From the personal blog of Derek Hatchard (Crowd Space founder):

http://derekhat.com/manage-your-christmas-card-list/

Our Christmas card mailing list is kept in a little address book that is full of entries that have been crossed out as addresses, marital status, and family members have all changed.  And despite good intentions of keeping everything in order, friendships are rarely formed alphabetically.

I was thinking today it would be handy to use an online tool to replace that little tattered address book when it struck me:  CROWD SPACE WOULD BE PERFECT FOR THAT!

Crowd Space (http://crowdspace.net) is the flagship product of my little web company.  It’s perhaps a tad embarrassing that it never occurred to me before that Crowd Space would be ideal for Christmas mailing list management.  Here’s a quick rundown of why Crowd Space is a great solution for this:

1. Crowd Space lets you track individuals and group them into families.

2. Crowd Space stores addresses and can print mailing labels.

3. Crowd Space lets you define custom fields so you could, for example, keep track of which people get Christmas cards, Christmas letters, Christmas emails, or small Christmas gifts.

4. Crowd Space sends email so you can mail your holiday email greetings directly from Crowd Space.

5. Crowd Space also tracks birthdays and prints birthday reports so after Christmas you can use it to manage your birthday card mailings all year long!

In order to better serve all Crowd Space users, we began phasing out our advertising-supported free-to-use accounts on December 9, 2009.  In October 2009 we introduced a paid (ad-free) subscription option that includes customer support.  We are now adding a new subscription option and offering major discounts for existing users.

What Are My Options?

We are now offering a new Personal account for $7/month in addition to the existing Standard account for $180/year (or $18/month).

If you are currently using a free account, your account will remain free until February 1, 2010.  If you upgrade to a Standard subscription by December 23, 2009, your first 3 months are free and the next 6 months will be half price.

Go to https://my.crowdspace.net/administration/subscription.aspx to upgrade your account.

Like Free?  Partner With Us!

Become a Crowd Space affiliate partner and tell others about Crowd Space.  If you sign up 9 new customers, your account will be free!  Go to http://crowdspace.net/affiliates for all the details.

Why the Change?

The ad-supported option for Crowd Space was designed to let small groups with constrained budgets enjoy the benefits of a full featured Crowd Space account.  Offering a product like Crowd Space is never truly free – we need to bring in revenue to provide a top quality service.  The vision was for the attention of your group members to serve as a type of currency (we put ads in the emails you send to your group and the advertisers pay us, thus generating revenue for our company without your group having to dip into its budget).  I had hoped this approach would be sustainable for Crowd Space but it simply is not.  Although I am personally disappointed to no longer be offering free Crowd Space accounts, I am confident that our new Personal plan is affordable enough for even the smallest groups.

If you have questions, you can email me directly at derek@webradius.com.

Derek Hatchard
CEO, Web Radius Inc. / CrowdSpace.net

Now that Crowd Space has officially launched, we want to celebrate with everyone.  Come enjoy some free food and prizes courtesy of Crowd Space:

Monday, July 20, 2009
Noon – 2pm
Centennial Park Upper Picnic Area
Moncton, NB, Canada

If we get at least 250 people out to the BBQ, we’re going to give away an MP3 player to someone who blogs, tweets, or otherwise spreads the word online about the launch.

If you have a business card, be sure to drop it in our bucket for the prize draws.

Here’s a map of exactly where we’ll be: http://bit.ly/monctonbbq

Update:  Here’s a poster you can print out to remind yourself and those around you about the BBQ: http://crowdspace.net/files/launchbbq.pdf

(Photo courtesy of besighyawn)

Well, Crowd Space is officially open for business.  A few important links:

https://my.crowdspace.net is the login page

http://crowdspace.uservoice.com is our feedback forum

http://crowdspace.net/blog is the official Crowd Space blog where news and useful resources will be posted

We’re @crowdspace on Twitter (http://twitter.com/crowdspace)