MEMORY KEEPING 101: FOREVER FOUNDER SHARES HIS WHY
What’s FOREVER?
FOREVER is not yet one of those companies everybody knows about, yet I think a day will come when it will be the go-to place for all things digital-memory-keeping. Until then it’s one of my missions in life to be sure people don’t lose their memories from lack of knowing about FOREVER.
You can’t be around me very long without finding out I care about your photos and have all the tools you need to preserve them for generations to come. That’s especially true if you read this blog.
Why FOREVER?
The founder of FOREVER recently took the time to share the reasons why he has devoted the rest of his life to this company. In this short (4:40 minutes) video he tells what led him to discover the need for the company and why he feels it is such an important tool for anyone and everyone to use.
No one could be more eloquent on this subject, so today, instead of writing a few more hundreds of words, I’m sharing this video. Please take the time to watch it. I think you’ll agree with me, the time has come for FOREVER.
Glen Meakem, Founder & CEO of FOREVER shares his why
So, what do you think? Are you ready to make FOREVER your memories’ home?
MEMORY KEEPING 101: THINK OF IT AS A RED CARPET FOR YOUR PHOTOS
What Do You Have & Where Do You Want It?
When I ask this question, most people have only the vaguest idea of where all their memories are and they really don’t have a really good idea of where they want them to be, but together we come up with a plan to find everything and get it someplace safe for generations to come.
When the bulk of their memories are on traditional media, like photographs, slides, video and such, the answer is easy. It has to be digitized! While there are a number of ways to go about getting from a pile under the bed to organized folders on FOREVER, it’s a pretty straight forward process.
If those memories are on their phone instead, well that’s easy, too. The FOREVER app can upload everything on your phone to your FOREVER storage while you sleep. Then if you like, it will continue to do so into perpetuity, so you never have to worry about losing your photos, even if you lose your phone, it gets stolen or if somebody runs over it.
When those photos are on a computer or hard drive, getting all of that organized on FOREVER was doable, but could be a long drawn out procedure. In truth, the bigger your mess was, the easier it was to transfer. If everything was carefully organized, there was not really any way to transfer all of that organization to FOREVER without doing it all over again. BUT NO MORE!
Valet Is Here!
Valet is a magic carpet ride for your photos. Thousands and thousands of photos can be moved from your hard drive, computer or laptop, with a few clicks of a button. If your photos are nothing but a great big mess, that’s great news! With Valet, they can arrive in FOREVER in nice neat folders, sorted by year and date, with all the duplicates pulled out. However, if your photos and videos are already in nice neat little folders on your device, then FOREVER will just move the whole thing – organization and all into FOREVER – BAM! It’s done!!
What’s even better is that you get to decide what kind of Valet customer you want to be:
Free One Month Trial – If all you want to do is a one time upload from your computer to FOREVER, then this is the route for you. There is no limit to the number of photos you can upload to FOREVER (or download from FOREVER, for that matter), you just have to do it all in 30 days. You can use it to get photos off your computer, off your husband’s computer, off your parent’s computer or wherever. The Valet Trial is associated with your FOREVER account, not a particular device.
Yearly Subscription – If a month is not enough, then how about a year. For only $59.99 you can do all the things mentioned above, but instead of 30 days, you have a 365 of them. That’s pennies a day.
Professional Subscription – If for any reason you have access to more than one FOREVER account, then perhaps you’ll need the professional version. It was designed for professional organizers, but there are other applications as well – such as if you are part of a family, team or other group using FOREVER for a project. The professional subscription is $299.99.
Here’s the good news. You can use your Club Dollars to buy it and it qualifies for the Club Discount. How can you resist?
If Valet sounds like something you’d be interested in, let’s get together and talk about how it can help you. It’s a very exciting product!!
Saving Your Memories, Not Selling a BusinessOpportunity
I remember sometime back in the late 70’s, a friend came by to share a business opportunity. It seems as if the first hour of his presentation was spent describing fantastic vacations, palatial second homes and very expensive cars we were going to have very, very soon. I guess we were supposed to overlook the fact his shoes were worn out and his car was ready for the wrecking yard. Eventually we got him to admit he was there to sign us up for a multi-level marketing company that is now a well known pyramid scheme. We said no thanks and then spent an hour trying to get him out of our house. His parting words, “I’m sorry you didn’t have the vision to understand what I was offering.” We ran into him a few months later and he sheepishly let us know he was pursuing other opportunities.
I’m sure all of us, at some point or another, have been approached by someone who wanted us to join their MLM team. I want you to know there are some great teams out there to join – Tupperware, Melaleuca, Mary Kay, Pampered Chef and so many more. While there have been some bad players in the past, this type of company provides great products, usually at a lower price and they have also been a real boon to women. When the glass ceiling was firmly in place, there were lots and lots of women who were outpacing their male counterparts through network marketing.
Back in the day, most network marketing happened out of the trunk of people’s car. They’d buy up lots of merchandise, so they’d have something to sell you and the more they bought, the more impressive their title would be. There were also lots of parties. You’d go to a friend’s house and their friend would demonstrate a product line. You’d order something so your friend could earn her free product and then a few weeks later it would be delivered, usually with a little pressure for you to have a party, too.
Then along came the world-wide web and network marketing was transformed. Network marketers didn’t have to buy up a bunch of merchandise they might or might not be able to sell. They could drop ship their products to their clients, just like Amazon and E-Bay and Walmart. While many companies still use the party format for marketing their products, there are many more that don’t and it’s not a tool I use.
Today, the biggest difference in retail marketing and network marketing is the way a company chooses to spend it’s marketing dollar. If you’re Walmart or Macy’s or Louis Vuitton, then you’re going to buy up radio and TV spots, have slick ads in print and put brick and mortar storefronts at the local mall. Companies like Mary Kay and Arbonne instead invest in their representatives to spread the word. That’s the way FOREVER and Creative Memories do it.
In spite of this transformation, there are still people who want to know if FOREVER or Creative Memories are MLM’s. So, let me tell you how my business works and then I will tell you how these companies work.
Service is my Primary Product
I am a Memory Keeper. I am offering my service and experience as a life long scrapbooker and part owner of a real estate photography company. I love helping others preserve their memories and along the way I have learned quite a bit about media, how to preserve it and how to share it. I will be happy to make scrapbooks for you and help you organize your photos. You pay me directly for those services. I will be using Creative Memory products in your album. I will also use my new Cricut, stickers from Hobby Lobby and paper from JoAnn’s if I can’t find what I need in the CM line. If we do a digital projects, I will most likely use FOREVER programs like Artisan and Historian as I work on the job, because they are my tools.
If your project is digital and you want to do it yourself, then I will recommend FOREVER products like digitization and permanent storage, to you. If you need these products, then I’m recommending to you the very thing I use for my own projects, because they are, without a doubt, the very best available. Yes, I will make some commission on those purchases, but this is my business and to continue doing what I love to do for others, I need to be able to support my habit, but if you’d rather use another company, go right ahead.
While I want to help you save your memories, I won’t be trying to recruit you to my team. There are CM advisors and FOREVER ambassadors who choose to build their businesses by building a team, but that’s not what I want to do. It takes a lot of time coaching and mentoring to be a good team leader, and your own success is determined by your leadership skills.
My business is based on my scrapbooking and organizational skills, not my recruiting skills. In addition, a team leader should also be modeling the business for your downline and very, very few people have creating scrapbooks and organizing photos for other people as their primary goal. If team building were my goal, I would not split my effort between two companies, but would pour my energies into one company or the other – in my case Creative Memories – but because many people with a memory mess need digital solutions, I offer both.
Now, if you’re going to be spending a significant amount of money (as in thousands) with either company, then I may show you how to get deeper discounts, but it’s because I want to save you money, not because I want to add you to my team. I will actually make less money with you as my team member, than I will if you are a customer, but because my ultimate goal is to preserve your memories and help you share them with others, if I can save you a little money along the way, then that’s what I am going to do.
Every once in a great while a unicorn does come along. You could join one of my companies as a representative to get the discount, fall in love with what they offer and build a very successful business of your own. That’s great! I would support your efforts, as would everyone in the company you chose. That’s why we call it network marketing. We network with our clients and our fellow representatives. The more you do for others, the more successful you become. However, I have photos to organize, scrapbooks to create and people to help save and share their memories. I don’t have time to go unicorn hunting.
Creative Memories
Creative Memories is a part of my life. Along with a lot of other people in the 90’s, I learned those adhesive photo albums I’d been using were actually destroying the very thing I was trying to save. I was soon hooked on a lot more than acid-free, photo-safe albums. I loved stickers and die cuts and paper. (Oh, did I ever love the paper!) I still love scrapbooking and after all these years I know there are no products out there better for what I love.
There have been two Creative Memories and I have been a customer and a representative of both. The first Creative Memories was an MLM. Your success depended on having parties – only they called them home classes, workshops and crops, but you also had to recruit. To keep your consultant designation, you had to purchase a certain amount of inventory you hoped to unload at your events and you had to recruit. Confession, I was dismal at both. I filled up my house with product and I never recruited a soul. That was happening to a lot of people, so for that reason and some others, Creative Memories went bankrupt.
The new CM is completely different. There are no buying quotas to meet and while I can build my own team should I desire to, they are only my team and no one else is benefitting off of them. There are various streams of income I can make based primarily on my sales and the sales of my direct team members, but that’s it. That’s all there is. It is not an MLM.
FOREVER
Forever is a little different and the teams do have various levels, but they are quite limited. The business plan is based first on my own sales to my own customers. They do not pay a membership fee, nor do they have to buy a certain amount within a certain time period. I never have to recruit anyone to promote within the company. I can reach the top commission level on my own.
Should building a team be what someone wants, that’s great and they will receive a tiny portion of sales for their own team members up to 5 levels down, but that’s it. There’s not some big dog at the top of the pyramid making his living off all the people who have ever been joined the company. There is no pyramid, only a short trapezium.
I say a trapezium, because while there are nine levels of compensation with Forever and thousands of ambassadors, a manager only qualifies for a tiny percentage of the sales within their own five level team. In fact, the Senior Executive Ambassador from whom I get most of my training and who I turn to when there’s a problem doesn’t get a penny of my sales. She just loves Forever and wants to help everyone be successful. That’s the culture.
So, if you avoid want to avoid having parties and being recruited, you’re safe with me. If you have a problem with the pyramid-like compensation plans of some of the MLM companies, you’re safe with me. I want you to be my customer, not my team member. I want to help you, not recruit you and I assure you, you can spend a whole lot of money with me and never buy a product from CM or FOREVER. If you have memories that need saving let’s talk. If not, check on my Weekend Report tomorrow and my Travel There post next week!
I started my morning by checking my email and since Memory Keeping is my business, I’m always on the look out for content, something I can post to my social media channels. I’d been writing blog posts the day before, so I really wasn’t looking for another one, but this one found me anyway.
Creative Memories is a Heaven for Crafters
Creative Memories has a blog and that’s where my email took me. If you’re a crafter, you’ll love it. You’ll need all kinds of tools and materials complete the beautiful things the blog features. These particular borders require 11 various items. Each border has 3-4 easy steps (ha), or at least it seems that way, until you figure out that each “easy” step also includes 4-5 steps. You could craft away a morning with these borders.
I have nothing against crafters. I’m happy they have both the skill and the time to do the amazing things they do. Crafters, please let me be your Creative Memories Advisor. I can point you in the direction of a lifetime of craft ideas and sell you everything you’ll need to complete them – including all the totes you need for packing up to go away on that crafting weekend.
Creative Memories is Also a Resource for Memory Keepers
However, crafters have given Memory Keeping a bad name and to be honest, I get a little mad at Creative Memories for obscuring the line between memory keeping and crafting. I get it, crafters who scrapbook are probably going to buy more product than your average person who just wants to save their memories in a traditional album. However, I’m one of those people who embraced the old CM taglines – “Everyone Has a Story to Tell” and “Simple Pages, Completed Albums.” “We Make Scrapbooking Fun,” the phrase on the back of a recent catalog, just doesn’t resonate with me.
So, as I was saying, I looked at the Creative Memories blog and my hair stood on end. Sure, the bear borders are really cute, but I’m not sharing the post on my Facebook feed without a disclaimer. Most of my clients are incredibly busy people who hire me to scrapbook for them. They want an economical answer to their Memory Mess, whether they’re attempting to tackle some of it themselves or they’re turning the whole project over to me. I offer them an affordable album package, which includes all labor and materials, and my clients love the results, but I assure you, none of these borders will be in one of my standard albums. My standard albums are simply beautiful and I can complete them in a couple of weeks, but they’re all Memory Keeping, with only a touch of crafting.
I’m a Devoted Memory Keeper Who Can Also Craft
That being said, if you’re a crafter, go visit the CM blog I mentioned, go to CMTV, soak up their YouTube Channel. There’s a lifetime of crafting there. Get after it. I love it, too.
I want you to know that if you hire me to do your albums for you, I can craft, but I also need you to understand, specialty albums have to cost more. I have stacks and stacks of papers, drawers of punches, boxes of stickers and a variety of other tools on shelves and in baskets. Heck, I even have a Cricut! No matter how simple the album, I find ways to use my toys in quick bites. I am a Closet Crafter, whose day job is Memory Keeping.
However, there’s no package price for a specialty album. I work on a time and materials basis, keeping track of every minute and every sticker. Elaborate titles and borders will fill every page, with thick layers of beautifully crafted paper enhancements. It’s the perfect gift for a bride or a new mother. It’s a vacation album you’ll cherish. However, the timeline for it could be anywhere from a month to six weeks. The materials used will add up, but it will be the time which takes the biggest bite of your budget.
Back to Basics
Here’s the bottom line. Memory Keeping does not require crafting skills. If you want to do this yourself. I promise you can do it. If you’re looking for an affordable way to get someone else to do it for you, I’m your girl. At the same time, if you are a crafter, there just aren’t any projects out there as meaningful as Memory Keeping.
In other words, Memory Keeping is job one, whether you do it or I do. Crafting is optional! So give me a call and lets get busy saving your memories!!
I hope Memory Keepers, Crafters and Travelers will keep coming back. Tomorrow I’ll have The Weekend Report, next Wednesday we’ll be traveling and then a week from now I’ll be keeping more memories.
Most people in the world wouldn’t recognize this car, yet it’s one of the best there is. It also is not a Ford, Chevy or Chrysler. Companies and politicians hustle for name recognition, because when most of us are in a pinch, we go for what we know. But I ask you – is that the best way to make a decision? Not if you want a luxury sports car. And certainly not if you’re about to digitize your memories.
If someone would deliver this car to your home, would you quibble over what the label said? Chances are you wouldn’t. You’d just want to grab the keys and roll. If you can get the best digitization service for the same price as a mediocre one, wouldn’t you want the best? When it comes to Memory Keeping, there are a lot of names which might immediately come to mind, but does that mean they are the best or does it just mean they have the biggest advertising budget?
The digital memory keeping company I work with, Forever, is not a household name. When it comes to digitization, there is another company which is on the radio and TV all the time with their boxes. Most people would recognize their name, but I’m not going to say it. There’s also another company which promotes their boxes as being in the same league, but are they? (And what about that company you saw in a strip center or some guy in your networking group that turns your photos into video? Talk about not in the same league!)
So, when these other digitization box companies are more familiar to most households, why should you go with Forever? I’m glad you asked!
Level of Care
While we’re on the subject of cars, think about the Mercedes Benz AMG line. You may not even know it stands for Aufrecht, Melcher and Großaspach, but chances are you have a clue those letters mean you’re looking at a Mercedes Benz superior to those which don’t have that designation. Among the reasons it’s better is the tag which shows who built your car over a matter of days, as opposed to other cars which are built on an assembly line by multiple people.
When it comes to digitization, those other guys are one-and-done. They slap a video or film in the machine, run it through and move on to the next one. That’s not the case at Forever. Eric Napier, Forever’s Director of Digitization explains the difference, “FOREVER will run each tape or film 2-3 times to get the best capture possible, edit the dead spots, clean up the tracking, video and audio as much as possible. We also provide editing, batch color correction and photo repair services that other companies don’t offer.”
Sounds kind of like the difference in a MB AMG and a Ford Pickup doesn’t it. A Ford Pickup is a great vehicle. It’s just not made with the level of care of a MB AMG. And here’s where my analogy falls apart. Regardless of which vehicle you might want, most of us can’t afford an MB AMG, but we might squeeze together enough for the Ford Pickup. But if you could pay the same for both, which would you choose? (Yes, if you own a ranch or a farm, you’ll go for the pickup truck, but you know what I mean.)
In the world of digitization, the sticker price of our small digitization box is virtually the same as the one-and-doners – in fact, there was a two cent difference on the day I checked. Now which digitization box would you prefer? Prices are subject to change and there are different specials going on at any given time, but generally, you are going to find that FOREVER and those guys are going to be in the same ballpark price wise, but FOREVER will always be a world apart in the level of care they offer.
Where’s My Stuff?
On the front end of the service, all the box services look a lot alike. They ship you a box. You fill it and send it back to them. Then your stuff is digitized. Each service does things a little different. Some include bags, some don’t. Some use a list, while others use barcodes. PaTAYto, PaTAHto. It doesn’t really matter.
As I’ve already mentioned, the prices are pretty much the same, including the shipping, but here’s the difference. FOREVER’s shipping price includes sending your stuff back to you – theirs doesn’t. That means if you want any or all of your hard copy items back, you’re going to have to pay extra, if you can get them back at all.
So, shipping differences aside, where does your digitized content end up. Well, all the companies are happy to provide you with a DVD or thumb drive, but is that what you want? I can tell that’s what the other guys want you to have. That’s because they are building a book of business for the future. Just as DOSS, Fortran, VHS, floppy discs and Betamax have all gone obsolete, the day will come when those DVD’s and thumb drives are a thing of the past. They’re banking on being around to “digitize” you all over again. Not FOREVER.
We’re hoping you’ll buy your own little piece of the Cloud, so when obsolescence sets in, you can enjoy the promise FOREVER makes to you. They will reformat your images to whatever format comes along when jpg, png, mp4 and their friends are a thing of the past. Never heard of anything like that? That’s because nobody else offers it!
Now, those other guys offer a piece of the cloud, too, but all they are going to do is rent it to you. We’ve all gotten so used to paying for online services by the month or by the year that many people assume that’s what FOREVER is offering and wow, do our prices look ridiculous. Take a second look, those guys are offering to lend you a little space with all the compressing, deleting, sharing, mining and selling that’s comes with that. In this case, it’s FOREVER that’s one-and-done. You pay us once for storage and you’re done forever!!
Look What I Found!!
There’s yet another reason you’ll prefer FOREVER over everyone else. If you have a shoebox of snapshots and a few VHS tapes, anybody can do those. Maybe not as well as FOREVER, but they can do them. Now, what if what you want digitized is larger than 8.5X11 or it’s 16mm or audio or it’s a scrapbook or you’d like to get your DVD’s uploaded. Fuhgeddaboutit! If it’s not plain and simple (see “Level of Care”) they aren’t interested. See the more kinds of things you want to digitize the more kinds of equipment you need and your staff will have to be trained on them.
One of the members of my team told a story one evening. FOREVER called her to apologize, because they were going to be behind schedule delivering an order. The reason for the delay was the fact that the object was so obscure they didn’t have the right machine. Who else but FOREVER would find out what they needed, find the right thing and buy it – at no additional cost to the customer? Everybody else would just say, “Gee, I’m sorry,” but that’s because they are in the digitization business and FOREVER is in the memory keeping business. It’s just what we do!!
Get the Best for Your Memories
So, FOREVER is like an exotic sports car, but it costs about the same amount as that family sedan in your neighbor’s drive way. I’d be driving the MB AMG, wouldn’t you? The color of your digitization box does matter.
So, perhaps you’re still wondering about what I’ve said. Maybe you don’t think you can believe me. Well, how about Trust Pilot? Do you think you can trust them?
Here’s what they have to say about FOREVER and the competition. I’ve blanked out their names, so as to avoid finger pointing, but no one comes near to us.
Since the color of your box does matter, let me help you get the Blue FOREVER box for your digitization needs.
Thanks for coming by. Drop in next week for more NYC, more Memory Keeping 101 and another Weekend Report.
Traveling is my thing and every year, when the Travel & Adventure Show comes to town, I feed that passion. I remember the first year I happened into it with my hubby at the Dallas Convention Center. He was more excited about the Belly Dancers on the Global Beats Stage and I didn’t worry him by picking up every brochure in sight, like I do these days, but I knew I’d found something.
The next year, bestie went with me and a tradition was born. We schedule our day around various speakers, grab every brochure that even slightly interests us and get our picture made at the photo booth. It’s a good time.
This year she had a dance lesson and we met afterwards. Confession, the last few times we’d been, it want’s the marvelous hit it had been in those first few years and we couldn’t even blame it on Covid. Somewhere along the way they’d moved to Dallas Market Hall and it just wasn’t what it had been. So, bestie and I decided we didn’t need to rush over there. We could have lunch first. I mean we’re not about to miss it, it had just fallen short in helpfulness since it first came along.
So, we grabbed lunch at Torchy’s Tacos, near one of her dance studios. We have one in Rockwall, but I rarely get there. In truth, I think it’s a little pricey for street tacos, but that’s me. This time it was well over $20, basically for fast food, but I did splurge and get a specialty margarita. It was bigger than the standard margarita and while Deb complained her regular margarita was a tad tart, mine was awesome.
Then it was on to Dallas Market Center. This year did not feature some of the big name travel types we’d seen in the past, but I thought it was an improvement over the last few years. The first time it was at DMC it was pathetic and the Covid years were tough, but we’ve hung in there and this year it really was worth the effort. It’s easy to be worth the price, because it was only $10. What else can you do for $10.
We started off with “How to Travel Solo, from the Experts” in the Savvy Traveler Theater, for Deb, who is contemplating a test drive in the world of Solo Travel. There had been a similar seminar last year, but it had been a total waste of time. This year was better – marginally so, but better. Deb was encouraged to discover more and more companies are doing away with an upcharge for solo travelers, but disappointed the cruise industry is slowest on the uptake.
The next seminar was right back in the same place, but it was Gabe Saglie of Travel Zoo talking about “How to Prioritize Travel in Uncertain Economic Times. He talked a lot about trends and offered up travel tips, but his goal in life was to get us to sign up for Travel Zoo. He made it sound good enough, that I actually just did so.
We immediately went to “”The Insider’s Guide to Visiting Arizona Parks,” but the seminar was misnamed. It should have been, “Look What I Did.” Some lady who worked for the Arizona Office of Tourism spent the time showing videos which are on the National Parks’ websites. Apparently, she had been tasked with making the National Parks websites more accessible and she was very proud of her videos. Thank you, I know how to use the internet. You have wasted my time. She got away with showing one. We left when she started showing the second one. She may have made the websites more accessible to the general public, but she made her presentation a real snorefest.
Next up was “Cruise Tips, Trends and Personal Stories from Our Adventures at Sea,” in the big Travel Theater. This seminar was also misnamed. It was an advertisement for Princess cruises to Alaska. The MC for this talk was Alanna Zingano, a social media travel influencer (No, thank you!) and Jeff Corwin. I confess, he looked a lot like Steve Irwin, the Australian Nature Dude who got killed by a stingray, so I thought he was that guy’s son. Not so. Somehow Jeff Corwin has gotten a job as the Nature & Adventure Ambassador, probably because I’m not the only one who thinks he’s Steve Irwin’s son. Anyway, Alaska is not at the top of my travel list and Deb has been four times, so that was a loser.
The final seminar of the day was probably the best. Someone named David McGuffin did a talk titled, “Exploring Europe: Top Destinations, Attractions and Experiences.” Of course, he was advertising his European travel company.
David and our friend from Travel Zoo were the most informative guys at the travel show, but I wish that wasn’t giving them more credit than they deserve. In the past, we’ve seen Samantha Brown, Rick Steves and other travel luminaires behind the podium. So, it was not a star-studded event. However, they have ramped up the quality of their vendors and I felt as if it was more worth the trip than it had been in recent years.
David Solomon at the Biblical Arts Museum
The other big event for the weekend was an opening reception for a new exhibition at the Biblical Arts Museum. I’m not sure how I get on these lists, but the museum invited me to opening of the “Flowers of the Holy Land” Exhibit. A little honesty here. I’m not really fond of this museum. It’s mostly a warehouse for copies of various religious art – including Thomas Kinkade prints. They also cram entirely to much stuff into the space they have, so actually enjoying one of their oversized look-alikes is difficult to do.
I can’t say I walked away from this exhibit with much more respect for what they are doing. Bill and I both thought an exhibit of my own photographs from the Dallas ARboretum would offer better photography and certainly FOREVER would have done a better job printing the large format photos. The refreshments offered were bad wine and bagels – a little odd, but the jazz band which played was actually pretty good.
Glad I went, so I know what’s up. I wonder if the exhibit will be there later this month when the Crowley Chamber Concert will be. While I’m not crazy about the museum, I do love the Crowley Chamber Concert Series.
For now, I must run! See you next week for travel, memory keeping and another weekend report.
Memory Keeping 101: Sharing and Gifting for Your Grads
Senior Photos, Graduation Announcements, Thank You Cards and Party Invitations
Ok, those who know me know I passed on the whole parenting thing. There’s a facet of our culture I have completely missed out on, except what I see on the social media feeds of my friends. When I was a senior, I took the same senior pictures everyone else did at the local Olan Mills studio and ordered my embossed announcements through Balfour.
My how the world has changed. Booking the right photographer for your senior photo session is a daunting task and you’ve somehow got to come up with a place for the shoot that no one else in the world has ever been. Well, once you’ve booked that photographer (And if you need a referral, just call!) then you have to think about ordering your announcements. Don’t make that purchase until you’ve checked out this page.
FOREVER has just introduced some of the most beautiful Graduation cards you’re going to find on the internet and they’ve upgraded their Design & Print pages to make personalizing your choice beyond easy. Choose the number of photos to include on front and on back, choose landscape or portrait orientation, choose your cardstock, choose your colors, choose your text and automatically address your cards when you’re ordering them. Also use QR codes to provide more photos, access to a video or slideshow, even audio files with a personal invitation from your senior. There are so many options available to you.
But don’t stop there! Choose an entire suite of coordinating stationary for party invitations, thank you cards and more. And whatever you choose, don’t check-out before you go to the Deals page! Over the next months, there are going to be such deals, not just for seniors, but for brides, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.
Decision Day
FOREVER graduation stationary is great for any graduate, from Kindergarten to Grade School, but high school seniors may have yet another important event to commemorate – Decision Day. Just as new parents throw big parties to announce the sex of their expected child, high school senior now make a big deal of their college or career choice. Use FOREVER to make it an even more special day.
From creating themed items for your reveal to creating the layout for your Decision Day social media post, FOREVER is there. Want a blanket for their bed, create in FOREVER. Want a dry erase board, use the FOREVER Table Top Panels. How about some coasters for Grandma and Grandpa? How about a thermal cup for your senior to sport with her university’s symbol? Want to create cards for a formal announcement. You’ve got all the FOREVER tools you have for graduation stationary. Wherever your imagination can take you, FOREVER can make it happen.
Gifts for Remembrance and Encouragement
So, maybe you don’t have a senior, but you know you’re going to be getting those announcements about graduations, parties and decision days. Yes, money and gift cards are always greatly appreciated, but in a week or so, they will be gone, gone, gone. Whether they spent it, saved it or invested it, in time names and amounts are going to get foggy. Make your graduation gift memorable with FOREVER’s AutoPrint or Design & Print gifts, slipping those dollars into a very affordable, easy, quick personalized gift your senior will treasure for years to come.
AutoPrint is a quick way to make all kinds of gifts your graduating senior will love. Personalized water bottles, coffee mugs, journals, dry erase boards and more. It’s so easy, you’ll have your gift ready to ship in moments.
With Design & Print, you can expand your choices to include blankets, frosted glasses, wall décor, puzzles and even calendars. It may take just a bit longer to complete these choices, it’s still easy peasy!
Go to FOREVER right now to choose your project and if you need any help, just let me know. You really don’t have to talk to some anonymous bot or listen to hold music. Just call or text me and I’ll walk you through it all.
If you’re looking for something really unique, why don’t you give your senior the gift of FOREVER storage. Set them on the road to memory keeping with their very own permanent storage account they’ll never have to make payments on, never have to upgrade to a different format, that will never be compressed or deleted or mined for advertising. What’s more, they can use the free app to automatically save all the photos they take with their phone or post to Facebook to their permanent storage, so even if they drop their phone into the punch bowl, lose it at a concert or whatever, those precious photos of their college days will be there. As they live their lives, they can add more GB’s and services, but they’ll never forget who set them on the Memory Keeping Road.
Be Generous and Thrifty!
Never ever buy anything from FOREVER without checking the Deals Page. If you don’t see any deals you like, then call me. I always have the inside track on what bargains will be coming out during a month. There’s always a deal at FOREVER and I don’t want you to miss the one you want.
If giving personalized gifts is something you like to do for all kinds of occasions, then you’ll be interested in The Club. No, The Club is not some sneaky way to turn you into a FOREVER Ambassador. The Club is a way to budget your expenditures and save an extra 5% on pretty much everything you buy from FOREVER. You choose what you want to put away for gift giving on a monthly basis from $25 to whatever you want. FOREVER will charge you that amount each month and save it until you are ready to make a purchase. Your dollars never expire. Then when you do buy something, you’re using the dollars you have already put away and you’ll get that 5% discount on top of whatever deals you find on the deals page (with a very, very few exceptions). If you’re a grandma or grandpa with lots of grandkids to gift, then you’ll also want to check out Premiere Shipping – pay one time for a year of shipping, no matter how much you send.
And that’s some of the ways FOREVER can make you a hero with SRS 2023. I’d love to help you with all your Memory Keeping and Memory Sharing ideas. Let’s meet over coffee and talk about it!
Keep coming back for travel stories, a run down on local attractions and my favorite – Memory Keeping.
MEMORY KEEPING 101 – ORGANIZING YOUR STASH WITH HISTORIAN
Why Historian?
When it comes to permanent online storage you own, there just isn’t anything better than Forever. However, you might have wondered how to get your digital files ready for it. You don’t have to tell me Forever storage is a big investment. For most of us, our digital horde far outweighs the legacy we’d like to pass on to the future.
Historian is the answer. When you’re dealing with hard copy photos and memorabilia, your tools are tabletops, Ziplocks and boxes. You can buy a variety of fancy tools for this project, from boxes and files, to labels and dividers but I just use what I have at home with time.
Curating photos, traditionally and digitally, takes time. Facing a phone, laptop or app full of photos can seem quite overwhelming and if you think of it in view of purchasing permanent storage to hold it all, then it is not only overwhelming, it is daunting.
Historian is the halfway house for your digital stash. I’ve always struggled with organizing photos with my computer. For one thing it will let me save the same pictures in 47 places. It may notify me when I try to put it in the same file, but Historian goes further than that and will let me know when I am saving the same picture anywhere in my stash. With tagging I can find it in several different ways, without taking up valuable space saving it multiple times.
Historian also reads the time stamp from metadata and puts the photos in historical order. How wonderful is that?
Another amazing feature is face recognition. Yes, face recognition. Once you take some time to teach it the faces in your life, it will go ahead and tag them automatically for you.
And stars! You can use stars to rate each photo, which will help you when it comes time to decide what to put on Forever, what to delete and what you’ll just keep on Historian for right now.
I could go on with all the wonderful tools you have for sorting and organizing photos on Historian, but I think you get the picture (wink, wink).
It Both Saves Time and Takes Time
All these automatic time-saving tricks are great, but I’m not going to kid you. To do it right will take time. For instance, I just wanted to take my whole photo folder and dump it there. You can’t do that. You can transfer every photo from a folder, no matter how many there are, but it won’t take folders. So, getting it all in there will take time. (At least you can’t do folders right now. Valet is coming this spring and that will change everything.)
However, it’s good to take time. I decided to dump about 300 photos in there as my first bite. I individually name tagged one photo and then hit Auto Face Recognition. It took me awhile to train the program the difference between the 50 or so people I had dumped on it. If I’d taken things a little slower, it would have been easier, but I don’t do things by half measures. From now on, all I’ll have to do is confirm the faces it recognizes and straighten it out when it gets something wrong.
To be honest, I’m still just learning the program. I had been under the impression I didn’t need it, until I started doing digital sorting jobs for my clients. I didn’t want to be stuck with the limited tools in Microsoft and I didn’t want to buy enough Forever storage to hold everything a client passed on to me. Now I don’t know how I’d live without it.
The very best part is this. When it comes time to transfer your images from Historian and Forever, they are fully integrated, so everything you did to organize your photos in Historian will show up on Forever. That does not happen when I upload directly from my Microsoft files. Oh happy days!!
If you have digital mess, then you’re going to want Historian! Let’s talk about it. Give me a call at 972-971-5263!
Remember when getting your printed photos was fun. You took pictures with a camera, not your phone. You used film, not an SD card. You couldn’t look at or share the photo until the film was developed. You’d gather up all your rolls of film and take them to the drug store to get printed. They took your photos and sent them to a lab and a few days later, you could have your photos. Seeing what you shot was like reliving your vacation or event. You even loved the bad photos.
Photo printing became big business and getting your photos back fast became the gold standard. Eventually, we all expected to get photos back in an hour, but instead of a technician in a lab developing your photos, you had some high school kid running the film through a machine that may or may not have been properly maintained, so those pictures might or might not be worth the paper they were printed on.
Along Came Digital
In my opinion, digital cameras were not an improvement. Suddenly, a whole new layer of challenges stood between me and my photographs. Yes, I know all about the improved photo quality and some people might like all that editing, but I liked dropping it off at the drug store and waiting a few day for the photos.
I’ve tried a lot of things since the advent of digital photography – printing the photos myself, taking a disc to the drug store or big box store and I’ve used SO many of the online photo printing services that I could not start to name them all.
An Education in Exploitation
Then a couple of years ago I discovered Forever and it has totally changed my outlook on the whole process, from where I store my images to where I get them printed and why. Have you ever wondered why so many places are so eager to print your photos and why they are willing to do it for such a cheap price? Try reading one of those terms and agreements that pop up as you fill in the blanks on your order. That would be an eye-opening experience.
Basically, when you download your photos to Shutterfly, Snapfish, MixBook, Costco, Walgreens – you name it, you sign an agreement which transfers the rights to your photos to that company. In turn, they do print photos for you on the cheap, but in return, they’ll use those photos for all kinds of things you never dream your photos would be subjected to. We’ve all heard horror stories about people seeing the photos they post on Facebook ending up in an ad campaign or on the dark web or other equally bad scenarios. The same thing happens when you upload your photos for printing.
And print quality? Once I spent a day editing a set of gorgeous vacation photos. I sent them off to Snapfish and eagerly awaited their delivery. The images I sent were sharp, crisp and beautiful. The images I got back were hazy. I’d been in the photography business long enough at that point to know something had happened to my images since I edited them and I was right. The company compressed all the photos before printing, because they could only handle up to a certain resolution. Sure it was all there in the terms and agreements, but who reads those.
So Now I Know
Then I found Forever. Instead of loading my photos onto a commercial site where who know what would happen to them, I load them into my very own online storage that I own. Nobody will ever mine my photos for advertising, sell them for stock photmpress them. When I want to print, I just choose the photos I want out of my account and order whatever size photo I want.
And here’s a tip. You know those letters and numbers on the back of some photos. Ever wonder who makes those up? Ever try to read them and decide what they mean. You can actually control what that says with Forever. That’s a big help.
Another Choice
So, you may be thinking to yourself, but I don’t WANT to store my photos on Forever. I just want to print them! OK, fine! But I have another option. Don’t go to the big box stores of online photo processing. You can print your photos with Creative Memories. Amazing quality, no compression, and yes you can control the print on the back of the photos.
What’s more, you’ll get your images back in these cool little plastic boxes that keeps them all nice and neat until you use them in your scrapbook. Then they are great for storing embellishments. I love them!!
When you are considering how you are going to handle your memory keeping, please consider me. I have all the answers you will ever need and sometime I have more than one way to do what you want. Come back next and let’s do some more memory keeping together.
My Saturday highlight was FOREVER’s Pet Milestones Online Event, but I started my day at the scrapbooking table. I’m working on a personal album, because I will have a client’s album to start soon, and I want to be caught up with my own stuff. Over the weekend I got up to October 2022, so I only have a few more pages to go.
My bestie is a Memory Keeper, too, so she joined me to watch the Milestones program. She doesn’t do it as a business, but she is her family’s historian and has been working with me on albums for years. However, I think she’s about to abandon the traditional scrapbooking route and embrace the digital side of things, because her sons have no interest in her carefully created scrapbooks, but they dig digital.
She enjoyed the Pets focus of the presentation, because even though she’s inherited all her family’s media and memorabilia, her phone is full of cat photos and videos. A number of the segments were devoted to auto print projects and we were both fascinated with how quickly they could be print ready. I still enjoy the creative process, but for those who just want to get it done, Auto Print is auto-amazing!
After the hour long program it was time for lunch. We decided to try the new seafood restaurant around the corner. The Anchor is a casual restaurant and bar. There’s a patio, but it was a bit brisk for that on Saturday, and there’s a bar, but we were there to eat.
You go to the counter to order, get a number to display on your table and then they deliver the food to you. I opted for a shrimp basket and margarita. The food is affordable, but the drinks are a little pricey in my opinion. I guess one makes up for the other. However, both food and drinks were great.
I’m sure they will do fine on that busy corner, but I found the layout a little disappointing. The primary view is the business end of the restaurant, including a peek into the double door leading into the kitchen and the utility sink. Very utilitarian and it certainly embraced the industrial décor vibe, but I’d rather not look at it.
Then it was time to go shopping. I still had birthday coupons burning a hole in my pocket, so we went to Firewheel, where I could use them all. First stop, DSW! I walked out of the store with a new pair of shoes for all of $10. Then on to Kirkland’s, where I scored a 20% off deal on the cute rabbit in the meme above. Next stop was Chico’s and they had a valentine-themed top on the clearance rack. I hadn’t had any valentine-themed clothes for awhile and decided I’d get it for next year. I only had to contribute a few dollars to go along with my coupon. Last coupon stop was White House|Black Market. My coupon would have almost covered a cute pair of earrings, but I opted for a gorgeous bracelet which would take a few more dollars out of my pocket, but guess what! I had earned enough in their loyalty program over the years to pay the balance! Score!!
You work up a thirst when you’re coupon shopping! Or maybe it was the fried shrimp? Anyway, we went to Sonic to grab a soda and the server overheard us talking about my birthday coupons and gave me a large drink for 99 cents. Another score! Then we made our way to the plaza to enjoy the fountain (and a little people watching!) Then it was time to go home.
Lazy Sunday
Sunday was a quiet day. We visited Lutheran church and marked it off the list, which was too bad, since it is so close to home, but it didn’t meet any of our criteria, except perhaps for the decoration of their sanctuary, but that wasn’t enough to get us back.
We had a few stops to make before we went home. Deb and I had visited Tuesday Morning on the way home from Firewheel and I saw a few things I thought Bill might like. I was right and we did buy a Cuisinart frying pan, to replace the scratched up thing we needed to replace, a table cloth and Bill found a treat he wanted to try. Next was Costco for beverages and Bill found a few other things he wanted to try. Then we enjoyed some of our favorite fast food, Cane’s!
At home, Bill retired to the sofa for a little nap and I hit the scrapbooking table. And then the weekend was over.
The upcoming weekend I will be going to a dance competition with my bestie. She’s going to dance and I’m going to be her dresser and moral support. Come back next week for a report on the world of competitive dance, after traveling to NYC and enjoying some memory-keeping.
jane sadek 