It’s spring time, tax day has passed, and now you have probably have lots of piles of papers, folders of files, and racks of records that need to be shredded. You’re probably thinking it’s time to call the local shredding company, right? You're on the right track, but you could be missing an opportunity.
While you could just call your local shredder to roll on over to your location and mill your documents to shreds, you could transform this rather mundane operation into a community event, even a party — one that’s educational, beneficial, fun and memorable for you, for your clients and for your community.
What kind of event is this? It’s what we call a shred day.
Here are 8 reasons you need a shred day:
C’mon! It’s spring time!
Need we say more? The weather is perfect!
That warm sun. That softly, cooling breeze.
Those brightly colored flowers, all those buzzing bees.
The trees all a-glitter, those softly flittering leaves.
The birds amidst the branches, twittering as they please ...
Okay, okay. Enough of the poetry. Nobody wants to be inside an office, especially with a smoldering summer just on the horizon. As shred days are by nature outdoor events, they are the perfect excuse to give your organization’s people a chance to enjoy the great outdoors while helping your company declutter. Even more, you can open the shred day to your clients so they can enjoy the outdoors too, bringing their boxes or bags of paper and getting to know your company more.
Turn your shredding need into fun day
In the same vein as the above, your shred day doesn’t have to be just a shred event. While the shredding can anchor the event, don’t be afraid to bring in a food truck or two, maybe some live music and some games. You could even set up a table with some giveaway swag or another showcasing other services you offer. Maybe you could make the event a benefit for a good cause your company supports. Use your imagination. Turn your shredding need into a whole new event — a tradition of sorts — a marker of culture for your company. Give your associates and your clients something to remember.
Celebrate Earth Day
Speaking of great weather, Earth Day is just around the corner — April 22, in fact! As it’s a day set aside to appreciate our planet, it’s many natural resources and to reflect on how we use those resources, how better to observe it then to save many of those resources by recycling paper? Resources, as in plural, you say? If you thought recycling paper only saves trees, think again. The process of making paper requires wood, oil and water — not to mention energy. So for each ton of paper you recycle, you save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, 7,000 gallons of water and nearly 4,000 kilowatts of energy. Additionally, you save 3 cubic yards of landfill space. How do you like that for saving the earth’s resources?
Help your organization and your clients achieve paperless-ness
Over the many last years, the big trending goal for businesses across the planet has been to go paperless, the reasons being for environmental, efficiency, security, economical and other purposes. Those in business though recognize that getting there though has been tough.
Whether your business has been able to achieve that goal or not, doubtless, you still have lots of paper, either on your desks, in your file cabinets, in your mailboxes or maybe even in offsite storage. Whether it be junk mail you haven’t gone through, old employee records, invoices or tax documents, you can probably do with less of it. So if you can’t go paperless, you can go “less paper.” Doing so frees up space, declutters your workspaces, increases security as you won’t have sensitive documents so accessible anymore and may even eliminate some storage costs. So by holding a shred day and opening it to your clients, while you may not be going paperless, you and your client are still going with less paper and are still achieving many of the same goals you had in going paperless.
Clear a cluttered workspace and cluttered minds
They say a cluttered desk reflects a cluttered mind. Could the same be said for the workplace? If your business is cluttered by file cabinets, banker boxes and stacks of paper, does that reflect, or worse, cause, clutter in the “headspace” of your employees and potentially project a negative image to clients entering your business?
By hosting a shred day, this gives your company a time to clean up the office and thence increase headspace, consequently improving workplace efficiency, but also projecting the image of a tidy, clean, and responsibly-run company. In addition, by offering the shred day to your clients, you are helping them to declutter as well, helping them organize and operate more efficiently.
Increase perceived value of your organization and its services
While you could just order a one-time purge, you could instead organize a shred day open to your clients as well. By doing so, you not only meet your own organization’s shredding needs, you also bring added value of your services to your clients. Whatever extra goodies or benefits you can offer along with your services, these are aspects that set you apart from your competitors and may very well factor in your client’s decision in the next time your client is faced with the opportunity to go with a competitor.
Increase identity theft awareness
Information security is more important now than it ever has been before. By hosting a shred event open to your clients, you acknowledge and declare its importance to the members of your own organization, to your business partners and to your clients. The shred day can be a kind of awareness event to help increase people’s knowledge of the risks of mishandling of sensitive information and of how to properly dispose of private records. This not only should increase the security of the information within your organization and partner entities, it should also increase your clients’ confidence in your handling of their confidential information.
Protect yourself and protect your clients
Ultimately, you want the success of your clients and the success of your business. As the relationship with your clients is symbiotic, it is in your best interest to protect your clients as you protect yourself. If information theft, a data breach or catastrophic record loss precipitates into the ruin of their business, it will hurt you and so conversely would such a mishap to you hurt your client. It could very well be in your best interest to not only protect yourself, but to protect you client to by hosting a shred day, and thereby potentially avoiding disaster for either of you.
There are many reasons to turn what could be a one-time purge event into a shred day beneficial to the whole community.
If you would like to organize one for your organization, let us know by clicking the button below and filing out the form. We’ll have one of our representative reach out to you immediately and get you set up.
Related Articles:
Shredding Event Basics: What they are, how to find them and how to host one
Shred your documents and fight breast cancer
About R.K. Black, Inc.
R.K. Black, Inc. is an Oklahoma City-based, family-owned leading provider of office technology solutions to small and medium-sized businesses in Oklahoma and Kansas. We specialize in everything business technology from copier, fax, printer and scanner technology to document management, onsite paper shredding services, VoIP phone systems and managed IT support to video surveillance solutions.
If you want to learn more about us, feel free to explore the website, read our other blogs or click the button below to be contacted by one of our reps and tell you! Also, be sure to keep watching our social media channels on Facebook and Twitter for more business tips from our blog.
