Joe,

(This is a copy of part of the e-mail I sent you on 6/13/02 regarding the pre-qualifier form and having a simple database created to capture the info in a database for future use - in addition to having that info emailed to each loan officer.)

Talked to the guy at Jumpinteractive. He said it would be a very simple, 1 or 2 hour job to create a simple database that would capture the contact info being generated by people filling out the pre-qual forms. That means it SHOULD be somewhere in the $200 range and that would be money well spent, I'm sure...

"But..." Just so nobody will ever be able to accuse me of "pulling a Dennis," it should also be emphasized that all that would do is CAPTURE and store the contact information: You'd wind up with a database full of email and regular addresses (sitting on the web site server). It would probably wind up costing more money (or thought, time, effort) later to put together a system that made it easy to DO something with that captured info (make it easy to send e-mails or regular letters to people on the list)...

But it probably wouldn't cost all THAT much, and it would probably turn out to be well worth the expense. Not to sound like Dennis, but could be done by having some (simple, non-eloborate) "back office" kind of thing created by somebody like Jumpinteractive (so you could work with the info online), or it wouldn't be all that hard to download the info from the server into a file that could be imported into Microsoft Excel, Outlook (email program), or Access (database), and used from there...

Anyway... Bottom line seems to be, it looks to me like it would be well worth the little bit of money to take the first simple step of capturing and storing the info as it's entered by the prospective customer (rather than re-entered by someone at the office being paid to retype all that stuff).

-- Anonymous, June 14, 2002