Seen on the outer envelope from a recent charity-oriented mailing:
Please accept our apologies if you are receiving more than one copy of our mailer. Please understand, though, that it costs us more to find and locate the duplicates in our lists than it does to mail out an extra flyer to you.
Did you know that a nonprofit mailer can send a 3 ounce flyer (about 12 sheets of paper in an envelope) for as little as 5.2 each? A regular for-profit mailer would spend double that for the same exact mailer. And that same piece would cost 75 to mail first class! Yes, it certainly is more cost-effective for the non-profit mailer to waste their postage and flyer rather than spending some time and money to clean up their list first. I'm bringing up this subject because the Post Office is planning to phase out the lower non-profit rates over the next few years. Everyone in the nonprofit industry feels this is horrible news. I don't believe they're right (and I mail lots of nonprofit literature for my clients, so technically I'll stand to suffer once the rates go up). The major argument against the increases is that the nonprofits will have to spend more for postage so they'll have less to spend on their various causes. Makes a good argument, too. Until you look under the surface and see that, since a nonprofit spends $50-$100 less per thousand mailings they can mail to every Tom, Dick, Jane and Harry in the hopes they'll get someone to send them some money or support their cause. One national nonprofit claims they'll spend $1.3 million more in postage alone just because of the rate hikes. Yes, if they send out the same amount of mail and include the same offers, they will spend more in postage. But they're leaving out one small, but highly significant, detail. They can now legitimately request that their members contribute a few dollars more because that horrible ogre (the Post Office) has taken more of their money, so won't you please, very kindly, kick in an extra five bucks or so to help pay this money that this monstrous bureaucracy demands that we pay?" Who could resist? Through proper list hygiene (getting rid of duplicates and weeding out the people who are unlikely to give) and appealing for a slightly larger donation (using effective copywriting and legitimate causes to donate more), the non profits will actually increase their overall bottom lines.