We know that change can be hard, but this change is really exciting.  All summer we have been hard at work on a major upgrade to Catalog Choice.  In addition to several great new features described below, we are sprucing up the site design, streamlining the process of making opt-outs, and giving you more ways to reduce unwanted mail.  First, we are dropping the bright green background and opting for a lighter white background for the site.  Second, we are dropping the blue navigation bar in favor of a dark red and earth green navigation bar.  Those are the simple design changes we are making.  Get used to the new look here on the blog.  The whole site will be upgraded in mid-September.

Enough with the design, the really important changes are:

1. Improved Dashboard and status monitoring.  Look for any requests that require action on your part to complete.  Sometimes the opt-out takes a little back and forth before it is done.  We are also implementing a feature to automatically email you an update of your dashboard if there are actions for you to take or if there is an update to the status of your requests.
2. Calculating the Environmental Benefits Working with our colleagues at the Environmental Defense Fund, we have used their Paper Calculator to estimate the benefit our community is having on the environment.  The Environmental Benefits show you the amount of natural resources our community has saved as well as your individual contribution.

3. Introducing the Activity Statement (sorry no screen shot yet).  The Activity Statement is your complete record of preference choices that you have made with a company.  It will include every unique name – address pair and the various customer numbers that you have documented.  The Activity Statement lists when you made the request, when the company received it, any message that we have received from the company, and your reply.  For each name – address pair, we list the status of the request.  We hope that they all become confirmed, but we have learned that sometimes companies don’t reply to your request.
4. Automated Dispute Process.  Some of you have contacted our customer service department to let us know of companies that have not honored your request.  Our customer service team diligently contacts the company and gets your name removed in the cases.  But with the holiday season just around the corner and the coverage of our service increasing, we needed to automate the process of you filing a dispute.  With the new release, you will be able to file a formal complaint with any company that violates their privacy policy and does not honor your request.  We are working on formalizing relationships with specific government entities so that your complaint can also be forwarded to the authorities.
5. Cool Companies Respect Your Choice. We are upgrading the Cool Companies section of our site which highlights those companies that are doing a good job honoring opt-out choices.  Cool Companies will become Respected Choice Certified companies.  More on this exciting initiative later.
6. More titles, more categories.  We have received over 650,000 suggestions for new title additions.  Many of these suggestions are for the same company but often spelled slightly differently.  With the help of an algorithm developed by Vladimir Levenshtein we disambiguated the suggestions to determine the important titles to add to our service.  After visiting the website of thousands of suggested titles, we systematically added new titles to the service.  Catalog Choice currently includes more than 3,000 titles and counting.  In the All Companies section of the site, you will also find short-cuts for Phonebooks, credit card offers, and coupons.
7. Making Opt-Outs Easier.  As our faithful members know, sometimes we have to open the opt-out or contact form for a company and you have to enter the information to opt-out.  We hate this process, but for some companies it is our only option.  In September when we release the new version of the service, we will provide you with the name, mailing address, private email address, and any special instructions on the page when we present the company’s opt-out form.  This will make it much easier to fill out the form.

There is one more really big change …. stay tuned for the announcement next week.

As always, we invite your comments.

Many catalog mailers are cautiously dipping their toes into the pool of social media, trying to figure out how to translate these new communication channels into sales. But Urban Outfitters is diving in and embracing social media with impressive results. The trendy apparel company, which has three popular brands – Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters – scrapped earlier plans to boost catalog circulation and instead is investing in “technology and people.” Despite flat-lining catalog mailings, the company’s direct sales recently jumped 20%, boosted by a 28% increase in website traffic. With numbers to back their success, Urban Outfitters is a great example of how a company can reduce reliance on catalogs by embracing social media as an important part of the marketing mix. To get the full scoop, check out this article.

We strive to make the opt-out process as easy as possible.  Your time is the ultimate measure of our success.  Based on our research, we have found that it can take around 10 minutes to find the contact information for a company, read their privacy policy to determine what you have to do to opt-out and then fulfill the request.  That does not count the time you spend doing it over when they fail to honor your first request.

We estimate that you can complete the Catalog Choice opt-out form in around 15 seconds.  This tweet from our follower @AllportEditions shows that it took them only 12 seconds per catalog to enter their requests.

What does this all translate to in terms of value:

Assuming an average of 10 minutes per request, it would take 2.8 million hours to submit the 17 million requests already recorded at Catalog Choice.  By comparison, at a rate of 15 seconds per title at Catalog Choice, we estimate that it has taken 70,800 hours for our Members to enter the 17 million requests.  Assuming a household wage of $5 per hour (just being conservative here) , the Catalog Choice service has saved $13.8 million in household costs to date.

This email message arrived last week.  Gay, the author, was happy to have me republish it on our blog.  We welcome everyones story.

Thank you SO much for the help in reducing my carbon load. 12 years ago, I lived on a ranch and used catalogs for my Christmas shopping – whoa, did my name ever get spread around. I have always been environmentally conscious, helping to start a recycling program in 1970 in Palo Alto, CA. I rode a bicycle to work for many years and now ride a Vespa. The catalogs were my last big problem to take care of and you have done an amazing, wonderful job. Thank you.