Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Snowflakes

Happy Winter! Outside our windows here in Danbury, snow falls thick and fast today, and is piling up nicely in the parking lot. Estimates of accumulation are jumping from 1-3 inches to 3-5 inches to 5-9 inches. Who knows.

According to Wikipedia, the highest seasonal total snowfall in the United States was in the 1998-1999 winter season at the Mount Baker Ski Area near Bellingham, WA. A total of 1,140 inches (29 meters) of snow fell there that winter! That’s 95 feet of snow! That’s about 1 foot of snow a day, every day, for 3 months straight! Yikes!!

If you’re watching some of the white flaky stuff fall past your windows today, take a moment to find out about these tiny little fairy flakes. Caltech has a website dedicated to snowflakes and snow crystals; what they are, where they come from and how they’re created. Pretty cool!

And the National Snow and Ice Data Center (nsidc.org) has a page on, “All About Snow.”

Labels: Danbury, local

Monday, December 22, 2008

Who knew?!?

Alan bakes! When he was growing up, his stepfather's mom Jane Rigby had a long standing tradition of making Christmas sugar cookies. When she passed, a young Alan took the reins and has baked the cookies using Jane's recipe ever since. Typically, Alan would make them on Christmas Eve but this year he broke tradition and made them earlier so he could share with his RMI colleagues. "Jane was a very important person in my life and I honor her every year by doing this."

Happy Holidays everyone...

Labels: employees

Friday, December 12, 2008

Consumer Reports goes to the mall

In an effort to reach new targeted markets Consumer Reports was in 16 malls around the Boston area. In 3 of the malls they set up kiosks called Smart Labs which had 6 stations housing LED monitors and free access to ConsumerReports.org. The idea was to get younger shoppers, who might not otherwise do consumer research before making a purchase, to log onto their online service. The other malls had stations where they could get passes for 24 hour free access to the service, which ran from November 25th through December 7th.

Labels: client, publishers

Happy cancer-free birthday Martin!

Monday, December 1st was Martin's last Chemo treatment. And being that tomorrow is his birthday, we thought we'd throw him a Happy Cancer Free Birthday Bash!

At 12:15 today we gathered in the conference room and surprised him with some of his favorites: soup, salad, middle eastern food, and a special cake made out of Lorna Doone cookies. The best part - as a present, all 40'ish of us pooled together and donated a whopping $1272 to the Danbury Hospital Praxair Cancer Center in his honor... A gift back to the organization that gave Martin back to us. (If you'd like to contribute to Danbury Hospital as well, further donations can be made online here.)

Happy Birthday Martin. Here's to many, many more!

UPDATE: Martin has decided to match our employees' contributions and will be gifting a corporate donation of $1300 to Danbury Hospital as well.

This holiday season, caroling gets extreme

By now I'm sure many of you have seen our Santa's Little Helpers holiday video of RMI's participation in the Extreme Caroling Association... Now, take a look at some photos from behind the scenes as we spent a few hours doing push-ups, throwing hot chocolate, and screaming in the office. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't an absolute blast.

And we were all totally impressed with everyone's acting abilities. There were just two lines scripted in the entire video, the rest was all spontaneous! But, no worries - until we find a proper manager and feature film to star in, we'll ignore Hollywood's beckoning call and stick to our day jobs diligently devising mail plans, selling lists, and pushing orders. We are however signing autographs on demand, with leaderboard ad space available at $35/M. Contact Hillary for more details.

So, what do you think... if RMI was to hold an Academy Awards, who would you vote for?

Labels: employees, video

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Nonprofit economic landscape

In a recently published report by the DMA Nonprofit Federation, our colleagues in the nonprofit community gave all of us an in depth look at the current challenges they are facing in this uncertain economic period. They speak to recent results, current issues, and future plans.

The survey takes a look at results for the month of October 2008. Of the 115 nonprofits who returned the survey 61% said that their response rates were worse in this period compared to the same period last year. Some 40% said that they were receiving smaller gifts and fewer individual donors, and some 34% said they received larger gifts, but from fewer individual donors.

Continue to read my cliff notes of the more specific responses provided by the organizations...

Labels: DMA Nonprofit Federation

Monday, December 8, 2008

Thank you to the HVDMA

On Friday the Hudson Valley DMA hosted their annual holiday luncheon at the beautiful Tamarack Country Club. Along with spending time to socialize and network with fellow colleagues we were also able to hear a wonderful speech by Amy Altmann of Boardroom about our friend and coworker Laura Smith who passed away earlier this year...

The Hudson Valley awarded Laura a posthumous Founders Award. Rich Leary, Debbie McLain, Dan Arnold and I accepted the award on behalf of the RMI family.

We are truly honored by the award and by the HVDMA naming the scholarship at Pace University in Laura’s name.

The HVDMA was a very important part of Laura’s career, she valued the HVDMA board and all the friends and colleagues that she worked with and met as part of the HVDMA events.

Thank you again for the wonderful tribute.

You can view more pictures of the day and a video of Amy Altmann's speech here.

Labels: HVDMA

Thursday, December 4, 2008

RMI Holiday Luncheon

Yesterday was the RMI Holiday Luncheon at the Ridgewood Country Club in Danbury. I sat at a table with Rich Leary, so you can imagine my time was especially entertaining. But asides from that, there were a few special moments to be acknowledged...

Every year at this time we recognize our employees who have been with us for increments of 5 years. This year we honored Kathy Englund, our Human Resources extraordinaire, for her 20 years of service with the company. With that came an engraved, framed certificate, a travel voucher, a few long time friends (like fellow 20 year vets Tally, Martin, Debbie, and Dan), and probably some gray hairs.

We also received our first installment of the "Stein Stimulus Package", a little giffy from the man himself to boost the economy and aid in our holiday cheer. And luckily no, it was not a membership to the Jelly of the Month Club. Just another one of the little perks of working at a great company.

All in all it was a great time; thanks to Tally, Martin and Kathy for throwing a fabulous event like they do every year!

Check out pictures and videos of the day here.

Labels: employees, RMI

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

A wedding in the works

More nuptials are in the wings for another RMI staffer. But we have a few months. Catherine Ryan, our Data & Reporting Specialist, is getting married on May 1st, 2009 to her long time friend Carlos Dos Santos. What's truly beautiful about this is that they have been friends since the third grade. Sometimes you just know early on.

We'll keep you posted on the wedding arrangements as we know them. Sounds like a contest in the making. We all get to vote on every aspect of the wedding like what they do on the Today Show, only we won't pay for it!

Labels: employees

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Cross your fingers

I'm not sure if we all tried to brace ourselves for bad news from retailers this past weekend just so that we might be happily surprised, but it certainly seems like the consumers came through. The word being used is "energetic" to describe the Thanksgiving weekend sales - both at stores and online.

Cyber Monday, on the other hand, has been referred to as “Cyber History” by some. In today’s world the majority of online shoppers have Internet access in their homes and can browse at their leisure, rather than cramming it in at work (which makes me wonder if that’s why sales were better than expected).

All in all the doom and gloom forecasts about all of the consumers who would keep their wallets closed until retailers severely slashed their prices seemed a little premature. Certainly there were bargain hunters out there, but at least they were buying. With a shortened holiday shopping season this year, the market taking its plunge, unemployment creeping up and foreclosures continuing, we need all the good news we can get. Let's all hope that this isn't just a flash in the pan and that marketers are being very smart in listening to their customers and giving them what they want.

Labels: e-commerce, holiday, retail