VoiceQuilt Messages On Facebook, A Tribute From Iraq And More.

Rachel's Grandpa with David-lex (when he was home on leave from Iraq)


It’s been quite a week. And it’s only Tuesday…

* On Monday, VoiceQuilt's Technical Team, led by Perry Flinn, made it easy for VoiceQuilt gift givers to share individual voice messages on Facebook. It’s incredibly fun, seamless and quite cool. While working on your VoiceQuilt, simply click on the Facebook "F". You can then post a heartwarming voice-based toast, tribute or favorite memory for everyone to enjoy.

* This morning, a VoiceQuilt gift giver named Rachel offered to share a voice-based tribute from a family member in Iraq. It's a very touching message and we're honored to feature it as VoiceQuilt's “message of the month” for December.

* This afternoon, we learned that East Forsyth High School, Class of 1973, created a VoiceQuilt to support a classmate named Rhonda recovering from a mysterious accident. Since VoiceQuilt was inspired by a get well situation, I love it when our service is used to create a cheering squad for someone going through a difficult time.

In short, it's been an exciting week already...

Personalized Holiday Gifts and VoiceQuilt

We’re big fans of personalized gifts. Have a few moments during the upcoming week? Get an early start and take advantage of some special discounts! Here are our favorites.

1.) Thank a carpool friend with a photo key ring. Save 25% at Snapfish with the coupon code MERRY2010.

2.) Send Grandma framed photo. ImageKind is relatively expensive but they’re offering a 25% discount when you use the promo code GIVETHANKS. Snapfish has a less expensive option, a simple panel photo frame that is under $20.

3.) Surprise the Aunts and Uncles with a photo ornament. Exposuresonline.com has a very good selection but – as far as we can tell -- no special discounts.

4.) Of course, our favorite personalized gifts combine photo and voice-based memories. Many VoiceQuilt gift givers will place a TinyPrints holiday card in a VoiceQuilt Christmas Photoframe keepsake. If you finish shopping at Tinyprints.com before tomorrow, you can save 20% off of all holiday cards and holiday party invites.

5.) For the super-savvy, there's always the VoiceQuilt Freebie. Why not sign up for one free day, line the kids up in the kitchen and have each call in their favorite memory with Dad? Simply download a free VoiceQuilt mp3 and surprise Dad with a different kind of holiday music...

Holidays, Family Memories and VoiceQuilt

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, thoughts often turn to family, turkey and memories. If you’re visiting with relatives next week, why not capture some stories? Ask Grandma to share the memories behind a favorite Thanksgiving dish or ask Dad to talk about holidays during wartime.

Bridget Poizner is a professional personal historian with a wonderful business called Save Their Story . She creates professional video biographies – usually by interviewing one family member and asking them to tell their life story.

If you’re serious about collecting family history, Bridget recommends preparing a list of open-ended interview questions ahead of time. That way, you can make the most of your conversation. Want more tips? Read more here.

Almost any holiday ritual can become rich with meaning. Just this week, a gift giver named Valerie asked us to extract voices from a short video of her father reading a Christmas story to his grandson. Valerie's Dad passed away a few months ago and she wanted a way to share this memory with others -- and to preserve her father's voice for generations to come.

We were proud to work with Valerie and are delighted to report that her father's voice will be played and preserved by one of our ivory photo frame keepsakes!

Why wait? Holidays are the perfect time to ask questions and preserve favorite memories.

More Friends, More VoiceQuilt Voice Messages = More Emotional Support

Forgive me for ranting, but Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal piece, “Beyond Facebook: the benefits of Deeper Friendships” really made me crabby.

The author assumes that friendships are binary: either deep or casual. She also assumes that Facebook friends are exclusively casual and that "deeper" friendships can only be maintained by face-to-face or phone communication.

“Constantly connected via Facebook and Twitter, you may feel like you have a lot of friends. But will they be your go-to friends during crisis?”

Don't most of us have both close and casual friends on Facebook? Moreover, life at VoiceQuilt has convinced me that emotional support can come from all quarters. A cheering squad of deep friends, casual friends and somewhere-in-between-friends is incredibly powerful. Just listen here.

Here is an excerpt from an email we received earlier this week from a gift giver named Emily.

• "My husband is going through a rough time at work so I had his friends call in and give him a "Pep Talk" which I put into his car this morning to surprise him on the way to work.”

VoiceQuilt's privacy policy doesn't allow us to listen to VoiceQuilt messages without the gift giver's permission. However, my intuition says that at least one caller shared inspirational words. I'll bet that at least one caller would have been deemed a "casual friend" by our Wall Street Journal writer. Maybe he shared a funny work memory, one that reminded Emily's husband that better times will come soon...

When it comes to emotional support, these old adages come to mind:

“The more, the merrier."
"Many hands make light work"
"Any port in a storm"

VoiceQuilt: BeClose Is Another Way to Stay Connected

When her father's health started to decline in 2007, Liddy Manson, a seasoned technology and interactive media executive, had the same reaction every daughter does—she worried. She worried about her parents being in Boston, 300 miles away. She worried about her father's health and started thinking about ways to stay connected despite the distance. In fact, Liddy spent several years imagining how she might understand and monitor the rhythms of her parents' life.

Because of this personal experience, Manson started BeClose, an organization designed to help caregivers keep an unobtrusive eye on aging parents, friends and relatives. BeClose (www.beclose.com) is all about respecting an aging parent’s independence – while offering peace of mind to the adult child.

Liddy's father died just as BeClose was launched, and Liddy's mother, living alone for the first time in 50 years, became one of BeClose's first customers. Mother and daughter feel better knowing that a safety net is in place, and both are grateful that nagging conversations about the activities of daily life don't have to take place anymore.

BeClose uses wireless sensors to monitor an older person’s daily routines. If, for example, a parent lingers too long in a hallway, the caregiver or adult child is notified via email or text message. Daughters like Liddy can also log on to a secure website to monitor their parent’s daily activities. If something is amiss, help can be summoned immediately.

This kind of system is reassuring to everyone involved. It’s yet one more way that technology can foster connection – something we’re quite fond of here at VoiceQuilt. Please be sure to check Liddy's company out here.

Storytelling, Lucky Charms and VoiceQuilt

This week, the Wall Street Journal published an article about "lucky charms", highlighting the story of a wig that has been passed from woman to woman – all breast cancer patients – “intended to help patients return to good health". Once one woman recovers, she passes the wig onto another woman just starting treatment.

Next, the article mentions the the Boston Keepsakes Project – a non-profit partnership which videotapes seniors telling stories about their keepsakes or “personal amulets”.

Because the Boston Keepsakes Project is the backdrop for a TV show, the storytelling seniors received extensive training and rehearsal to tell their stories effectively.

“BNN's Barbara Barrow-Murray shared her expertise in television production with the seniors by providing them with hands-on technical experience and nurturing their confidence in front of the camera.”

Perhaps that’s one of the best things about VoiceQuilt: the memories are unscripted, unrehearsed and brimming with emotion. The callers don’t have to worry about their hair or clothes. (Indeed, most calls occur in the wee hours of the morning or late evening – something we deem “the Pajama Effect”.)

Most callers focus on toasts, tributes and favorite memories about a person. However, we’ve noticed several VoiceQuilts where family chefs talk about recipes and family cooking traditions.

VoiceQuilts are created not only for happy occasions - Birthdays or Anniversaries - but to commemorate the end of life. Mothers who are dying want to share stories about mementos they will be leaving to their children. These VoiceQuilts are heartbreaking but we are proud to help with an incredibly valuable process.

Like the Wall Street Journal’s lucky wig story, these VoiceQuilt messages invariably focus on the emotional significance of the jewelry – why that piece was valuable to the Mom and how she’d like to be remembered.

VoiceQuilt allows the lucky charms to "speak for themselves".

Funeral For the Phone? Not According To VoiceQuilt!

This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine contained an article subtitled, “Mourning the lost art of the analog phone call”. The author, Virginia Heffernan, laments the disappearance of long, intimate phone conversations, a staple of her teens.

“A conversation could last hours upon dazed hours, as you sat on your parents’ bed, twirling the curly cord, or hauled the house phone into the bathroom, the better to monopolize family telecommunications...”

On one level, Ms. Heffernan is right. In absolute terms, phone calls are declining.

Nielsen, at the request of The Wall Street Journal, analyzed cellphone bills of 60,000 mobile subscribers and found adults made and received an average of 188 mobile phone calls a month in the 2010 period, down 25% from the same period three years earlier.

Most teens use cell phones almost exclusively for texting. Some, according to yet another Wall Street Journal article, consider phone calls quasi-rude.

Anne McAndrews, a 21-year-old marketing major at Emerson College in Boston, says she and her friends almost never talk on the phone. "If I were to call someone, it would have to be urgent," she says. "Otherwise, it's sort of rude and invasive."

I think that these statistics and perceptions overlook an important fact about listeneng best captured by Norman Doidge, the author of “The Brain that Changes Itself”.

“…The brain constructs the message…differently for reading and listening….Listening to an audio book leaves a different set of memories than reading does. A newscast heard on the radio is processed differently from the same words read on a newspaper.”

Doidge explains something we’ve known for a long time: The sound of someone's voice – their accent, tone and laughter – conveys something much different than a photo, letter or any store-bought gift. Listening to a loved one share a favorite memory is more emotional than anyone expects.

Maybe that’s why Ms. Heffernan is so sentimental about those conversations as a teen….She remembers those waves of emotion…