Bulk Mailing Updates

Hello everyone! To the people who already know what bulk mailing is and how to use it, feel free to skip to the **. Otherwise, please read the first part to learn about bulk mailing and see if it might be something you want to chat more about. Feel free to reach out to Heather Loveland or Nick, the Mail Supervisor, if you have any questions now or during any preparation that you do.

Bulk Mailing, AKA Automation Mailing, is a service that Mail Services provides to other university departments. This is a great way to reduce your mailing costs if you're sending out a lot of something. Normally mail is sent out at the standard first-class rate of 69¢; when doing bulk mailings you can cut that down to 20¢-30¢ each as long as you meet the criteria for mailing. We add a 7¢ surcharge per piece for sending them out bulk since it's a more involved process for the Mail Room, but you still generally see savings of around 45% of the price you would be paying.

The requirements for sending out a bulk mailing are fairly straightforward:

• Domestic mail (no foreign addresses)
• 200 to 5,000 pieces
• All mail must be the same size, weight, and contents.
  • The letter CAN be mail-merged for personalization, but the contents should otherwise be the same.

If your mailing job meets these requirements, then please reach out and we can talk more! If you're an experienced mailer and have done this before, here's the more nitty-gritty stuff where the updates are.

**To complete a bulk mailing job, you need to be able to supply the following to mail services:**

• An Excel sheet with the names and addresses of all recipients
  • If the mail is personalized, this needs to be provided before the job is submitted to the Service Center for printing. This allows us to sort your list into mailing order so that when you perform the mail merge and print, they come out in the order that the addresses are printed.
    • Please imagine trying to hunt through a list of 500 letters alphabetized by high school name and matching them to 500 addresses that are in order by mail routes. It is not fun and makes the student workers sad.
• The mail piece
• Envelopes with bulk mailing information printed on them
  • If you're sending a postcard, the mail piece and envelope are the same thing
• A completed NonProfit Mail Job Request Form
  • If you submit a print job to the Service Center but do not tell us, then we don't know about it. We need the Job Request Form so that we know

Please note that we will be returning mail that does not meet these requirements. This is generally an issue with the postcard or envelope design where it does not contain all the necessary information for the post office. If you want to be extra nice to the student workers, you can request that your letters be folded as part of the printing process. This saves us a lot of time and energy and also gives you a more consistent fold.

Again, please reach out if you have any questions. I'm more than happy to help you look over your designs to advise if it's compliant with postal regulations and go into more detail if you need clarification.