PastPerfect Newsletter News from the World's Most Popular Museum Software Company

January 2012 In This Issue - Upcoming Online Training Class - Managing Contacts, Donations & Membership - What's New at our Knowledge Base - Making New Years Resolutions? We have a few suggestions! - NEW PastPerfect-Online Blog!

Upcoming Online Training Class - Managing Contacts, Donations & Membership by Jennessa Reed When: February 7-9, 2012 from 9:30am to 12 noon, ET Where: Anywhere you want! A comfy spot in your office or home at your computer with high speed internet access What: "Managing Contacts, Donations & Membership with PastPerfect 5.0" Class Online Training classes for PastPerfect 5.0 are back in session! Join us for our next class, "Managing Contacts, Donations & Membership with PastPerfect 5.0," scheduled for February 7-9, 2012 from 9:30 AM to 12 Noon ET. Online Training enables you to learn PastPerfect without the need or expense of travel. An experienced PastPerfect trainer will demonstrate how to use the program to its full potential. You will be able to see the trainer's PastPerfect on your own computer and hear the trainer online or over a long distance conference call. Course Description: For most organizations, good contact management is more than a full-time job. This class will teach you how to streamline many of the essential tasks. Instruction includes creating contacts and memberships, documenting donations, dues payments and volunteer hours, and focusing mailings by creating Contact Lists and mail merge letters. Tips on emailing contacts and keeping your data safe will also be discussed. Class attendees will receive a FREE copy of the "Managing Contacts, Donations & Membership with PastPerfect 5.0" training CD, which complements this course. Online training classes are priced at $69/person for AASLH Members ($86.25 for non-members). Seats for this class are limited, so please call 1-800-562-6080 to reserve your seat today. What's New at our Knowledge Base by Adam Stepansky Have you visited the newly redesigned PastPerfect Software Knowledge Base recently? We add and update articles all the time. You can find the Knowledge Base by going to our home page www.MuseumSoftware.com and clicking on the Knowledge Base button (at right) just under the "Need Help?" button. With a quick keyword search, you access articles that provide answers to frequently asked how-to questions, common errors and museum-related topics. Below are links to a couple of our latest articles. To find "When should I use the Archives catalog instead of the Library catalog ?" (as well as other Archives related articles), type Archives Catalog in the search field at the top right portion of the screen. The main Knowledge Base page also enables you to browse articles based on your PastPerfect version and other topics. To find more articles in that section, click on the section title to the right of the blue file folder icon. For instance, PastPerfect-Online users can find a wealth of information by clicking "PastPerfect-Online." When should I use the Archives catalog instead of the Library catalog ? How can I get my PastPerfect-Online records to be included in and rated higher with Google and Bing? What is the difference between Active Memberships and Current Memberships? Making New Years Resolutions? We have a few suggestions! by Brian Gomez Backup Your Data! Here at the support office we receive at least one call each week asking us to help an organization recover from a catastrophic failure of some sort or another. I’d say in about 70% of the cases, we are able to use their PastPerfect made backup to get the organization back on track! What about the other 30%? Most common response: My IT staff said that they were making backups and that we would be able to recover those backups, but it didn’t work. Another common one: We made backups to hard drive on the same computer that failed. And unfortunately: We didn’t know how to make backups. Please don’t be one of our 2012 Support Disasters and make PastPerfect backups regularly. Here is a Knowledge base article to show you how! http://hosted.comm100.com/KnowledgeBase/Article.aspx?siteId=45720&id=112 Do a good inventory. Inventory has got to be a priority for organizations of all sizes. Figuring out what you have, where it is stored and what’s missing is an ongoing challenge for all organizations. PastPerfect released a new module called Inventory Manager that allows you to automate many of the tasks associated with your inventory project. Whether you spot check or do complete inventories, you’ll benefit from the lists and mass update features available with this upgrade. Visit http://museumsoftware.com/invnmanager.shtml for details. Share your collection with the world. In March of 2011, Internet World Stats stated that North America has about 272 million internet users. If you could open your doors to just 1/10 of 1% of this population, you would have 3 people entering your museum EVERY MINUTE in 2012. If you have a website, they might know you exist, but are you providing them with access to exhibits or the collection? There are several ways to do it. It doesn’t have to be hard nor expensive. Check out http://www.PastPerfect-Online.com and see how others are sharing their collections. From the support office, we wish you a very happy 2012! NEW PastPerfect-Online Blog! by Stephanie Witt Did you know that there are over 350 museums worldwide that have uploaded over 1.9 million collection items to PastPerfect-Online? To help highlight some of the amazing items that you can find by searching on the PastPerfect-Online.com, we have a started a blog, and we want you to join in on the fun! Help us create an interactive community where you can see what other organizations have in their collection as well as share items that your museum has posted online. To submit an item from your collection to be featured on our blog, simply click the “Submit Your Items” button, fill out the form, and include a link to the PastPerfect-Online record for your item. We look forward to your visit at http://pastperfect-online.tumblr.com!

PastPerfect Software Inc. 300 N Pottstown Pike Suite 200 Exton, PA 19341 1-800-562-6080 news@museumsoftware.com www.MuseumSoftware.com