BY CHAD HEMENWAY, PROPERTYCASUALTY360.COM April 16, 2012 The National Weather Service reports 126 tornadoes touched down in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma Saturday and early Sunday. The count is not official. Many of the tornadoes have been reported in isolated areas of rural Kansas—99 of the 126 tornado reports are from Kansas, reports catastrophe modeler Risk Management Solutions. Currently, insurers are responding to the hardest-hit areas in Oklahoma, Kansas and Iowa to help residents there begin to pick up the pieces and assess damage from wind and hail.

BY CATERINA PONTORIERO, PROPERTYCASUALTY360.COM April 12, 2012 • Reprints Anyone who has tied the knot recently knows that the cost of weddings is sky-high. According to The Wedding Report, the total average wedding spending for 2011 was $25,631. That’s a lot of money to invest into an event where so much can go wrong, from flowers not being delivered and DJs not showing up to sickness and catastrophic weather-related events causing cancellations. Travelers—which offers wedding insurance to cover items such as lost deposits, perishable materials, unavoidable cancellation, lost or damaged photographs, damaged gifts, host liability and more—recently analyzed its wedding insurance claims…

The top ten business classes written by our insurance agency group through AccessPLUS in February were:

The top ten business classes written by our insurance agency group through AccessPLUS in January were:          

Some direct writers have become an independent insurance agent to have more markets, but what do independent agents have to offer besides more markets?  I felt that the following article was important to read while we are bombarded by the multitude of direct-online insurance carrier commercials that focus on price. – Josh Nordin   NU Online News Service BY PHIL GUSMAN, PROPERTYCASUALTY360.COM February 22, 2012

The top ten business classes written by our insurance agency group for our members in the last 3 months were:   Janitorial Service Mini Storage Warehouse Auto Body Shop Restaurant Private School Grocery Market Construction Company Builders Risk Church Optometrist Office

Stay safe online Advice for staying more secure on the web and an overview of some of the security tools that Google offers.

Insurance Carrier Service Centers can save time in your agency and increase retention if used correctly.  In our agency, we have discovered three key elements for very successful results: Transfer Your Clients – Don’t just give them the phone number Let Clients Know at Point of Sale that Service Centers Exist Proactively Contact Your Clients 1. Let’s face it:  if a customer calls you to help them with a problem and you tell them to call another number, you might as well have shut a door in their face.  The effective way to utilize a service center is to transfer…

By Laura Mazzuca Toops, PropertyCasualty360.com November 11, 2011   In spite of its stellar reputation as an educational institution, Penn State failed to communicate and execute the most rudimentary risk management protocols in the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal, risk management experts say. With a timeline dating back to 1994, when Penn State defensive line coach Jerry Sandusky launched The Second Mile nonprofit program for at-risk boys, multiple incidents of alleged sexual abuse went unreported to the appropriate authorities, resulting in a situation where liability escalated from potentially damaging to devastating—with the university and even third parties now potentially liable.

The article below does a good job of explaining the magnitude of the earthquake and recent Midwest earthquake trends for our insurance agents. Geological events aren’t something that our insurance agency group can ignore anymore.  What are your thoughts on the recent activity? –Josh Nordin For a Weekend, Oklahoma is Earthquake Country By SARAH MASLIN NIR Published: November 6, 2011     Usually, the earth-moving events on an autumn weekend in Oklahoma are at the college football stadiums in Norman and Stillwater. But on this Saturday and Sunday, the earth moved — at least 23 times — and football was not involved….