School may be out for summer but for one Spokeo user- SchoolsIN

Nothing makes us more happy than hearing about how Spokeo is helpful to everyday people. We’ve heard from fans who have reconnected with a friend or family members and we’ve heard from business owners thanking us for our part in helping them make day to day affairs just that much easier.

We were extra glad to learn about how Spokeo continues to help one small business in particular! Since 2008, SCHOOLSin has provided educators with a safe, easy and affordable way to shop for school furniture and equipment. Christopher is one of the company’s stellar customer service representatives and he let us know how Spokeo makes things easier when processing orders.

“Because many of our customers order online, it can be difficult knowing what type of property our products are shipping to,” he explains. “With Spokeo, we can verify addresses to determine whether the end location is residential or commercial. This is very helpful since our carriers usually charge more when shipping to a residence.”

Not only is our service helping others save money on shipping costs, but it’s also helping them protect themselves from fraud.

“There was one order in particular where we suspected fraud. Thanks to Spokeo, we were able to check the shipping address and find out that it was fake. We later confirmed that the order was, in fact, fraud. We are grateful that we discovered it early with the help of Spokeo.”

We are too Christopher! Most people know Spokeo for its ability to help you find information specifically about one person you’re researching, but it can be helpful in so many more ways.

If Spokeo’s helpful to you or your business let us know!

*Spokeo provided SchoolsIN with a complimentary premium account after hearing about the company’s usage of the product.

When I think back to high school, a rush of great memories flood my mind. I was involved in sports and loved playing volleyball and being on the swim team.  I proudly supported my friends at the friday night football or basketball games. I was part of a close circle of pals who ate lunch together, rented limos for school dances, and hung out for grad night at Disneyland. Graduating was especially exciting and though I vowed to stay in touch with these friends (and many others) there is only one that I talk with regularly to this day.

As my twenty year high school reunion approaches this summer, I give lots of credit to our reunion committee for tracking down hundreds of people from our graduating class. Believe me when I say, not all your friends are on Facebook. It takes a robust and data-rich people search tool to help reconnect with others.

If you’re trying to find old friends or starting to plan for your next reunion, let Spokeo help you. Check out these search tips from Spokeo’s people search experts:.

1. Use maiden and married names.

When searching for your old gal pals, be sure to try both married names and maiden names. A lot can change over the course of a few years so, if you have access to both names, try searching under each.

2. Search old hometown addresses.

Let’s hope most of your friends have moved out of the homes they grew up in, but that’s no reason to forgo searching those addresses. Searching old addresses can connect you to the new ones or it may help you to find family members who can can contact for the person’s new address or number!

3. Find siblings.

Remember that George had an older brother a couple grades ahead of him? Try searching for a sibling’s name to help you gather the information you need. Maybe it can help you find figure out where the family moved to after high school and, with a little investigative work, you can find the person you’re looking for!

4. Rely on friends.

You don’t have to seek out every single number and address. Once you’ve used Spokeo to locate one person’s contact information, you can ask that person for contact information of their friends from the same class. If that fails, you can at least see if they know a general location of the person and use our search engine to narrow down the results!

5. Utilize all Spokeo searches.

Organizing a reunion is a lot of work and any information you can get on a person will help get you to the ultimate goal of bringing former classmates and friends together. To do so, try all of our different types of searches, including our name, reverse phone, reverse address, reverse email, and username searches. Each may lead to another important piece of the puzzle, eventually helping you find each and every person on your list.

Hopefully, these search tips will help you to build your high school reunion invite list. Good luck finding those classmates!

Mary Wilson lives in Ft. Worth, Texas and has been a volunteer searcher for more than 15 years. She began with her own search for her relinquished daughter and started helping others when she found out a friend from work was looking for a sibling and she knew she could be helpful. Mary not only dedicates herself to making matches, but also to helping those she connects with beginning a healing relationship. Her passion for doing searching work stems from the healing it affords everyone involved, including herself. She is an Edna Gladney birthmother with aspirations to continue to help others and share stories of joy and hope that will touch the lives of many.

It is our honor to introduce, Spokeo Search Angel Award Winner, Mary Edna Wilson.

With Memorial Day approaching, not only is it important to remember those who gave their lives serving our country, but also those who are still with us: the men and women of our armed forces and veterans nationwide. After being discharged or separating from our military, it’s easy for service members to lose touch with their brothers or sisters in arms. These important relationships are extremely meaningful, but difficult to maintain. However, by remembering a few searching tips, Spokeo is hoping we can be useful to you in locating old military buddies and commemorate this Memorial Day with a reunion.

Keep both last names and first names in mind.

While we call our friends by their first names, service members get used to addressing everyone by last name. As such, sometimes it’s difficult to remember or use those first names. Keep in mind, however, that Spokeo name searches require both a first and last name. So, while he may always be known to you as Sergeant Smith, do your best to get a hold of that first name to get your search started.

Don’t throw out those old home or mobile numbers.

After getting out of the military, many service members move, change their phone numbers, and begin new lives, but that’s no reason to throw out old phone numbers. Though a number may be outdated, it can still be useful in tracking down other information, such as old addresses, names of relatives, or addresses of their family members. Keep that old contact information and use it to track down the updates!

Use the “Home of Record” for searches.

It’s not uncommon for people to move, get married, have children, or even change their names. To combat these changes and the lacking trail of information, try searching for the person you’re looking for using their Home of Record (this is the address a person claims while on duty, usually the home you came from; for many, this is their parents’ home). The Home of Record is usually more reliable because it’s more commonly established in publicly accessible sources. Even if the person no longer takes up residence there, the Home of Record can be used to locate family members, phone numbers, or even email addresses.

We hope that with these tips, you can get in touch with former military friends. Spokeo’s is focused on helping people reunite and this Memorial Day we’re focused on those who have dedicated themselves to defending our country.

If you’re a member of the military who has reconnected with a friend, we’d love to hear your story! Contact us at veterans@spokeo.com

Imagine a typical Friday night out with the girls, dancing and laughing, having a grand time. Across the dance floor, you spot Mr. Wonderful and he’s spotted you too. Before you know it, you’ve exchanged phone numbers with the promise of a romantic dinner. You make your way back to your friends, still glowing with excitement, but that soon wears off and you realize you don’t know anything about this guy. He could be anybody. What do you do? Blow him off entirely and throw the number away, never knowing if he was Mr. Right? Or take your chances on a perfect stranger, possibly putting yourself in harm’s way? Before you decide, do a little research on the number you have with Spokeo’s reverse phone search (also known as reverse phone lookup and phone number lookup).

Spokeo’s reverse phone search may provide the following information:

• Names associated with the phone number: Did he give you his real name? Is he married or is it his mother that’s still paying his phone bill? One thing that can potentially be discovered using the search is the name associated with the phone number. It can also include people who have been associated with it in the past, which might give you even more insight on the person you met.

• Location history: When looking for a potential partner, it’s important to get a sense of who they are when they’re not putting their best foot forward. By using the reverse phone lookup, you can find the location history of the soon-to-be suitor, which may include current or past addresses of the person you’re searching for. Maybe you know of someone in that area that knows them and can give you the inside scoop, or maybe it will give you an idea of who they spend their time with!

• Email address: An email address alone might not give you a lot of info about the potential suitor, but this is where our reverse email search can be useful. Try typing that email address into one of our search bars to see which networks the person might have accounts with, whether they’re social networking sites, dating sites, or other online accounts.

• Age: We’ve all been warned about people who lie about their ages. One feature that can help uncover this falsehood is the month and year of birth that can be found using the reverse phone lookup. Simply type in the phone number and, if we have the month or year of birth, you can view it directly on our search results. Seeing that a “mature 25” actually means 40 years old might change your mind about the person’s character and save you from wasting your time!

In this world, it’s not easy to find your soul mate; it’s even more difficult when you have to weed out those that aren’t worth your time. Use reverse phone lookup to do a little research before you make the decision to call or not to call!

We may be a little biased here at Spokeo, but we’re pretty proud of our product and we know it’s a very useful research tool.

Recently we were reminded of one more way to use Spokeo – as a tool to verify news stories on the web. With the rise of social media come many localized stories that can quickly brew into national or even global sensations. However, in order for journalists to separate fact from fiction, they need to check out some sources.

A couple stories posted this week by Fast Company and PBS’s Idealab call out some great research tools (including yours truly). We don’t always need news stories to remind us of our great capabilities, but we surely appreciate the love, especially the digital shout-outs from journalists like  @SamanthaSunne –  “Getting to use my paid @Spokeo account today makes me a happy reporter ”

Glad Spokeo is working well for the hard working journalists. We’ll do our best to keep it up.

Helen was only 15 years old in April of 1992 when she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. At the time she was living with her parents in the Cleveland, Ohio area and the baby was given up for adoption but she never forgot about that little boy.

Meanwhile, one loving family had been blessed with a baby boy.  ”We knew Jonathan was our blessing,” said Mollie, the mother who raised the baby boy. “We’d always talked to him about how he was adopted and how his birth mother was thinking about him too. We’d even done our own search for her.”

“I never expected anything to ever happen. I thought I’d be searching forever,” said Helen as she thought back on her solo search efforts without knowing that she too, was being searched for.

Until one day in April this year, as they approached Jonathan’s 21st birthday, Helen stumbled upon postings on the Internet that praised the work of a “search angel” named Kellie Sharpe. Search angels are volunteers who donate their time and resources to help individuals touched by adoption, foster care and other family events, search for their family members while providing guidance and support . There are many of them that have been working behind the scenes for the last 30 years and with the emergence of the internet and people search tools like Spokeo, they’ve been empowered to help more people in search of family.

Filled with both excitement and anxiety, Helen wrote an emotional plea asking Kellie for some of her time. It was while Kellie was attending a conference to be introduced as one of the prestigious winners of the Spokeo Search Angel Award in Cleveland, only a few minutes away from Helen, that she received the email and wrote back as soon as she got back to her hotel room that evening.

“I am always searching no matter where I am or what I’m doing,” said Kellie. “My family understands that when someone has been searching for years, I can’t wait till tomorrow to get back to them.”

Kellie searched during the conference breaks, quietly on her phone during workshops and late at night in her room. That hard work paid off when she located Jonathan and his family in only three days. A few key details (like Jonathan’s birth date and county) made for a good start, but it was the power of the Internet and online people search tools like Spokeo, that kicked the search into high gear and helped her pinpoint him. New opportunities had taken the family out of the Ohio area and they were now living in Texas.

“One of the core capabilities of Spokeo is organizing massive amounts of information to create simple and yet comprehensive online profiles about people,” says Angela Saverice-Rohan, General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer for Spokeo. “These profiles help people like Kellie and Helen find the family members they are searching for. It is truly an inspiring use of our technology.”

After that first phone call to the family home, Jonathan and Helen have been talking regularly.

“We’re all very excited to meet Helen,” said Mollie. “This is going to be a wonderful family event.”

The families chose Mother’s Day weekend to meet face to face for the first time and they invited Spokeo to help put together this amazing reunion.

With so many people searching, it took someone with the “sharpe” searching expertise to bring everyone together – Search Angel Kellie Sharpe that is!

“She’s still there for me if I need someone to talk to,” said Helen about Kellie. “She’s a wonderful person.”

We couldn’t agree more. Happy Mother’s Day ladies! It is our honor to continue supporting amazing search angels like Kellie, courageous birth moms like Helen and loving families like Jonathan’s. We thank you for inviting us to be a part of this wonderful reunion and hope to continue highlighting the efforts of Search Angels everywhere as they help bring more families together.

While taking breaks from her own search, Kellie would help other people impacted by adoption in an effort to create reunions.  After finding her daughter in 2010, she dedicated herself fully to helping others search for their families. Kellie describes herself as  “just a wife and mother of four who sits in her room on her laptop, changing people’s lives.” It is her hope to spread the word about search angels so more will volunteer and get involved.

We are proud to introduce Spokeo Search Angel Award Winner, Kellie Sharpe!!

It’s spring cleaning time, so why not consider cleaning up your digital address book?  If it seems too daunting to find updated contact information, we’re going to share a cool tool to assist you:  Email Search.  Spokeo’s email search makes it easy to find virtually anyone via email as long as the email account holder maintains a profile on the sites we support.

Here are four tips to help you, as a subscriber, optimize your email searches:

1)  Try the Name Search:

Your most powerful Spokeo tool is cross-referencing.  Let’s say you search an email and you don’t find the phone number you want.  Don’t give up!  Remember that your Spokeo subscription comes with five different search types! If your email search has no phone number, but it does include an address, try typing the address in our search bar.  Re-searching the name might lead you to another email which, in turn, might lead you to the phone number.  Don’t hesitate to use all of the search tools at your disposal.

2)  Skip the Business/School Email:

If you have an email that is obviously a business or educational email (ex: JSullivan@MonstersInc.org, CalvinH@CamdenCollege.edu or PParker13@ESU.edu), you may want to skip this as a search.  Most people use a personal email address to set up their online social network profiles – and those professional accounts may not yield the best results.

3)  Try Different Domain Names:

It’s not uncommon for people to set up and use multiple email addresses these days, whether it be for different aspects of their life (work, home, school) or because it’s time for an update. Keep in mind, though, that people sometimes use the same username but a different provider for an email address. So, consider switching the domain name you’re searching (gmail, yahoo, aol, msn, etc.) to see what else your searches can yield!

4) Search The Old Email Address:

Even though you know someone has moved on to a new email address, we suggest attempting a search with the old email. Older email addresses may still be linked to accounts online that can help you find that person you’re searching for. Don’t give up on a search just because you don’t have all the up-to-date information. Our searches can help lead you there!

With these additional tips, we hope you’re able to access more results and locate the people you need to “spring” into action!

]]> http://www.spokeo.com/blog/2013/05/spokeo-search-answers-4-tips-to-deliver-better-email-search-results/feed 0 http://www.spokeo.com/blog/2013/05/spokeo-search-answers-4-tips-to-deliver-better-email-search-results http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Spokeo/~3/3Ya2ZvOvcK0/search-angel-spotlight-priscilla-sharp http://www.spokeo.com/blog/2013/05/search-angel-spotlight-priscilla-sharp#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 19:10:01 +0000 Vanessa http://www.spokeo.com/blog/?p=9799 With the recent introduction of our Search Angels program video on our community site  and the announcement about Spokeo’s Search Angel award and winners, we asked Priscilla Sharp, a member of the Spokeo Search Angels Advisory Committee, and a search angel herself, to share some thoughts about how to get involved and what searching on behalf of families is all about.

Priscilla Sharp, www.priscillasharp.org

In your words, how would you describe a Search Angel?

A “search angel” is someone who gives of their time and expertise, without charge, to help people separated from family and lost loved ones by adoption, foster care, divorce, and alienation, to find their information and reconnect, if they choose.  Search angels are men and women of all ages and from all socio-economic strata.  Some are members of the adoption community – adoptees, mothers/family members of loss to adoption, and adoptive families– and some are simply passionate genealogists and researchers who have not had first-hand experience with adoption but appreciate the importance of the work.

Why is this work important to you?

I believe that every human being has a right to their identity, family history, and heritage.  There are an estimated 6 to 7 million adopted persons in the United States today.  Most of them were adopted as babies or young children under “closed and sealed” circumstances, meaning their original birth certificates and other identifying information were sealed upon adoption and are inaccessible to them. In 43 states, adoptees are forbidden by outdated laws from accessing their own personal information.

How do Search Angels start and conduct searches?

Typically, I get an email or call from someone asking for help in finding a loved one. From there, we start to piece together whatever details they have (birth date, birth city, names, “non-identifying” information provided by agencies).  Then, using publicly accessible information housed in databases on the Internet, like Spokeo, we search for the families.  Thanks to rapidly-expanding 21^st century information technology, almost all of this research can be done on the computer with an occasional visit to a library or other public record facility.

Why is Search Angel awareness increasing?

Search angels have been around, quietly working in the background, for the last 30 years solving hundreds of thousands of cases.  Until the advent of the Internet and social networking, we have not had the organization or funds to make our availability known.  Now, thanks to Spokeo and Mixed Roots Foundation, in consultation and cooperation with adoption organizations and individuals, the spotlight is finally shining on these selfless volunteer workers, and I believe it is going to take our efforts to the next level by helping us to coalesce into a strong and highly visible network.

How can we teach new Search Angels to help more people?

Thanks to the Spokeo Search Angel Awards and increasing public awareness of who search angels are and what we do, we are excited to receive daily inquiries from people asking how they can become a search angel and join the network.  To meet these requests, we’re working towards developing programs to assist new angels, such as training webinars, mentoring, networking, and support groups for sharing expertise and guidance.  Keep checking on Spokeo’s Search Angel site and Facebook group to stay up to date on the latest developments.

I also encourage folks to join some of the search and support groups on the Internet and Facebook, read the files and messages and learn.  Two of my favorite groups are TheRegistry and NYAdoptees on Yahoo.  We look forward to working with you and sharing the exciting, rewarding successes you will experience.