Postal

In a mailbox that’s a little less crowded than just a few years ago, there’s still a daunting task at hand for fundraisers: how to stand out to the prospective member or donor. Even with a full box of exciting tools at your disposal, the good ol’ envelope is still just an envelope, right?...

U.S. Mail goes digital in Gotham this week. Residents and businesses in several New York zip codes are being introduced to the Informed Delivery app, which—every day at 8 a.m.—emails them pictures of the front of mail envelopes being delivered to them later in the day. The pilot program works through the My USPS website…

Catholic Charities USA (CCUSA) has selected Merkle Response Management Group (Merkle RMG), a subsidiary of Merkle, to manage its direct mail gift processing and donor service requirements. Merkle RMG's features include mail processing, scanning, imaging, data entry, exception services, and call center and email management. The three-year contract began in October 2014. Since 1910, CCUSA…

Robert Taub, acting chairman of the U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission, summed up the state of the USPS in 2015 during his DMA Nonprofit Federation Washington Nonprofit Conference keynote: "Very few people wonder if the mail will be there — it's always there and always has been … but will the mail be there in the future?"

At the DMA Nonprofit Federation's 2012 Washington Nonprofit Conference, Gretchen Littlefield, president, nonprofit and government, at Infogroup, and Angel Aloma, executive director of Food For The Poor, discussed postal and tax topics and urged each and every fundraiser in attendance to take action and make his or her voice heard. Aloma, ever the passionate speaker, really drove his point home: "The biggest sin of all is the sin of doing nothing."

The Senate failed on Tuesday to move forward with its revised plan to overhaul the U.S. Postal Service, delaying a committee vote after a series of potential amendments threatened to derail the bill. The most significant sticking point during the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee markup arose when lawmakers discussed how the postal bill would deal with postal rates in the future.

Did you know the USPS has special offers and incentives for nonprofit mailers? They may last only for a limited time with certain restrictions, but they may be worth the cost savings they can ultimately provide. 

Congress is poised to tell the Postal Service it must continue all Saturday mail services, but the message hasn't been delivered just yet. The six-day-a-week service mandate, wrapped into a government spending bill on remaining fiscal 2013 spending, is the same one Congress has had for the past 30 years. The House has already passed the provision. The Senate is expected to follow suit as early as Tuesday.

The United States Postal Service announced plans to transition to a new delivery schedule during the week of Aug. 5, 2013, that includes package delivery Monday through Saturday, and mail delivery Monday through Friday. The Postal Service expects to generate cost savings of approximately $2 billion annually, once the plan is fully implemented.

The section of a U.S. Postal Service reform bill in Congress that would have eliminated discounted nonprofit postal rates during a 12-year period has been eliminated from the legislation.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the leading sponsor of the postal reform bill, H.R. 2309, informed the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers that Section 403 of the bill will be deleted when it goes to the House floor for a vote later this summer.