The daffodils are blooming, the days are getting longer, holiday catalogues are appearing through letter boxes and people are coming out of hibernation. Spring must be here!
Welcome indeed to the R.E.D. News, we hope you’re all well and happy and had a good Winter. We at R.E.D. have. Helen, John, and the children had a great Christmas holiday visiting family in the USA, Nicola attended her graduation, and Emma and JB excelled at our Ten Pin Bowling evening!
There were plenty of chocolate winners from the last anagram,
but the first to arrive, and hence the person to whom the biggest
bar went, was Shaunagh Cowell. Well done everybody. The answer,
for those who were completely bamboozled, was SEASONS GREETINGS.
Many of you will have spoken to our Nicola, who has settled in very well and who has made a huge difference with her wicked sense of humour !
We would now like to welcome Rachael to our team. Rachael comes from a training and advising background and will be with us for two days a week to help with our increasing office administration. Her skills will be put to good use and we wish her well here.
Both Emma and John Barry have moved house recently, independent
of each other, you understand! Emma’s now in Redhill, and
John and Lisa are in Woking. Everybody seems very happy with their
new purchases and we wish them well in their new homes!
Don’t forget the next user group meeting will be just a few short weeks away on May 20. We’ll send you an invitation and details nearer the time, but put it in your diary now so it doesn’t get booked up.
If you have an ambition to speak at the meeting, or would like
to pass on any useful information to the other members, do let
us know. We will also prepare a user-group survey, so if you have
any questions you would like included do let us know.
You should be receiving in the post from the Royal Mail an order form for Database 99. You should send it back to them requesting your file in FIXED FORMAT. Then do absolutely nothing with the disk until the date shown on its label!
If you use Mailsort or Presstream and you don’t hear from the Royal
Mail do get in touch with them to request your update.
The Royal Mail has launched what they claim to be "an exciting new service". It may be very good, but we’re not so sure about "exciting"! Anyway, it’s designed to allow you to find addresses and postcodes on the Internet, along with details of their other services. The address is:
If you do a reasonable amount of direct marketing, you may be interested in the Direct Marketing Fair. It’s quite soon, March 16, 17, 18 at Wembley and the address for information is:
There are various seminars and talks (not free) as well as
the exhibition (free), and we see that Wednesday is the telemarketing
day.
Paid Subs Import
Following the success and immediate take-up by many companies of the batch credit card processing and post code updates, we’ve turned our attention to paid subscriptions coming from outside sources and we are very pleased to announce the new Paid Subs Import facility.
Up until now, the import has been for names, addresses and demographic information, plus a free sub, and it’s been very successful and used enormously. With the increase in popularity in on-line subscriptions, we have evolved with the times and the paid sub import can pick up the amount paid, the rate, the source, set up a cash record, set up an invoice and do all manner of deeply exciting things from a text file. Call us for more information.
Subs in Windows
As you may have gathered, we’re close to launching, after many years and much development and testing, our Windows software. It is in the process of going to one user (brave soul), who will report back on how easy it is to use, how easy to install, and other information which will help us ensure the new software is wonderful!
If you are interested in being involved in the evaluation programme,
please contact us for details, specifications, etc.
We are currently prototyping our very own web site. We will be packing lots of information on to it and use it as an extra arm for support. We plan that it will include FAQ’s, downloadable documentation, on-line technical information, and other exciting things!
We have put our first few test pages onto the World Wide Web (complete with a photograph of our smiling faces). The R.E.D. web address is
The annual education day organised by the BPA is on June 7th and will be at the Great George Centre Conference Centre in London. Details from the BPA on 0171 734 7111. Also worth a look is the BPA web-site at:
Yes, we shall be offering biscuits and laughs on our stand
in the Specialist Services Pavillion at the Total Publishing Show
again this year, it’s July 6-7. We had such fun seeing you
all last year, do make a point of coming to see us!
…. Probably not what you’re thinking! JB has recently celebrated his ten year anniversary at R.E.D. No wonder he’s "a man who knows!"
Also, and possibly crucially, there is a new service we’re
now offering called The Ten Point System
Health Check. Take a look at
the enclosed leaflet for more details. It could turn you into
the hero of the day!
Circulation Management is an increasingly vital asset to any publishing company requiring many skills and offering daily challenges.
We feel that those of you who’ve had RE.D. training should get something official to show the world that you have an R.E.D. training day under your belt. To this end, we shall be issuing training certificates for you to pin up! We will be producing these into the future, but if you have had training in the past and would like to claim your certificate, please let us know.
While on the subject of training, we’ve now produced some
very pretty training booklets to keep the trainees entertained
and on their toes! They’re based on a "fill it in as
you go along" system.
We are in search of a volunteer venue in central London for our next user group meeting on May 20. The room would need to be big enough to seat about 40 – 45 people, and have access to a few kettles for the all-important tea and coffee breaks! Please ring if you think you might be able to help. Thanks.