Most of the gifting type programs we came across were "monthly-payment" types.

These are programs where you pay a small fee each month of, say $20 or $30, and you send these payments in to the program operator each month. The program operator then dispatches all payments received to the appropriate participants once or twice each month

As these programs grow, the volume of mail also grows since each member sends a gift each month. This is the Achilles heel that defeats every one of the MONTHLY gifting programs! That volume of mail simply can't be disguised because it attracts a LOT of attention! With this much attention, one of two things usually occurs:

1)  Someone eventually discovers that cash is inside all those envelopes. Thisusually happens when a postal employee sees an envelope that has been accidentally torn by mail handling equipment. Mail going to that address in the future is then stolen or somehow "lost" ( as the post office would describe it). From here on out the program is on its way down because payments are not getting to the participants since they are being stolen and the operator is not receiving them. The operator does not know what is going on; he just knows that his monthly mail volume has dropped, but he's not sure why. The program dies.

2) The Postal Service gets word from another government agency to interrupt mail service - without notice - to whatever address the operator was using. The Postal Service complies, which causes a serious disruption to the program and the program suffers an immediate death. The operator is pwerless to do anything about it. By the time the operator goes to court to fight this illegal action by the postal service, its too late...he cannot salvage the program.

The number one weakness that causes most gifting programs to fail is the fact that the U.S. Postal Service cannot be trusted to reliably deliver any mail that contains cash!

And you know what? The sad thing about this fact is that THEY KNOW IT TOO because even the Postal Service tells you not to send cash through their system. Yeah... even they know they have serious theft problems! In each of the above examples, the operator gets blamed for the failure of the program, but the reality is the U.S. Postal Service (the government) is at fault for the program's failure - not the operator. Unfortunately, there's not much any of us can do to change how the government operates.

The point we're trying to make here is that we found out gifting programs would really work if the government would leave them alone!

To recap, the three problems with most cash gifting programs are:

1.  Requiring members to make regular monthly      payments(which leads to Problem #2)...

2.  Attracting too much attention due to the high  volume of mail to a single address (which leads to  Problem #3)...

3.  Theft of cash by postal employees or other mail handlers.

HOW WE FIXED THE PROBLEMS...

The first thing we've done in our new system is eliminate the U.S. Postal Service from the most critical loop, which is the delivery of cash and other correspondence to the program operstors (Bernie and me). To deliver cash payments and other

correspondence, we use Private Carriers such as UPS, Fed-Ex, Airborne Express, etc. Notice we didnt say that YOU can't use the Postal Service to promote the program through the mail if you wanted to, because you can... there's certainly no problem with that since you are just mailing letters and there is no cash in them. We mean that anything coming to us as the internal monitors of the program must not travel via the U.S. Postal Service since they are not the trustworthy public servants they are supposed to be.

Secondly, we've created a way to keep our delivery address so fluid that even existing members will not be sure what it is from one day to another. It changes very frequently. The only people who will know which address is the correct address on any given day will be those new people who wish to jin our program.

Yes, yes yes, we will eventually give YOU a phone number, a fax number, and an e-mail address so you can communicate directly with us, but not until we are ready for you to have that information. We dont want this privy information given out to every Tom, Dick, and Harry. This procedure is for your benefit because it protects the program and keeps the cash flowing FOR YOU!

Thirdly, we solved the incoming mail-volume problem by making this plan a one-time payment program. This eleminates the major problem with those "monthly" gifting programs described earlier. This procedure does three things: 1) It prevents drawing too much attention to a single address, 2) It eleminates the hassles of remembering to make a monthly payment and then going through the trouble and inconvenience of actually making the payment, and 3) It prevents a member from accidentally getting dropped from the program because he or she was either late with their monthly payment or forgot to make it altogether. You see, many programs would drop you like a hot potato if you missed a payment. Our procedure of making a SINGLE payment