Campaign Mail

As I wrote a couple of years ago, political mailers haven’t gone the way of the dinosaurs – they’re still a very effective method of communication for both persuasion and GOTV efforts. Political mailers may not be as sexy as the world of digital, but here are a few reasons to hang onto mail a while longer.

A lot of people struggle to communicate with an artist to get the design they want for their project. Working with someone outside of your field can sometimes be frustrating for you and the person you’re working with. You may not feel confident in knowing what to ask for, or you may not realize everything that goes into designing something.

On February 13, 2015 the United States Postal Service (USPS) experienced an outage in its Postal One service. To the uninitiated, this is the service that processes mailings and postage payments. All postal documents for mailings are done electronically through this system. Luckily, this didn’t happen back in October, during the height of election season.

National Change of Address, NCOA, is a required process for all bulk mailing lists to qualify for bulk rates according to the USPS. NCOA checks the names on your mailing list against a current database of 160 million names and addresses maintained by the USPS.This process is actually of benefit to all especially your campaign.

Two things off the bat to consider are costs and timing. First, die-cuts add costs, so it's not something to suggest on every campaign. Second is the time factor, die-cuts do add time to the production of the piece, so this needs to be worked into the schedule. If you have the budget and time for producing a die-cut piece, then the issues become production related.

Last week we released our first ebook: Political Direct Mail In The Digital Age. The book explains why with all the technology we have, political direct mail in the digital age is still relevant. We explain how you should decide on direct mail and targeted communications strategies for political and advocacy campaigns. We also discuss the cost of direct mail, micro-targeting strategies and how to use direct mail for GOTV.