Make the Post Office Work for You
What’s the best way to get your fire safe message out to your community? There certainly are a lot of options—from paid advertising on television, radio or in the newspapers to public service announcements, attending community events and asking volunteers to distribute materials at community gathering spots.
Mailing with the US Postal Service is sure-fire method to share your fire safe council information and activities with folks in your community. Not everyone may be listening to the radio or watching television when your ad is aired, but you can be sure everyone opens up their mailbox. Every resident in your area may not subscribe to the newspaper, but we’ll bet that almost everyone has a mailbox or Post Office box.
Using “standard mail” (formerly called “bulk mail”) means you can mail inexpensively if you’re sending out at least 200 mailpieces.. If your fire safe council is a non-profit organization, or affiliated closely in mission with one, you can file paperwork to receive the cheapest postage rates possible (as low as 10.5 cents each).
The catch to mailing? Using standard mail can seem overwhelming—there are sortation and labeling requirements, the paperwork is confusing and, unfortunately, some USPS employees aren’t the most helpful with information. There’s also a one-time $160 fee to acquire a permit and an annual fee of $160.
That’s where we can help. We know the ins and outs of mailing. We mail hundreds of thousands of mailpieces every year for businesses and nonprofit organizations. We have software that takes your data file (or the list of neighborhoods you want to target for a mailing) and processes it right down to the delivery travel route of the mail carrier. Because our software does so much of the work for the Postal Service, our mailings receive the highest postage discounts possible. You pay less for postage! In fact, you pay so much less that the savings more than pays for our mail preparation services.
That’s right, we do your mailing even cheaper than you can with all volunteer labor. Save your volunteers for jobs that only they can do. We’ll let your fire safe council use our mail permit for free and you won’t need an annual permit fee. We’ll even supply the USPS paperwork and assist you in qualifying for a non-profit mailing rate—at no charge.
We have specialized mailing equipment which can affix labels or inkjet addresses on your mailpiece. We even have machinery which can fold a letter, add a donor envelope or brochure, insert the whole thing into an outer envelope and then seal the envelope. It’s amazing to watch—and a lot easier and quicker than doing it by hand while sharing a pizza at a “volunteer mailing party”!
If you’re interested in exploring how mailing can work for your fire safe council, give us a call. Our goal is to make sure that you’re spending your hard-earned funds on educating people—not paying one cent more than you have to for postage!
Planning ahead is important when you create a mailpiece. See our Resources page for detailed US Postal Service information—as well as our tips from years of mailing experience.