’ve got 2 VCR tapes and 100 photos you want to have digitized. The 2 VCR tapes are covered by the price of the box, but with your Club Discount the photos would be just under $69. You go ahead and return the box to FOREVER, who will audit the box and verify the price of your extra items. In the meantime a month has passed, you’ve put another $100 in The Club and when the $69 comes out, you’ve still got $96 in The Club.

When your items have been digitized, you have 60 days to decide what you want to do with them, but you’ve always known you wanted them to go into your FOREVER storage you own rather than rent. After your third Club payment is made, you’ve got $196 dollars to spend and that easily covers the price of 10GB of storage. You buy the storage you need for your images and still have money left over for your next FOREVER purchase and because it’s the third month of the plan, you’ll get 2 extra GB of storage – something you’ll get every third month you belong to The Club. At this point, you probably also have plenty of room for the hundreds of images you’ve got stored on you phone.

Using this example, let’s say that you spend a couple of months curating the images you’ve uploaded to FOREVER. You’ve also been sharing them with your family and friends through FOREVER’s connections and a few times you even shared some on social media, which is so easy with FOREVER. Then things get crazy at work, you go on vacation and a couple of months pass where you don’t get anything done in your account.

Don’t worry! Club Dollars never expire and while your back was turned you got another 2GB of storage. When you get back to your projects you have about $440 waiting for you. You’re ready to start getting creative with Artisan 6 and you want to join the Pixels 2 Pages Digital Scrapbooking Community Online. Go for it and you’ll not only have the software and belong to P2P for a year, but you’ll have plenty of money left to shop for some digital art to go with all the free art you got with Artisan and with your P2P membership.

Getting Even More Creative

These are just a few of the scenarios I’ve seen with The Club. I’m surprised every day by the way people discover to use it. Remember the client who saved $300 on a $7800 purchase. Well, some people make the whole purchase with Club Dollars to also get free storage.

So, they know they need to stay in The Club for 3 months to earn free storage. They divide the $7500 they need to spend into a three month investment, buying $2500 worth of Club Dollars (i.e. that’s 10 $250 memberships). At the end of the 3 months, they buy the things they wanted and they get 50 GB of free storage – a value far above $600 on top of the $300 they saved on their purchases and their savings are near $1000!!

The Club comes with other benefits. Free shipping for print projects on Club Weekend, Quarterly Zoom Calls with the Founder and even a CLUBload contest every month, where you can win gift certificates for uploading the most images! Specials offered only to Club Members. The list goes on.

I know few people will be stepping up to buy $7600 of Memory Keeping at one time, but whatever your project and your budget, share that information with me and I’ll help you get the very best deals possible. With Christmas just around the corner, you may need to touch base immediately, but I’m always here to help you with your Memory Keeping.

ART, DFW Metroplex, Memory Keeping, Photo Organization, Photography, Scrapbooking

Give the Gift of FOREVER

Jane Sadek

MEMORY KEEPING 101: SHARE THE LOVE

Start Something with FOREVER

Talk about a gift that keeps on giving! What if a gift you give this Christmas could tell generations you’ll never meet how much you care. That’s what the gift of FOREVER can do.

A Permanent Digital Home

Perhaps the perfect gift for your someone is FOREVER’s permanent online storage they own rather than rent. Phones, tablets and other devices are lost, corrupted and destroyed every minute of every day and yet, they contain some of our most valuable possessions – our memories. With FOREVER Storage, those memories can be automatically delivered to safe, permanent storage and you never have to worry about losing them again. Because you own rather than rent FOREVER storage, you’re not signing up for someone to make monthly or annual payments into perpetuity. You buy it, they have it – FOREVER. Not only do they have it, but their kids have it and their grandkids have it and their great grandkids have it and – well you get the picture.

What’s more, those images are not going to be mined for advertising, compressed, sold or shared, because your giftee will own it. They’re in control of who has access and that access is guaranteed by the FOREVER Guarantee Fund. And FOREVER storage is more affordable this month than it ever will be again, because January 1, 2024 the price goes up!

FOREVER Digitization Boxes

Somebody in your family is the Family Historian. Everyone knows who they are. They were the ones who agreed to store all of the photos/slides/videos left behind by your mother/father/grandmother/grandfather/aunt/uncle. That means in some closet, under some bed or on some shelf all of your family’s history is sitting around and no one has access to those images. Give that historian a gift that all the family will enjoy. Get them a digitization box and begin the journey of turning a mess into shareable memories. Just for fun, FOREVER has a special Holiday Edition Box that will look great under the tree.

Genealogy Genius

Perhaps the Family Historian, with the Media Mess, is also the Keeper of the Family Tree. Perhaps someone else is constantly researching the Family Connections. Perhaps family members belong to the DAR, DRT and/ or ODC. If someone is researching genealogy, then it is inevitable for them to hit a brick wall. Did you know FOREVER has a team of Professional Genealogists with connections all over the world to help amateur sleuths climb over those brick walls? There are a number of plans from 1 hour consultations to months long research projects. Brick walls melt before these seasoned pros and your favorite genealogist will love you for gifting them some help.

Click & Play

Who’s the videographer in your family? They’ve got their phone out all the time and they’re taking videos rather than photos. So then, what happens next? They might put it on social media, but with all the hacking going on, they’re account might or might not be there next week. The videos can disappear into their phone or perhaps be loaded on another device, but then you have to download it to play it. There are sites like YouTube or Vimeo, but the bottom line is that they own the videos, not you. So, your videographer will love FOREVER’s Personal Video Streaming. Buy it once, own it forever. Share videos without the recipient having to download to watch.

A Community of Crafters

Crafters love other crafters. Crafters will pack up all their stuff and travel many miles to hang out with other crafters. What if they could just sign in, instead? Pixels 2 Pages is an online community of digital crafters who use Artisan 6 software as their vehicle of creativity. Gift your favorite crafter Artisan 6 and a month long trial membership in Pixels 2 Pages or if they’re already using Artisan 6, how about a membership in P2P? Or perhaps they’d like to be part of an online crop. FOREVER has one in January and another in April. Whatever you choose, your crafter will love you.

These are just a few of the gifting ideas with FOREVER and there’s always a gift certificate, which allows them to decide how to invest in their memory keeping. FOREVER is the gift which truly keeps on giving. They can’t eat it all or out grow it. They can’t lose it. It won’t ever be out of style. What’s even better is that long after you or your giftee are around, your thoughtful gift will still be enjoyed by family and friends for years to come.

Just call me at 972-971-5263 and let’s talk about who you’d like to gift with FOREVER and decide on the perfect gift or if you already know what to get, just follow this link https://www.forever.com/ambassador/jane-sadek and order it now. And just in case you come up short Christmas morning, remember FOREVER will be there for your order!

DFW Metroplex, Memory Keeping, Photo Organization, Photo Organization Coach, Photography, Scrapbooking

Get Ready for January

Jane Sadek

MEMORY KEEPING 101: ADD MEMORIES TO EVERY DAY OF 2024

Calendar, Planner, Notebook or Journal

So, how do you keep your life organized? A large monthly calendar on the wall? Or is it a chunky planner you carry everywhere you go? Or are you the more free flowing type who keeps a notebook with all your pertinent information and to do lists? Or perhaps you’re the reflective type that settles down at the end of the day to write down what was important.

Just about every store you’ll walk in for the next month or so will have zillions of calendars, planners and blank books on fixtures throughout the store – especially in those impulse buying areas. They want you to think “Oh yeah, I need a ___________________________(fill in the blank: calendar, a planner, a journal)!

Ooooh those exciting travel places! Look at those cat and puppy faces! That one has motivational sayings! What’s your hot button? How about, instead of that canned theme and stock pictures, you design a calendar or planner that instead focuses on your travels, your pets, your goals, your friends and your family?

Well, with FOREVER Create & Print you can use photos of your own memories, motivational sayings and Bible verses you choose, or even download images from the internet of things you want to do – it’s up to you. Just click on Create & Print on the FOREVER website and start designing your calendar, planner or notebook with their great templates. Or use Artisan 6 to add even more more exciting choices, like a personal event list.

The Wall Calendar

No matter what other calendars and planning tools you have in your life, most of us have a wall calendar hanging somewhere – on the refrigerator, next to our desk wherever we need to be reminded of what the year looks like. Every insurance agent, real estate agent and most financial advisors are quick to offer you a free calendar, but do you really want to look at their advertising all year long?

There are many great designs for wall calendars in Design & Print. You can have one large glorious image on each month or multiple images with a variety of themes. While the basic calendar design is great, with Artisan 6 you can change up the format, putting the month and days where you want them, the way you want them, in the font you want them.

Oh, and if you do choose Artisan 6 to design your calendar, then you have even more options when you design from a blank page. Perhaps the best part is that there’s a customizable event list which will offer both sets of holidays like Christian and Jewish or American and Canadian, OR you can create your own personal event list with birthdays, anniversaries and milestones! (Oh, and with Artisan you also have the choice of making desk calendars!)

The Planner

I’m a planner girl. Confession, I also have a wall calendar and desk calendar, because I am a little obsessive, but I love my planner best. FOREVER Planners became available in the summer, so mine starts in August. That’s one of the beauties of of creating your own calendar, you can start it whenever makes sense for you, whether it’s tied to an event or just when you decide you want a new planner or calendar.

One of my favorite features of the FOREVER planners is the three templates available. I’m a month/week girl, but you may identify most with a weekly or daily view of your life. Along with three different page styles, you can choose between hardbound and spiral-bound. I’m using spiral bound right now and I love it.

Notebooks/Journals/Blank Books

FOREVER calls them notebooks, but you might call them journals or blank books. Whatever you call them, there are a million ways to use them and the choices we offer make it easy to create your own perfect place to jot notes, ideas, memories, dates, goals – anything.

First, you choose what you want on the cover. Will it be a motivational statement, your Bible verse for the year, photos of your goals, photos of the ones you love or photos of the places you love.

Then you can have hardbound or spiral bound – whichever best fits your taste and usage. How people resist having a few of each is beyond me!

Best of all, you get to choose exactly which style of pages best suit your needs. (See why it’s hard to resist having a stack of them?) Do you think best on lined pages? Are you using the notebook to journal your way through your year? Do you think in images? Then you’ll definitely enjoy the bullet pages. If your method depends on your mood, then perhaps the graph/lined combo will attract your attention.

Create Your Planning Tool Today

While we’re talking about planning tools, I wanted to let you know you can use our Table Top Panels to make great dry erase boards. That’s not the same thing, but it’s in the planning family.

Whatever planning tool you’d prefer, give it a go with FOREVER – and while you’re at it, I will remind you, they also make great holiday gifts. Design & Print your calendar today.

DFW Metroplex, Memory Keeping, Photo Organization, Photo Organization Coach, Photography, Scrapbooking

Who Has the Best Media Digitization?

Jane Sadek

MEMORY KEEPING 101: DEFINE BEST

Searching the Web

The internet is a funny thing. We depend on it heavily and yet it has very limited capabilities – in part, because it depends mostly on numbers. Were you to ask it who offers the best media digitization available, you could get a lot of different answers, but chances are, you wouldn’t know what those results meant, because what is best? Is it the company that’s been around the longest? Is it the one with the most reviews? Is it the one with the highest rating?

One of the oldest companies offering media digitization is by far the best known, but they don’t make any of the best lists. Some rating companies point to bad reviews. Others talk about it being expensive. I hate it when people ask me if we’re like XXXXXXXXXXXX, the company they know from the ubiquitous advertising campaigns. Yes, we’re both in the same business, but what we offer is light years ahead of this company, which was once on the leading edge of this industry.

One of our competitors is making great strides, in part because they’ve convinced the rating companies that they do everything – only they don’t. Two words – Scrapbook Pages. They don’t. And their photo restoration is handled by AI, not photo restoration artists. I don’t know about you, but those things matter to me. I think they’ve done a great job of marketing, but I know they actually can’t compare to us.

In fact, when you really start to dig into it, the more you learn the crazier it gets. Bright new start-ups, mobile digitization services, the guy in a garage with an ancient scanner. In fact, the internet hides more than it reveals. If they have a shiny new website with good SEO, chances are the internet is going to love them, regardless of what they do or do not offer.

So What Does FOREVER Offer and Why Should I Use Them?

Well, for one thing, we just moved into the newest, largest, most state-of-the-art media digitization facility in the world. We’re very excited about the “newest” thing, because we literally just built it and moved in, but it’s not the most important thing on the list.

That we built it is rather relevant, because we’ve been digitizing for a while now and we’ve been in some of those older facilities like our friendly competitors. These days we’re not making do with a remodeled strip center retrofitted to meet our needs. We built our facility from the ground up with only one thing in mind – media digitization. From weatherproofed docks which allows Fed Ex to unload their trucks inside to the clean room for processing media, no stone was left unturned which would allow us to do our job better.

Largest is quite significant, because one of the reasons for our size is the number of pieces of equipment we have for digitization. That’s why when we say we digitize everything, unlike our competition who try to say the same thing, we actually do. We’ve invested in a lot of equipment, just so we can digitized anything. We’ve actually developed our own equipment for handling materials that other companies don’t touch (like scrapbook pages, newspapers, 3D items etc.)

Most state-of-the-art is a little of both of these. Our warehouse is innovative, but our clean room is amazing. Our people are pretty remarkable, too. Our hiring process is not about finding warm bodies to shove photos through a machine. We hire and train media specialist with a focus on customer satisfaction. Our mind set is not faster processing, it’s more accurate, better quality processing. And yes, we hire real live artists to handle our photo restoration projects.

Our white glove service isn’t restricted to the clean room. The entire circle of service, from the moment a box comes to our facility until the moment we load the media we’re returning to the customer for delivery (yes, we return your media back to you after it is digitized) we understand what we’re handling. Throughout the entire process, from the moment you order your box, we’re going to keep you updated with exactly where your media is in our process. It’s not media to us – it’s memories.

Beyond Our New Building and Our Boxes

The fact that we deal in memories, rather than media is what really matters. Media Digitization is the beginning of what we do. We also offer the best online solutions for storing and sharing your memories. Those other guys will allow you to download from their site, offer you equipment to store your images or try and rent storage to you.

You can download from our online box center and you can buy equipment like thumb drives and DVD’s if you want to, but that’s not what we want you to do. We know you need a permanent place to store your memories, one that is safe and will be there for generations to come, without having to pay monthly/annual fees. That’s why we have online storage you own rather than rent, protected by an ironclad guarantee you can read for yourself.

We also offer a free app for synching your phone’s photo storage with FOREVER; a computer-based program for sorting, editing and sharing photos that also has facial recognition, scanning and album planning; file migration software developed for professional photo organizers and cherished by memory keepers everywhere; the world’s most advanced and comprehensive software for designing digital scrapbooks, photo gifts and more, as well as a huge selection of digital art; private video streaming; frequent free training events for our customers, as well as an extensive library of free training videos; family research professionals for discovering your genealogy; a very active online community of digital scrapbookers with virtual crops, free giveaways and more training than you can imagine; and that’s still not all we do.

We offer an extensive line of projects you can create and print, on your own. No need to go to the local office supply store, the big box store, the pharmacy’s photo department or one of those online places that offer photobooks and gifts, but has made you sign an agreement saying they can delete, compress or mine your photos. We have Autobooks and Photobooks in a wide variety of sizes, styles and bindings. Our Photo Gifts include tabletop panels, ornaments, coasters, magnets, puzzles, blankets, drinkware and wall décor. Our stationary choices include greeting cards, notebooks, planners and calendars. And if that’s not enough, get Artisan and design anything you want. Oh, and if you want prints, from standard sized photos, to page prints to posters, yes we do that, too.

A Stream-lined One-Stop Shop for All Your Digital Memory-Keeping Needs

There’s just not anything else like FOREVER. There might not be a keyword or phrase you can plug into your search engine that will say we are the best, but after reading through this blog post, I hope you realize FOREVER is the best for you. Call or text me and let’s talk about it!

DFW Metroplex, Memory Keeping, Photo Organization, Photo Organization Coach, Photography, Scrapbooking

Monthly Deals: Your Ticket to Savings

Jane Sadek

Memory Keeping 101: Always Save Money with FOREVER Deals

There’s Always a Deal at FOREVER

It’s November, so FOREVER has Black Friday deals happening all month long, but FOREVER has deals every month. Here’s how to find out what they are!

If you’re a FOREVER customer then chances are you’ve noticed the daily emails you get from them. (You can shut them off if you want. Just go to preferences in your account.) Someone in the marketing department has run their algorithms and decided which deal will entice the most people to make a trip over to their website. That’s the first place a deal might get your attention, but if you’re like me I get so much stuff in my inbox that sometimes I don’t see these love notes until a week or two later. Besides, this is just a teaser and doesn’t cover the whole spectrum of what’s being offered at a discount.

If you follow my business pages on social media, then perhaps you’ll see my daily posts about current deals. Or then again, maybe you won’t, because social media has algorithms and while they seem as if they read your mind, they also keep you from seeing a lot of things you really might be interested in. If you’re really looking for a certain item to go on sale, then don’t count on social media to deliver the post to you.

The best way to see what’s on sale at FOREVER every day is FOREVER’s Deal Page. To begin with, FOREVER has a Deal of the Day every day. Their target is digital scrapbookers who are always hungry for new digital art. Some Pixies I know (Pixies are members of the Pixels 2 Pages Online Community of Digital Scrapbookers) start their morning ordering the Deal of the Day every day. You may not be a Digital Scrapbooker, but it doesn’t hurt to keep an eye on the daily deal, because sometimes it’s free. I love free, even when it’s not really something I want!

But that’s only the beginning of what’s offered. The day I wrote this blog there were 27 deals on the page, from a free coupon for new CLUB Memberships to 50% off Print Orders to Gift Ideas, Events and even FOREVER logo-wear. From the deals page, you can click directly to what you want to buy.

If you bypass the Deals page and just go to the merchandise you’re interested in, you don’t have to worry that you’ll miss a deal, because each item will be marked with both the retail price and the current deal. Just be sure that when you order you check to see that the deal has made it to your cart. It usually will, but it is the internet and things happen or don’t happen at the whim of a byte.

And Then There’s Me

Let’s face the facts! It really doesn’t matter how many places the deals are posted, most of us are too busy to go track deals down and because of that, there’s a chance you will miss the one you really want. And that’s why you have me!

While it’s not your job to keep up with what’s on sale at FOREVER, it is mine. I keep a list of what my clients want and when I know it’s going to be on sale, I let them know. How do I know what’s going to be on sale? Well, I’m an Ambassador, so on the first day of each month I get a spreadsheet that lays out everything that will be on sale for the month. The first thing I do with it is match it up with the deals up with my clients’ wish lists and let them know the window for getting that deal.

Even though I am an Ambassador, I am not privy to the specific deals of each month until they are announced, but I do know the rhythm of our business. I know there will be special offerings for Black Friday in both November and May. I know we have Christmas in June every year. I know the seasons when greeting cards are most affordable and when there will be a deal on calendars. So when you and I sit down and map out your Memory Keeping priorities and agenda, then I can help you base your schedule on when the best deals will be coming around.

Let’s Do Lunch or Coffee or Drinks or…

So, when you look at your Media Mess, remember you do not have to tackle it alone. I am happy to be your ally in the war against lost memories. Even if you don’t have time right now to tackle the job, let’s get together and talk about it. Learn your options, set your budget and let me help you get it done. I not only have access to the monthly deals as soon as they come out, I also know which tools will help you with your projects and how to use the CLUB to get the best deals.

Whether you’d like to chat memories over margaritas or you only have time for a quick Zoom, the first step in any project is to get started! Give me a call or at 972-971-5263 and let’s get started.

DFW Metroplex, Memory Keeping, Photo Organization, Photo Organization Coach, Photography, Scrapbooking

Voila! The Group Box

Jane Sadek

Memory Keeping 101: Togetherness for Digitization Value

Welcome to Group Box Digitization

Group Box Digitization is a great way to try out FOREVER’s Digitization Process, with less expense and risk than ordering your own FOREVER Box. Though our Digitization Process is quite easy and safe, some people are intimidated. Joining FOREVER, verifying an email address, choosing a type of box, choosing a size of box and then ordering a box. It sounds like a lot to some people and for the budget-minded or skeptical, it might seem like too much of an expense or risk. Then there’s packing the box and sending it back to FOREVER. We do it every day, but if you never have, you might feel some hesitation.

See there are all those urban legends about digitization companies, most of which may have actually happened, but have nothing in the world to do with FOREVER. We don’t do any of the awful things to your media the other guys do. Turn-around time is quick, everything gets the white glove treatment, nothing is lost, nothing is destroyed by equipment etc. etc. etc., but if all you’ve heard are horror stories from customers of other media digitization companies, sending your treasures off to strangers is scary.

With a Group Box, you don’t pay a penny until your media arrives at FOREVER. I order the box and I pay for most of the shipping. A Group Box is actually a big box with four small individual boxes inside. Your individual box is smaller than a standard FOREVER box, so you don’t feel the pressure to load up the box to get your money’s worth. Send one thing and see what happens. Or load it up and enjoy the reduced shipping fees. It’s up to you.

All you have to do with a Group Box is get signed up for FOREVER and give me your stuff. When I receive the big box, I’ll pack your media and send it back. When the Group Box containing your media arrives at FOREVER, they’ll let you know. Only then will you be invoiced for the digitization and return shipping. Then sooner than you can imagine, you’ll receive notification that your digitized media is online. You can download it or even better, you can invest in FOREVER storage and have those memories ready to share for generations to come – even generations you’ll never know.

Try It! You’ll Like It!

My first Group Box was delivered to my house just the other day. I want to return it to FOREVER before Thanksgiving, so your digitization order will earn an entry in my Crazy Turkey Day Drawing for a $50 Gift Certificate and you can share your digitized memories around the Christmas tree!

For some clients, Group Boxes become a way of life. As soon as I send off their media in one Group Box, they start gathering what they want to send in the next one. For others, sampling Digitization with a Group Box was all the encouragement they needed to order their own Box and ship into high Memory Keeping gear. Maybe, the Group box is just big enough to hold the two or three items you wanted to get done and that’s all you’ll ever need.

Whatever your situation, the Group Box might be just the thing you need next for your Memory Keeping projects. Give me a call at 972-971-5263 and let’s get sgtarted!

DFW Metroplex, Memory Keeping, Photo Organization, Photo Organization Coach, Photography, Scrapbooking

Farewell to The Pricing Roulette Game

Jane Sadek
Photo by Naim Benjelloun on Pexels.com

MEMORY KEEPING 101: SIMPLE & SURE PRICING

No More Buy It Now or Else

In my career as a FOREVER Ambassador, there was one thing I really hated and it was the way their prices were moving targets. The decision to invest in Memory Keeping is an important one and when someone decides to do it, they shouldn’t have to hurry up or wait to make their basic purchases, but the way FOREVER handled some of their pricing made me crazy.

Nobody loves a bargain better than me, so I love FOREVER print deals. I’ve always got a project on my mind and yes, I save them for the 50% off deals and Club Weekends free shipping. That just makes sense. However, some deals just didn’t.

To me, the pricing for much of the FOREVER services were counterproductive to my efforts. When I first started with FOREVER (almost 3 years ago!) the pricing for storage would fluctuate wildly. I get it – they were trying to match what the competition was doing and the competition, those fishes, flies and boxes, use slashed prices to lure in customers, but we had things the competitors didn’t, so why were we slashing those prices?

Obviously, I wasn’t alone. I was a mere newbie, what did I know? But behind the scenes the Executive Ambassadors were saying the same thing I was.

Few people buy permanent online storage or private video streaming on a whim. Most people don’t even realize it exists. They think you have to pay for storage month by month for the rest of their lives. They think their personal videos have to be posted to some social media giant to be shared. FOREVER isn’t a household name, yet.

So, Ambassadors go around letting people know they have a choice, but figuring out what that means usually takes some getting used to and some serious consideration about budget. When the price changed for those unique services week by week and day by day, trying to offer your customers the best value for their dollar was a game of chance.

It Got Better

I am not privy to everything that went on behind the scenes, but at the first of this year, they made a change to the pricing on storage. They set a price that was the price, but they weren’t quite to where I wanted to be, because the price was consistently marked down the same percentage. It wasn’t what I wanted, but at least I wouldn’t be faced with telling anyone the 50% off storage was last week and now they had to pay full price.

In recent months, they tried something with a few of our other premiere products which, like our storage and video streaming, you can’t get anywhere else. When Valet, the file migration software beloved of the professional photo organizers, was introduced, they didn’t kick it off with bargains. They said here’s this unique software and you can try it free for a month, but then this is the price. Nobody waited for a deal, because there wasn’t going to be one. They just purchased it with glee.

That went so well, FOREVER made a change with our other unique software programs, Artisan and Historian. Instead of juggling the price with deals from month to month, they announced the price was the price and that was it. Guess what, sales continued at the same rate they had before. People weren’t buying because of the deals. They were buying because they understood the value and uniqueness of what we offer.

It’s Going to Get Even Better

So, come January, the same thing is going to happen with storage and streaming. The price is going to be the price. The “deals” which have been going on all year are going away, because when something is permanently 25% off, that isn’t much of a deal. I’ve got to tell you there will be a slight (very slight) rise in the price of storage and streaming from the net price you’d pay today, but it will be the price and I am so happy.

So, if you have storage you need to buy or have been considering streaming, the price you can get it for, through the end of December, is the cheapest you are ever going to see it. Come January 1, 2024, the new prices will be announced and that’s going to be the price. The only deal you can get is the 5% off you get with The Club or the $20 off with Welcome and Referral Coupons. That’s it! My job will be easier and I believe our clients will be less confused.

While We’re on the Subject of Deals, Let’s Talk About Our Print Deals

While I think FOREVER has been a little frustrating with some of their deals, I have always been very impressed with their print deals. Just like you, I used to think my only options for photo printing were the fish and the fly. While I was always a traditional scrapbooking fan and didn’t delve into the world of digital photo books (or digitization with the box for that matter), I did go their for Holiday Cards and photo printing. I’d be all excited about a deal and then when I’d made all of my selections, I’d be aghast at the final price. It would seem awfully high.

Well, let me tell you about those slashed prices at the fish, the fly and the box. Their bargains are offered on a particular portion of the sale and then they get you on everything else. If you were buying Christmas cards, for instance, you’d get the reduced price on the basics, but if you did anything beyond that, like a different finish or shape, fees would be added which were not marked down. If you were creating a photobook, the standard number of pages would be discounted, but every page after that had a hefty per page price. And those other digitization people? Who cares if they were going to give you 60% off on the initial items, because they’d always charge you full price on the rest of them.

When FOREVER has a deal, the deal applies to the whole product. If your digitization box is 40% off, then your extra items are going to be 40% off. If your photo book is 50% off, then the extra pages, matte finishes and anything else added to that book will be 50% off. And of course, the same applies with your holiday cards. Now that’s what I call a deal.

I know Memory Keeping is a big investment, however, the returns on your investment are immeasurable. How can you put a price on creating and sharing a heritage which will reach generations you will never even know? I don’t think you can, but with FOREVER and their new pricing policies, you won’t be playing a game of roulette. The price will be the price for the basics and you’ll enjoy true savings on the rest. Call me today at 972-971-5263 to talk about your memory mess.

DFW Metroplex, Memory Keeping, Photo Organization, Photo Organization Coach, Photography

Curating Individual Images in FOREVER Part II

Jane Sadek

MEMORY KEEPING 101: EVERY IMAGE MATTERS

Telling Every Picture’s Story

So, a couple of weeks ago, I went over the editing capabilities in the lightbox for every photo in FOREVER. It was a lot, I know, but it will always be here for you. Now I want to talk about the amazing curating tools available.

First up? Is this a favorite photo of yours, then click the heart right under “Info” and it will go red. When you are in the library (or any album), you can sort by favorites and they will all come up for you.

Next click Edit Info. This is where you get to tell the image’s story. This particular photo is brand new in my Library, so I will show you how I do it.

Before and after curating info

As you can see, I put the names of the people in the photo and the place in the title. That’s what works for me. I don’t need the date, because that was already picked up from the metadata. I can change it if I need to. However, I waxed eloquent in the description. I gave our full names, where we were and explained why we were there. I talked about what was going on around us and mentioned the location was close to our home.

You can go on for as long as you need to for the description. If there are 100 people in the photo – name them all, if you like. Tell what the occasion was, why it was special and whatever other info you think might be of interest to future generations. Naming things like cars, shops, articles of clothing and other items may have important historical information in the future. Having the description of a ceremony or family tradition might thrill someone a few generations from now.

Now, get ready for this. If you are in your app on your phone, you can use the microphone to tell the story, instead of typing it. Voice to Text technology can be a lot of fun. Imagine showing an old family photo to your grandmother, pressing the microphone and saying, “Grandma, tell me who this is and what is going on?” You’ll capture the past in your grandmother’s words. Can’t get much better than that.

I’ve talked about tagging before, so I won’t take up more of your time here. If you’d like to learn more, click this link.

Also in the lightbox, you can add the image to any album. When you click Add to Album a space will open and you can start typing. FOREVER will begin to find albums which match what you type. Your image will always reside in the library, but you can add it to as many albums as you want without it taking up more space in your storage.

And there we are! I edited the photo to keep the focus on Bill and me. I used a filter to make us look extra pretty. I chose the image as a favorite chose a name for the photo and described it, added some tags and put us in the 2023 Album. I’m done! I can click the arrow on the right side and move to the next photo.

If you need some help with any of this, you can call me, or use any of the great videos in FOREVER’s Getting Started section. Where’s that? Right on the front page of the site.

This link is always available to you right under the first image on FOREVER’s home page. When you click Get Answers, this is what you see! Enjoy!

DFW Metroplex, Memory Keeping, Photo Organization, Photo Organization Coach

Have You Ordered Your Christmas Cards Yet?

Jane Sadek

MEMORY KEEPING 101: HOLIDAY CARDS

Christmas is My Holiday, What’s Yours?

As the aisles of your favorite shopping sites and shops fill up with holiday décor, I’m wondering what your holiday is. Do you do Christmas? Or just send Seasons Greetings and Happy Holiday cards? Or are you totally a holiday card dropout? If you’re going to send cards this season, you need to come to FOREVER.

We Have It All!

With the introduction of foiled cards, the improvement of our address book and upgrade to our Create & Print templates, allowing text, trim and finish choices, there’s no reason to go anywhere else. I couldn’t have said that last year. We had great choices, but there were reasons you might look elsewhere. Not this year.

And pricing? Forget about it. No one touches us. They may have come up with some scheme that looks like a bargain on the surface, but I assure you, when you hit the order button with FOREVER, it’s going to shame the competition. All standard cards are 50% off through October and that 50% off everything, you’re gonna love it!

With Artisan, We Have Even More

While our Create & Print Templates are gorgeous, we have something else those other guys don’t have – Artisan. If you look through all our designs and don’t see anything you like, then your card can be designed from scratch. If you’ve got the designer’s touch, get Artisan and design it yourself OR, tell me what you want and I will design it for you – free of charge.

I designed my personal Christmas card to first pay homage to the birthday of Jesus Christ and then moves on what Bill and I have been up to, but that’s my thing. The point is this, you can do whatever you want. That’s not really possible with the other guys.

So, for your Holiday Cards, whatever you want to celebrate, from Halloween to Happy New Year, come see me!

ART, Attractions, DESTINATIONS, Museums, Road Trips, TRAVEL, United States

Detroit Institute of Art

Jane Sadek

TRAVEL THERE: THE DIA IS A FEAST FOR THE EYES

Finally, An Art Museum

I am the Museum Girl. I want to get up early, to be there when they open, and I could happily stay until they close, especially if they have cool restaurants to enjoy. While this little trip to Detroit had been lovely in a number of ways, the schedules of my top choices were not cooperating with me.

If I’d had my druthers, we’d have been to the Motown Museum, the living museum of Greenfield Village and more, but they weren’t open when we had time to see them. Some of the things I wanted to see, like the Conservatory on Belle Island were being remodeled. What I had seen was nice, but it was secondary and tertiary selections, because the family events took first place and keeping Bill happy took second.

I had one non-negotiable though. If I did nothing else, I wanted to see the Detroit Institute of Art and finally the time to do that had arrived.

Remnant of a Glorious Past

About the time they were building The Guardian Building I enjoyed so much downtown, Detroit was almost the center of the world. Americans flocked there for vacation like we go to New York, Chicago or San Fran. It’s where all the best shows were performed, the shopping was wonderful and the Detroit Institute of Art reigned the cultural world. The men went to smoky offices to discuss commerce and the women spent their money after a visit to the museum.

The DIA retains all the beauty of her former glory and she’s making a comeback in the world of museums. The city of Detroit went through some pretty tough days. It wasn’t just the Renaissance Center and the Guardian Building which seemed like a ghost town. The whole of Detroit almost disappeared and her cultural jewels could have been up for grabs, but she held on and now her art museum is back to its former glory and bragging about all the improvements they have in the works.

The DIA is a wonderful place to go if you want to see classical art in America. They were one of those museums which bought all the good stuff up before later cities could get their share. I once heard a curator at the Dallas Museum of Art answer a question about their lack of important classical pieces, “How could an important, wealthy city, like Dallas, have so few recognizable classical pieces?” The curator explained that when the DMA started collecting art, those recognizable classical pieces already had home in Europe and a few American museums – museums like the DIA.

If you ever get the opportunity to go, I hope you’ll do so and leave plenty of time, so you can see it all. My husband took about 100 pictures and then he took almost that many more of the tags that went with them. I won’t show you all 100 or the tags, but I thought you might enjoy these portraits of women.

Heading Homeward

Far too soon, it was time to go. There were a number of unfamiliar variables, so I had allowed plenty of time in my schedule for trouble. I checked on the travel time from the museum. I added a little time for traffic, for finding a gas station, for fueling the car, for returning the car, for getting transported to the terminal from the remote rental car and so on and so forth.

Well, none of that happened. There was no traffic. Bill pulled off the road at an exit, found a gas station within a block and filled up without having to wait. We returned the car in moments and the bus took us immediately. We checked our luggage without a single delay and there was no line at security. Bill wasn’t happy, because he doesn’t like to wait. I was happy! After what we went through getting to Detroit, I was happy to be all checked in and ready to board. A vast difference in priorities there.

We got home safe and sound. Come back next week and see what we got up to next.