It doesn’t happen often but it happens. A job came to us that involved mailing out 3,000 chapbooks. These are books that are small enough to fit into a shirt or trouser pocket. They were to be inserted into a regular envelope along with a letter.
The real challenge was to see if there was any way to fit these dimensions into a category that would reduce the cost of unit postage compared to the first class rate. I went down to my friends at the postal service in Eagan Minnesota, where all the experts on regulations have their desks, in order to figure this out.
With the sample in his hands and referring to the latest postal rate publication, our contact determined that the piece would qualify for a steep discount. To be honest, I would never have found the category of mail he found. It had to do with changing a parcel to a letter sized piece and it was only available to non-profit groups.
But there it was in black and white. When we did the math it turned out that the customer would save almost $5,000, and this on just one mailing!
Because of our willingness to research, I believe we are one of the only mailshops that could have found this solution. As I tell people, the rule book is complex but the reward for understanding it is very high.
Some people think that postage is postage, that you really can’t control the bottom line when it comes to what the post office charges you. What we try to do here at Do-Good is show that is not the case.
The $5,000 we saved the customer will “buy a lot of hamburgers.” If we use our knowledge base and connect with the right postal people, there is a lot of money that can be returned to your pocket. This is just one example.
Thank you for your continued interest in Do-Good.biz.
