Create a community with Timebanking

I recently came across an article on a timebank in Lousville that, once I got past the difficult-to-read font, was heartwarming. The idea of this group of 30 random individuals coming together to share what they can do with eachother and begin creating the threads of a community is very cool (here is the original article).

So I went ahead and did a little research. Timebanking essentially builds on the principle that everyone has something to give. By putting a group of people together and each offering their skills, everyone can get something they need for something they easily can do and build relationships in the process.

For instance, one invidual may be a great handyman, but have no idea how to fix a computer. In that group, there could be someone in need of some handiwork and someone who is good at and enjoys fixing computers. If enough skills match up, everyone can win.

While writing this, I’m not really sure how well this will work in real life…where there be one person who accepts help from many without giving back? Or individuals with skills that no one needs? How does the group fabric stay positive and continue to grow over time? I really have no idea, but it does appeal to me.

It also seems that a personal concierge could benefit so many individuals in the group that it would be a challenge to not be taken advantage of. 

If this is of interest to you, check out timebanks.org and you can create a timebank or likely find timebanks in your area. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some timebanks popped up on MeetUp.

Favorite Online Stationary Sites

Around the holidays, I always kick myself for not bookmarking all the fantastic stationary sites I come across while checking out all the great custom stationary gifts and greeting cards my personal concerge clients receive. While I have had favorite sites in the past, many have gone out of business and it is always nice to have a few options. Here the notable sites from this season.

Minted – A client received customized notebooks with her grandchildren’s pictures on the front this year from Minted. The books were of excellent quality and had a fun design. While I have yet to use minted personally, I love their product selection and was impressed by what I saw.

MixBook - I got a photo card from a friend through this company and the card stood out among the pile of greeting cards. It was on an excellent thick stock, was beautifully designed, and the MixBook logo wasn’t obnoxiously prominent. Worth checking out.

Shutterfly and 123Print - These are great fallbacks. Especially for cheap, but good looking greeting cards. While I have used Shutterfly many times in the past and like the quality of their books and cards, I went with 123Print this year for two reasons: they offered an “upload your own design” card without any additions (which I could not find on Shutterfly) and there is more freedom to customize text and text placement with the editor. That said, Shutterfly has better free envelopes and great deals.

Let Clients Pay Online Without Eating Credit Card Fees

There are so many cool and interesting developments occurring with tech in the financial industry right now. If they succeed, these are surely going to upset the financial giants. In addition to Simple (banking made easy with no fees and the best rates by using tech to move your money around to the best accounts in the country automatically), I just found the very exciting Dwolla.

After reading an excellent article on Dwolla in the Business Insider (check it out here), I thought this was worth sharing:

By strategically partnering with a financial institution and financial services company (investors that do the credit and debit processing for banks), Dwolla allows you and your clients to make payments directly from your/their bank accounts without any of the usual fees usually associated with credit/debit card processing.

Think of Paypal or Square. Great ideas that are built on top of networks like Visa and Mastercard. Dwolla created their own network so, as long your clients sign up for Dwolla, money can be exchanged for only $0.25 a transaction. Just think! No minimum charge + that pesky %. This is especially helpful when you are doing large transactions.

Now you get to keep your hard-earned money instead of giving up a chunk of it to the credit card processor!

 

A Concierge Scam

I’m curious how many of you have received something similar to this email?

Hello,

I will be in the country with a couple of my co-workers and during our stay we will need your concierge service for the duration of 12 days.what are the various ways you charges for your service, is it hourly or daily. we will need to be assisted on our daily shopping outings and errands and also let me know if you offer chauffeur service too.

Thanks

It’s a total scam and I’ve now received it at a variety of my concierge email addresses over the past month and all from different email addresses. I naively responded to the first one and it turned into one of those “give me your address and bank name so I can send you money” deals. I told my mail program that it was spam and have spammed every other one that has come through.

Has anyone else had this happen?

A Mint.com for Insurance?

 

Just got into the beta testing for CakeHealth. This may be getting cliche to use, but my immediate impression is that CakeHealth is the Mint.com for Insurance. 

Why?

Like Mint does for your banking, CakeHealth does for your insurance. It accesses your insurance records and then helps you manage all of your healthcare expenses, claims, and upcoming appointments in a very clean user interface for free.

And I’m pretty sure that CakeHealth is taking a page from the Mint book because not only is the idea similar, but so is the design and the website sales pages. 

Well. I love Mint and cannot live without it. Perhaps CakeHealth will become another indispensable resource.

Also. I’ve set up Mint for many of my personal concierge clients and, if this ends up being a great product, it would be a great added benefit I could give my residential concierge clients as well. 

Check it out!

The “Orbitz for Insurance”

I came across Leaky this weekend. Don’t let the name throw you, this service may save you a lot of $$$. It just launched on August 7th, 2011 and, unfortunately, is not available yet in my city…but it sure looks pretty. If you check it out, please let me know what you think!

Image from Lifehacker article on Leaky: “Leaky Quickly Compares Car Insurance Qoutes from Practically Every Provider.”

Become a Google Master

It’s funny. Google has been around for a LONG time now and searching the internet with Google or any other search engine should be second nature to all. Yet I still seem to impress people with my Google search skills. Odd.

If you haven’t yet become a Google Master, there’s still hope! It’s not too hard to learn a few of the tricks to make searching successful the first time and find that impossible item that no one else can find. While there is a lot more Google can do, use these few tricks and you’ll drastically improve your search results:

 

Use basic operators to tell the search engine how to connect or separate words

 OR or | - Google will automatically search for all the words you enter so use these to search for either word.

Example: best beach on maui | kauai and best beach on maui OR kauai. Please note that OR must be in caps.

“” - If you just enter a phrase, Google will search for the words as a phrase and individually. However, if you quote it, Google will search for exactly what is in the quotation (great for finding a movie/song by a memorable line!).

Example: “it’s like popcorn in the pan.” is a Jerry Maguire move quote – if you remove the quotations you’ll get sites on making popcorn.

 - - The minus tells Google to exclude a word from the search results. 

Example: best beach in maui -snorkeling will not include any beaches that describe snorkeling. Note: there is no space after the minus symbol.

* - The asterisk is a wildcard to represent a missing word. Use it and google will fill in the potential word.

Example: “it’s like * in the pan.” may find a few other qoutes but does find the popcorn qoute as well.

.. - If you put a double dot between two numbers, Google will search within that timeframe.

Example: Portland Flood 2006…2011 will only provide information on floods from 2006 to 2011. Note: there are no spaces.

 

Dig deeper once you have a direction

Let Google do a search for more specific content. Google will exclude vast parts of information and dig deeper, if you tell it where to look or what to look for. And these are the operators you will need to know for that purpose:

site: - Searches a specific site only. Nice if the site doesn’t have an in-site search.

Example: site:amazon.com google master will find anything with google master on Amazon.com.

inurl: or intext: - Will search for words in a url or in a webpage text respectively. This is nice if you only remember part of an obscure url or need to find something particular in text. If you add “all” in front of it, all the terms have to appear in the search results.

Example: inurl:concierge info OR allinurl:concierge info

related: – If your client LOVES Pottery Barn and wants something like it, try this.

Example: related:http://www.potterybarn.com/

 

So there is a lot more, but if you remember these 9 operators you’ll definitely see search improvement. And, as a residential concierge, you’ll impress the heck out of your clients!