Making a list and checking it twice

I mail out about 60 Christmas cards (and hand out another 15 or so) every year. Some years it felt like I didn't get a response from the people that I sent them too, which is frustrating. I put all this time and effort into the cards and I hear nothing back (and some of these people are MY family).

So last year I came up with a plan. I keep my addresses on an excel spreadsheet for ease of mail merge creation and by extension label printing. Last year I added a column - this column recorded whether or not I had received a card, note or call back. And because I am a dork I colour coded it. Blue means they communicated, yellow means they didn't. After two years of no communication you are on the chopping block. Like the soup Nazi on Seinfeld "NO CARD FOR YOU"

Exceptions are if you are blood relation (like my sister and parents)  or over 60 (some of my husbands great aunts are pretty old and enjoy the newsletters but can't respond for whatever reason).

Surprisingly last year there were quite a few more blue squares than I had thought. But we'll see this year............

ba humbug!