It’s usually nice to get those letters that start off with “I’m pleased to inform you …” It’s sort of the opposite of the “Dear John” letter.

Sure, sometimes someone is just trying to sell you something, but often the news is genuinely good, 

Small but mighty, the EnergyCAP finance department wields the power of the purse with precision and purpose. Today’s blog introduces our two-member Finance team. 

In any field, including energy management, there can be real power and opportunity in new beginnings.

I took a trip to Wilmington, Delaware, last Saturday to hold my first grandson for the very first time.

We saw him in the hospital on day two of his adventure outside the womb, and I have to say that the experience was very special and delightful for me. I’m not sure what he thought of the experience, because he wasn’t talking any language I could understand. In fact, he wasn’t communicating much at all, but that didn’t change my very positive attitude. And my daughter and son-in-law were obviously in a similar frame of mind.

The EnergyCAP team is up by four this summer, thanks to the addition of two new full-time staff members and two temporary summer employees.

We’d like to introduce them, and share their expertise and responsibilities in today’s blog.

Make new friends, but keep the old,
One is silver, and the other, gold.

The Girl Scout campfire song is old, but the sentiment is current, especially in business: It’s wonderful to find a new customer, but even better to keep your existing customers so happy that they keep coming back for more.

At EnergyCAP, our Customer Service team has the challenge of doing exactly that. In today’s blog, we unmask the EnergyCAP Customer Service department.

About 120 EnergyCAP users from North America recently gathered for the Catalyst Training Conference for hands-on training, networking with other users, one-on-one meetings with staff, new feature demos, and fun social events.

In case you missed it, here are some highlights, including the Catalyst Spoof video:

They're the geekiest of the geeks. Superheroes of cyberspace, they're known for a techno-speak vocabulary that is just short of incantation. They mysteriously appear and disappear from secure server rooms like Clark Kent from a telephone booth, keeping odd hours to perform their computer network miracles at times when the demand for bandwidth is lowest. They're the Operations team (Ops) at EnergyCAP. Today’s blog unmasks their valuable activity on behalf of our staff and our clients.

May I share some good news with you? EnergyCAP is officially an Environmental Leader!

We were notified by Environmental Leader (EL) magazine that EnergyCAP software was selected as an Environmental Leader Product of the Year.

The EL Product & Project Awards recognize excellence in environmental and sustainability management. According to EL Program Director Jennifer Hermes, the third year of this annual awards program drew more entries than ever, and competition was steep.

So how did we win?

An email marketing company called Aweber studied millions of email subject lines and discovered the most successful subject line ever. This email subject line delivered stellar results—an average email open rate of 90%!

That means 9 out of 10 people who received an email with that subject line opened it. Those of us in the email marketing industry know an open rate of 90% is almost unheard of, since average email open rates are more like 23%.

So what is the most successful email subject line ever?

Here's good news for 2015—EnergyCAP is hiring! We’re looking to fill two important positions on our Implementation Solutions team. This department works with clients to implement EnergyCAP at their organization. EnergyCAP users are great candidates because they’re familiar with the software and have gone through the implementation process already.

While we’re not looking to steal talent from anyone, we realize that sometimes a better fit with a different organization benefits all the parties involved. We also realize that our blog network is part of a much larger network, so please forward this information to friends or colleagues who might be interested! Here are the two job openings:

In the past, we've reached out to a handful of customers with limited labor resources who were struggling to stay ahead of the utility bill data that was pouring into their offices—in the form of paper utility bills or diverse file formats.

That energy information had to find its way into the EnergyCAP database, and they needed help from someone with expertise dealing with energy data to help ensure data integrity throughout the process.

In these days of Ask Google and Siri, it’s frustrating for many energy managers to be so reliant upon data delivered up via snail mail and served on sheets of paper in small print. And then there’s the onerous task of data entry—matching up all the tracked items with the correct field in your spreadsheet or database. Surely there must be a better way!

We all know about four-letter words. We learned a couple of them when we were young, but when we tried them out in conversation, we discovered they were non-starters, especially with mom. My parents had ways of ensuring that an important lesson was learned—some words are dirty and some words are clean.

A number of times, the dirty words seemed to have four letters. But not always. And as I grew older, they grew harder to classify. Today’s blog is about a fourteen-letter word which, if we’re honest, can fall on either end of the clean/dirty continuum, depending on the manner in which the word is used, who is using it, and for what purpose.

Our three-day annual Catalyst training conference provided a glimpse into the future for clients using the online version of EnergyCAP. Some of our training resources are now available online, whether you attended or not.

Catalyst, which concluded May 1, offered attendees three training tracks, good food, networking opportunities, and individual consultations with EnergyCAP project managers and technical support personnel.

This year, the emphasis was hands-on training using Version 3.2, which is scheduled for a phased release this quarter. The new version will include a totally new chargebacks module offering an intuitive graphical interface for visualizing and customizing complex chargeback account-meter relationships.

Here's why people came to Catalyst:

EnergyCAP, Inc.'s nonprofit organization, Global Capacity, is providing 41 high school scholarships for extremely poor children in Rwanda, Africa. Unfortunately, Global Capacity has encountered two hardships.

In January, we published a blog post every day—save New Year’s Day—in order to jumpstart 2014. Some posts had everything to do with energy management, but not all of them. Some were about client savings, software features, company news, or the workplace.

But just because you subscribe to our blog doesn’t mean you read all the blog posts last month. Sometimes you were tired of reading. Sometimes your inbox was too full. Sometimes you clicked delete just to feel powerful. We get it, we did, too.

So in case you missed a popular post or two, here’s a countdown of the ten most popular blog posts from the 30 Blogs in 30 Days Series (drum roll, please):

The following is my talk from the prayer breakfast at Cenergistic’s National Training Conference on January 21, 2014. Cenergistic is an energy conservation company that partners with our company.

A shocking thing happened this past Christmas Day, but it can revive the most important conversation of your life.

Each spring, we hold a training conference called EnergyCAP Catalyst. This year's Catalyst is April 29-May 1 in our hometown of State College, PA. Registration is now open!

Based on feedback from previous conferences, we’ve added more hands-on training sessions. Through two-and-a-half days of hands-on training, appointments with staff, and networking with users, Catalyst will help you use EnergyCAP better so you can save time, energy, and money for your organization.

This year, our focus will be on the EnergyCAP Online, Express, and Pro Online versions.

• Pro 2011 Desktop users: Catalyst registration and attendance qualifies you for a priority Pro Online upgrade!
• Enterprise users: We will not discuss budgets, accrual module, report distribution setup, installing ECE or ECO, the administrator program, or interval data, but you can schedule an appointment in Ace Place.

Earlier this fall, EnergyCAP received some unexpected and welcome news: