Use outside service bureau for ward mailing?

Our ward leadership is considering an idea to employ the services of a commercial mailing house to facilitate the bishopric's upcoming Christmas mailing to our large ward roster. It may save some postage and effort. The list would be extracted from MLS.

I know of no Church policy that would preclude this, but I don't know everything. Can anyone point to policy or precedent to the contrary, or is this essentially a judgment call for the Bishop?

Presumably the outside company has business policies in place to protect its customers' privacy and not copy their mailing lists for any other purpose, although I have not been in the loop to inquire about that directly.

Thanks in advance.

boomerbubba wrote:Our ward leadership is considering an idea to employ the services of a commercial mailing house to facilitate the bishopric's upcoming Christmas mailing to our large ward roster. It may save some postage and effort. The list would be extracted from MLS.

I know of no Church policy that would preclude this, but I don;t know everything. Can anyone point to policy or precedent to the contrary, or is this essentially a judgment call for the Bishop?

Presumably the outside company has business policies in place to protect its customers' privacy and not copy their mailing lists for any other purpose, although I have not been in the loop to inquire about that directly.

Thanks in advance.

Years ago, when I was in a Bishopric, we did a monthly mailing using the local post office. We addressed the envelopes ourselves to each family by printing up mailing labels. We then did a bulk mail at the post office at reduced rates. I think we had to have a 200 pc minimum but that wasn't an issue with the ward we had. You'd have to check with the Post Office in your area to see what their bulk rates are, but I would believe that the mailing could be handled by members of the ward and then done as a bulk mail without the expense of an outside firm.

Techgy wrote:You'd have to check with the Post Office in your area to see what their bulk rates are, but I would believe that the mailing could be handled by members of the ward and then done as a bulk mail without the expense of an outside firm.

My exploration of a DIY approach to bulk-mailing hit a feasibility problem. USPS charges $180/year just for the privilege, before postage. And the commercial software and database required to preprocess the mailing list would cost about $120, which would only be officially usable for two months. It would not be possible for a ward-sized unit to recover those costs in postage savings, and those sums are a non-trivial hit on a ward budget.

(It's too bad, because owning that software tool would provide ancillary benefits in validating and standardizing the addressesin MLS for other purposes, such as supporting geocoding and identifying invalid addresses of members.)

So I'm back to wondering if the use of a mailing house is acceptable.

boomerbubba wrote:So I'm back to wondering if the use of a mailing house is acceptable.

My first question is "what would they charge"? I suspect the cost is a non-trivial increase over the postage.

As for the work, hold a PEC or Ward Correlation meeting to stuff the envelopes. If it's anything some of the ones I've been to in the past, it might be the most productive meeting of the year.

RussellHltn wrote:My first question is "what would they charge"? I suspect the cost is a non-trivial increase over the postage.

My understanding is that our cost would be about 32 cents per item compared to 42 cents for ordinary first-class postage. If there are any hidden fees I am not aware of them. Our ward has almost 600 families.

So assuming these facts, it would be a matter of saving $60 and doing little work vs. paying the higher costs and doing a lot of work..

boomerbubba wrote:My understanding is that our cost would be about 32 cents per item compared to 42 cents for ordinary first-class postage. If there are any hidden fees I am not aware of them. Our ward has almost 600 families.

So assuming these facts, it would be a matter of saving $60 and doing little work vs. paying the higher costs and doing a lot of work..

As I had indicated it was years ago that we did the bulk mailing. Obviously things have changed since then.

How about passing out the letter to families that attend church and mailing those that don't attend? Since this is a one-time holiday mailing, I'm betting that it wouldn't be that difficult to get some help in the ward to stuff envelopes and get address labels on them. With a little help the envelopes could be passed out during Priesthood and Relief Society to home teachers and visiting teachers and to those who attend. This would probably get a fair percentage of the ward covered at almost no cost.



Then those envelopes that remain can be mailed.

Techgy wrote:How about passing out the letter to families that attend church and mailing those that don't attend? ... Then those envelopes that remain can be mailed.

That is certainly an idea worth considering if saving postage is the primary consideration. But my twisted clerk's mind says there is much to be said for a central mailing to the whole ward -- not just for delivering the message content, but for the practical purpose of putting all MLS addresses through the USPS "Address Correction Requested" test. We happen to have a major problem with many lost sheep on our roster. and even active members can forget to give their new contact information to the clerks. We need all the tools we can get just to maintain the list, and the annual Christmas mailing is one such tool.

In fact, I am intrigued by your experience with monthly mailings. If we could afford it, monthly or quarterly mailings would be worthwhile to catch moves before the forwarding trail goes cold.

boomerbubba wrote:..... We happen to have a major problem with many lost sheep on our roster. and even active members can forget to give their new contact information to the clerks. .......

In fact, I am intrigued by your experience with monthly mailings. If we could afford it, monthly or quarterly mailings would be worthwhile to catch moves before the forwarding trail goes cold.

Our monthly mailing was for the purpose of a ward newsletter. We did it for several years and it worked very well. Tracking members who had moved was done by sending a "tracer letter". This was a letter addressed as usual but with the words "postmaster do not forward, address correction requested, return postage guaranteed." If the address of the member had changed the letter would come back to us with the new address.

In regards to your problems with members who have moved and not corrected their address, if they are attending, then it would be easier and cheaper to just hand them out in person. If you don't have good addresses then the mailing wouldn't be helpful.

If I were in your shoes, I'd hand out what I could, then put my efforts into a mailing to hunt down those who either don't attend or whose address is incorrect. This would at least get the Christmas greeting out to the majority of the ward.

Techgy wrote:Our monthly mailing was for the purpose of a ward newsletter. We did it for several years and it worked very well. Tracking members who had moved was done by sending a "tracer letter". This was a letter addressed as usual but with the words "postmaster do not forward, address correction requested, return postage guaranteed." If the address of the member had changed the letter would come back to us with the new address.

In regards to your problems with members who have moved and not corrected their address, if they are attending, then it would easier and cheaper to just hand them out in person. If you don't have good addresses then the mailing wouldn't be helpful.

I think such a mailing would be very helpful because it more rigorously identifies the fact that the address is bad. (All mailings should routinely include the relevant instructions to the Postal Service requesting address-correction service.) From the clerk's practical point of view, this is really the more important purpose of the mailing; delivering the message content is just a spiritual bonus for the recipients. Of course, the biggest problem is really with the inactive members, who comprise a large majority of our ward roster.

Getting back to the monthly newsletter mailing, I think it is a great idea. The problem is that it likely would not be affordable today. I suspect that for most wards, the annual Christmas mailing is the only mailing they can afford to send to the entire ward list. That has been the case in the wards where I have served in the clerk's office. Perhaps budget funds could be found for a quarterly or mid-summer mailing as well.

Our quorums and Relief Society distribute newsletters via home and visiting teachers, but I suspect the teachers usually eat the cost of any postage themselves. If all that postage is reimbursed, it becomes a big sum relative to a typical ward budget. Again, I am mostly focusing not on delivering the message content, but on using the Postal Service as an administrative tool to help track members who are not being visited. If they are being visited, then we should know their address. The practical truth is that there are many members on the ward books who do not fit that pattern.

boomerbubba wrote:That is certainly an idea worth considering if saving postage is the primary consideration. But my twisted clerk's mind says there is much to be said for a central mailing to the whole ward -- not just for delivering the message content, but for the practical purpose of putting all MLS addresses through the USPS "Address Correction Requested" test. We happen to have a major problem with many lost sheep on our roster. and even active members can forget to give their new contact information to the clerks. We need all the tools we can get just to maintain the list, and the annual Christmas mailing is one such tool.

Note that the USPS address dmatching software that your bulk mailer will use will only tell you whether or not the address is valid, and not whether the people living there are who you think they are. Also, I don't believe that the USPS will return undeliverable mail pieces to the sender that are mailed at bulk rates

Interestingly, if you look at the raw USPS database, you will see that it only contains address ranges. It is not an actual list of addresses. You can thank congress for this, as they passed a law a while back which prohibits the Post Office from publishing databases of mailing addresses. So, theoretically, just because an address is reported as valid by the USPS address verification database, that does not mean that that address actually exists.

Aaron

cannona wrote:Note that the USPS address dmatching software that your bulk mailer will use will only tell you whether or not the address is valid, and not whether the people living there are who you think they are. Also, I don't believe that the USPS will return undeliverable mail pieces to the sender that are mailed at bulk rates

Interestingly, if you look at the raw USPS database, you will see that it only contains address ranges. It is not an actual list of addresses. You can thank congress for this, as they passed a law a while back which prohibits the Post Office from publishing databases of mailing addresses. So, theoretically, just because an address is reported as valid by the USPS address verification database, that does not mean that that address actually exists.

My understanding is that if the mailer scrubs the addresses using the Postal Service's Delivery Point Validation database, that will flag individual addresses that are not actually valid mailing sites. But there are licensing restrictions on that database designed to preven someone from publiishing the database itself or using it to construct blanket address lists.

USPS will not return mail if the person has moved -- unless they filed a forwarding address or if the new resident cooperates by returning it to sender. That is why it is important to do the mailings frequently, at least once a year, because forwarding-address notifications expire.

As for whether USPS will honor "Return Service Requested" endorsements on bulk mail, you raise a very important warning. I certainly do not want to do a mailing that does not qualify for some such service, because address maintenance is such an important objective. I have been trying to research that. It may be that presorted first-class mail, which qualifies for a more modest discount than bulk mail does, would have to be used. Another possibility may to to use the USPSAddress Correction Services. I am still trying to figure that one out.

Addendum: It may well be that the optimum approach would be to utilize a service provider that licenses the USPSNCOA Link database. This service performs the forwarding-address search before the mailing and provides the mailer with a file containing updated addresses, perhaps as old as 48 months. This would seem ideal for tracking some of the lost sheep on the ward roster.

FYI, after further investigation our ward has decided to try using a commercial mail-list processing vendor licensed to use the USPS NCOAlink database as a "Full Service Provider." Such a service is designed to report forwarding addresses on file for up to 48 months. If this service finds forwarding addresses for even a small fraction of the many lost sheep on our ward roster, this may be the best $75 we spend all year.

I will report back with results later, but in case any other ward wants to try this in time for its Christmas mailing, now is the time to act. There are several national vendors that do this. (Google "NCOAlink.") We have elected to try this one. Be aware that there also are "Limited Service Providers" that offer only an 18-month database search.

Legally, the licensed use of these databases is restricted to lists used for postal mailing, so the opportunity to employ the service depends upon your mailing schedule. In our ward, the Christmas mailing is the only mailing routinely sent to the whole roster.

After scrubbing our list, we may or may not also use some local mail shop to help facilitate the physical mailing. To me, those services are of secondary importance, since we do not lack for free labor. The database preprocessing should already have done three things for us: 1) identify forwarding addresses, even for older move-outs; 2) as a byproduct, provide a standardized and validated form of all the good addresses in the ward; 3) identify addresses in our ward that look okay to the naked eye but are actually invalid as postal addresses.

Note: In researching how to prepare the input file for the NCOAlist processing, I learned that we should use individual name records rather than household name records. So it still is our responsibility to combine the resulting name-record output to update the MLS household records. That will involve a little database programming, and possibly some subjective judgments.

FYI, I got the results back from the service vendor described above. (Anchor Computer Inc.) We ended up selecting their 48-month search of the Postal Service's NCOAlink database, enhanced with a search of proprietary databases. The vendor calls this combined service NCOALinkTM & AAE Plus.

The results seem very worthwhile. Overall, we got forwarding addresses for about 12 percent of our existing ward roster, and identified another 4 percent for further investigation as probable moves or moves without forwarding info! As a byproduct, we also identified several missing apartment numbers in our list, got several other addresses corrected, and obtained an authoritative file of standardized/validated addresses for the remaining ward roster. It only cost $85.

It is late in the cycle for other wards to try this for their Christmas mailing. But if you are running late like us, you still might try this service and get next-day turnaround for a premium price. YMMV. If your ward list is cleaner than ours to start with (and I should hope so) the results would be less significant. But almost any unit could benefit.

There is a bit of a learning curve in doing this. (I now have about 180 fields of detailed output to interpret.) And it takes some paperwork -- there are couple of forms to sign, which our Bishop executed. But I believe it is absolutely worth the effort.

boomerbubba wrote:It is late in the cycle for other wards to try this for their Christmas mailing.

New Years? (New meeting time, New Year's resolutions, etc.)

boomerbubba wrote:My exploration of a DIY approach to bulk-mailing hit a feasibility problem. USPS charges $180/year just for the privilege, before postage.

Part of the problem is that you may be using terminology interchangably that isn't really interchangeble.

Bulk Rate, now called Standard Rate, and monitarily equivalent to Non-Profit Rate, requires an annual fee for the permit. I suspect that when you asked the USPS about "Bulk Rate" mailings they gave you information on the those fees.

Bulk/Standard Rate is not the same as First Class. Single Piece (SP) rate for 1 ounce First Class mail is currently 42 cents per mail piece. There are discounts on First Class if the mail is presorted. A simple way to do this is to prepare all the mail pieces yourself WITHOUT POSTAGE, and then send them to a co-mingling house which uses equipment to presort the mail for the USPS thus qualifiying for a discounted First Class Rate (typically AB, Automated Basic). The co-mingle house will weigh and put postage on your mail pieces and deliver them to the USPS mailstream for you.

Another option is the one you implemented, which is to process your addresses through a commercial address service to get your addresses up to USPS standards. Some of the vendors only provide address service, that is, upload your data to them, they process it, and then you download the processed address list from them and prepare your own mailing. Thus you might still need to send your mail pieces to a co-mingle house to get a discount on postage. Other services combine various aspects of processing your address list and preparing and mailing your mail pieces.

Any mailings under 200 total pieces don't qualify for any discount and must be mailed at Single Piece rate regardless (unless the USPS has changed this threshold). For Standard Rate I think the threshold was 250 minimum mail pieces. This is why co-mingle houses exist. They will take your batch of mail under 200 pieces and co-mingle it with other clients' small batches so that they can get above the 200 piece threshhold and qualify for a discount. They typically charge their clients for the AB (automation basic) First Class rate and keep any additional postage discounts the co-mingled mailing qualifies for for profit and operating expenses.

Techgy wrote:Our monthly mailing was for the purpose of a ward newsletter. We did it for several years and it worked very well. Tracking members who had moved was done by sending a "tracer letter". This was a letter addressed as usual but with the words "postmaster do not forward, address correction requested, return postage guaranteed." If the address of the member had changed the letter would come back to us with the new address.

This is called an ancillary endorsement, and your example was excessively wordy. All it needed to say was Return Service Requested. This service is free for First Class mail; it costs extra for bulk/standard/non-profit rate mail.

If the mail piece has first class postage and contains no ancillary endorsement it is supposed to be processed as though it had an endorsement of Forward Service Requested (which is different from Address Service Requested and Return Service Requested).

The difference is this:
Forwarding Service is the default. It forwards your mail for the first 12 months after an address change. Once the address change is 12 months old, your mail piece is returned to you with the updated address or reason for non-delivery, instead of being forwarded. Therefore you might not recieve notice of an address change until after the change is a year old.

Address Service is the same as Forwarding Service, except that a separate postcard is sent back to you (FOR A FEE) with the updated address during the first 12 months while the piece is forwarded.

Return Service, if the piece is undeliverable, it is NOT FORWARDED but is returned to you immediately with the new address or reason for non-delivery. I've noticed that most Church envelopes have Return Service Requested printed on them for this reason (even though most may be unaware why).

An example of where ancillary endorsements may be placed is shown here.

jbh001,

Since I wrote that I post I have educated myself much more about postal methods. I think your description above sounds right, except I am pretty sure that Non-Profit status has different rates from Standard (what I had called "bulk") rates.

In any event we already have taken the step, which I described above, of having our file processed by a service bureau. And we are very glad we did this, for reasons having nothing to do with postal rates. We got a thoroughly scrubbed and updated file back in response.

Whether we still use some local shop to do the physical mailing will be decided in the next day or two. The best postal discount that we might expect there is a discounted First Class rate (for all letters in the same 3-digit ZIP), but those savings would likely be offset by the shop's own fees. The remaining question is what services a local shop would perform for the physical steps of stuff, seal and stamp. If only the latter, and we still have to stuff and seal all the envelopes, the value-added is small IMHO.

My own primary concern is to maximize the scrubbing of the list. So I favor a belt-and-suspenders approach: We have already had our database of individual records for each adult ("John Doe") processed for a 48-month forwarding search. But of the remaining valid addresses, the physical mailing with the "Return Service Requested" endorsement will be addressed per household ("John & Jane Doe"). So we might get a couple of extra hits on the USPS 18-month forwarding database.

The major benefits of all this will be not in the mailing itself, but in the cleanup of our MLS records. I broke the news yesterday to our membership clerk, as he plowed into a full inbox of paper, that soon I will be giving him files to ship about 60 families' records out of the ward, update the addresses on about 20 others for intra-ward moves, flag about 40 others for investigation and key/paste validated addresses for many records that remain. At least our unit recently called a second membership clerk to help.

boomerbubba wrote:We got a thoroughly scrubbed and updated file back in response.

I would think that you would only need to do this (pay to "scrub" the addresses) every few years or so unless your ward has a lot of turnover. But in between that time, the Return Service option usually works well. I have occasionally received and address correction back via this method that I then sent a new "tracer letter" out only to have it returned also with another update. I kept doing this until the letter no longer came back before finally sending the records out.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

boomerbubba wrote:The major benefits of all this will be not in the mailing itself, but in the cleanup of our MLS records.

Agreed. I'm glad you got such good results.

jbh001 wrote:I would think that you would only need to do this (pay to "scrub" the addresses) every few years or so unless your ward has a lot of turnover. ... Lather, Rinse, Repeat..

We do have high turnover, and a large ward. Once we get past the holidays, and we dig ourselves out from our cumulative backlog, I am thinking it might be worthwhile to do this more frequently than annually so we don't get buried again. And purely for the purpose of ministering to these mobile members, it seems better not to wait even as long as a year to get their addresses right -- either within our ward or in whatever unit their records properly belong.

This is not the only tool for leaders and clerks to use, but it is a useful one.

The significant downside is cost. The database search itself is not prohibitively expensive, but it must accompany an actual mailing. (Since local units are the entities who typically mail to members, this is properly a local priority.) I have been intrigued to learn that if we invested the trouble to get a non-profit permit and preprocessed our mail, we could send out a newsletter for as little as about 15 cents per copy. We might need also to invest in a mailing permit -- separate from the non-profit status -- at $180/year.

boomerbubba wrote:I have been intrigued to learn that if we invested the trouble to get a non-profit permit and preprocessed our mail, we could send out a newsletter for as little as about 15 cents per copy. We might need also to invest in a mailing permit -- separate from the non-profit status -- at $180/year.

Unless my math is off, you'd have to send 667 pieces to break even. That's a minimum annual budget of at least $280. I can see that may not be cost effective for once a year.

RussellHltn wrote:Unless my math is off, you'd have to send 667 pieces to break even. That's a minimum annual budget of at least $280. I can see that may not be cost effective for once a year.

I understand. But the numbers make it thinkable to mail more than once, which was less thinkable at First Class rates. For our ward, a typical mailing to households would be more than 500 pieces, even after excluding the move-outs and invalid addresses.

jbh001 wrote:Return Service, if the piece is undeliverable, it is NOT FORWARDED but is returned to you immediately with the new address or reason for non-delivery. I've noticed that most Church envelopes have Return Service Requested printed on them for this reason (even though most may be unaware why).

This is the method we always used when a home or visiting teacher could not come up with a new address. I would caution, however, that the postal service does not always return the piece, so it is wise to put something inside the envelope that you would not mind having the member actually read if the postal service does not perform as instructed.

boomerbubba wrote:The significant downside is cost. The database search itself is not prohibitively expensive, but it must accompany an actual mailing.

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but our unit is looking at this option as a way to locate some members on our roster. Since you provided them the address list, I have a few questions.

1. I assume you provided the addresses electronically via spreadsheet or something. Did you also provide the "newsletter" electronically or as a hardcopy?

2. Did you also have to supply envelopes? I am hoping the answer is yes. When our bishop was called about 3.5 years ago, I ordered a new box of envelopes for him, and put corrected labels on the return address of all the envelopes from the previous bishop. Unfortunately, Distribution Services has a minimum 1000 envelope order, and we are still chugging through the manually corrected envelopes from the previous bishop. I am looking for a way to use up the existing envelope stock.