Direct Mail Printer

Political direct mail is one of the most effective ways to reach voters, but I’ll be the first to admit: all that paper takes a toll on our environment. At The Campaign Workshop, we’re passionate about protecting our natural world—luckily for us, so are a lot of the printers we work with.

Regardless of how you cut it, writing and producing quality political direct mail and doing political printing is no easy task. There are a lot of things that go into quality political printing, and it takes quite a bit of time and practice to be able to do it well. With that said, below is a quick list of dos and don’ts to producing quality political printing.

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.

Here at The Campaign Workshop, we’re always on the lookout for innovative direct mail and marketing campaigns to inspire our creativity. We often look to the commercial world for ideas that could translate to the political or advocacy direct mail world. Here are three campaigns we love:

Political direct mail printing: #4:  In previous installments of this series we covered finding a printer, managing schedules, specifying paper and digital vs. offset printing. This week is the final installment of the series and we’re going to talk about photos, file preparation and proofing.

Political direct mail printing part 3: In previous installments of this series on political direct mail printing we covered finding a political direct mail printer, managing schedules and specifying paper. Today, we’re going to get technical and talk about presses. We couldn’t have political direct mail printing without presses to get the job done, so let’s examine the differences and uses for digital and offset printing.

In part one of this series we talked about the characteristics of a good printer for political direct mail printing and how to find them. This week we’re going to talk about schedules and paper.