2018 was a tough year for our home state of California.

According to a recent CNN report, an estimated 18 million trees died here from issues such as drought, disease, invasive insect species and wildfires. In particular, the massive Thomas Fire affected Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties and impacted our employees and community directly, and the devastation it caused is still visible.

In response to this major environmental challenge, Service Objects has joined with 500 participating companies who have each promised to plant at least 2000 trees in California through One Tree Planted, with a goal of repopulating the state with over one million new trees. We have committed to plant 10 trees for each new customer and are already well on our way to exceeding our goal.

One Tree Planted is a unique organization. As their name suggests, they support reforestation efforts in regions around the globe, including North and South America, Latin America and Africa. They are very cost-efficient at what they do, and their entire focus is on planting trees. We particularly like partnering with them because they let you choose which geographic region your trees are planted in, allowing us to support the regrowth of forest land here in California.

Supporting environmental causes is nothing new for us at Service Objects. We were originally founded in 2001 with a goal of reducing the waste stream in the environment, by cleansing databases of bogus, fraudulent, and undeliverable customer records. In doing so, we estimate we have saved over one million trees, 400 million gallons of water, and prevented 30 million pounds of air pollution. Even as we have grown to become one of the world’s major players in contact data quality services, we remain true to our founding values to make the world a better place through data quality excellence.

This means that environmentalism isn’t just some faceless corporate contribution for us – it is part of our DNA. As a company, we are very thoughtful about our stewardship of the environment. We incentivize people for bicycling to work instead of driving, conserve energy, and encourage recycling and minimal use of resources wherever possible. And we will continue to support like-minded causes through corporate action.

This year we chose to focus our contributions on our company’s home state of California, because of all the devastation this state has faced as a result of recent wildfires and other environmental issues. We love living and working here and realize that we all need to pull together to help rebuild our community and our state. This is why our partnership with One Tree Planted was a natural fit for this pivotal time in California history.

If you would like to learn more about Service Objects’ corporate conservation efforts, we have a dedicated web page where you can check out more details. Above all, we would like to thank you – our customers – for being part of our efforts to create a better planet for all of us. Or as our state’s forests might say, “thanks a million!”

If you live in the United States, you probably think that Independence Day is synonymous with the fourth of July. In reality, Independence Day holidays are celebrated around the world, commemorating freedom under a variety of dates and names. Whether it is our neighbor to the north’s Canada Day (July 1), Singapore’s National Day (August 9), Brazil’s Dia da Independência (September 7), or a host of similar holidays, much of the globe marks and cherishes the birth of their nation’s own self-determination.

Declaring our independence – from waste

At Service Objects, our own Independence Day dates back to 2001. That was the year our founder Geoff Grow – a mathematician and an environmentalist – looked at this nation’s flood of wasted and misdirected junk mail, along with its cost to the environment, and realized that he didn’t have to just sit back passively and accept it. This led to the beginnings of our flagship Address Validation service, a first step in helping clients deliver to valid addresses every time.

Of course, we have grown substantially since then: not just in a revenue sense, but in the breadth of products we offer. Nowadays our solutions encompass areas that include fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, marketing optimization and customer insight. But they all tie back to one core concept: automated tools for data quality. And in turn, a concern for the environment.

Nowadays we are proud of serving over 2,500 customers and processing over three billion transactions. But we are also proud of serving the environment as well as our great clients. You’ll see this in a company where most people ride bikes to work, recycling is a fact of life, and our products continue to reduce the waste stream in this country – on the order of over a million trees and nearly half a billion gallons of water saved. And to this day, we still plant ten trees for every new customer we serve.

Declaring your independence – from bad data

Naturally, we enjoy having the opportunity to serve you too. And this Independence Day, we invite you to look at some of the data quality problems you can break free from, including:

• Wasting your time on incorrect or fraudulent leads
• Seeing products get sent to the wrong people or addresses, hurting your costs and reputation
• Not knowing who your most high-value customers or prospects are
• Laying awake at night worrying about compliance with GDPR, TCPA and more
• Losing revenue to preventable fraud

Whatever stands between you and leveraging the full power of your contact data assets, we probably have a solution for it, ranging from worldwide address validation to US tax rates. Whether it is a specific data quality problem, or a planned strategy for effective data hygiene, we have cost-effective solutions to make your life easier.

We also can set you free from implementation worries. Our services can be integrated directly with your CRM, marketing automation or other systems, using real-time API integration or cloud connectors. We can also provide convenient batch list processing for your databases, without the need for systems integration. And you can try out our products for free, with either real-time output right on our website and/or free API keys.

Whatever is holding your business back, we’re glad to help get your Independence Day party started – just contact us for a free consultation, with no sales pressure. (Just remember that we’re closed on July 4th! Except for our 24/7 support, of course.) We look forward to helping you declare your own independence from data quality problems.