SNOW & ASSOCIATES

Tips for Institutional Mailers

This page appears courtesy of Snow & Associates, an international research organization dedicated to helping educational, fraternal and professional institutions maintain better information on their alumni/ae, communicate more effectively with them, and relocate those who are lost. Click HERE to visit our home page.

The Coming Disintegration of the U.S. Postal Service

Once again, postal rates are increasing. At a time when competition is increasing on many fronts, the USPS is providing poorer services at higher costs.

S&A believes that the disintegration of the U.S. Postal Service as we know it today is inevitable, and urges institutional mailers to start planning alternatives before it occurs.

USPS overnight mail service does not compare favorably with UPS, Federal Express or other expedited delivery services. In an attempt to compete with "blue label" or second-day delivery services of competitors, the USPS began promoting its so-called "Priority Mail" service at lower prices. But Priority Mail is actually nothing more than First Class Mail in a fancy envelope. Although its advertising insinuates that Priority Mail is delivered in "two to three days" (quietly adding "in major markets" to the fine print) the USPS will not guarantee delivery of Priority Mail in two days, three days -- or even ten days -- and no tracking number is provided.

Parcel Post is cheap, but notoriously unreliable. Likewise, regular first class mail seems to take longer and longer to be delivered every year while rates continue to rise.

E-Mail continues to supplant regular mail as the medium of choice for savvy consumers, and the migration of routine correspondence from snail-mail to e-mail is certain to gradually erode the revenue base of the USPS from First Class and Bulk Mail in the years ahead.

This will eventually create circumstances similar to those that gave birth to rural electric cooperatives in the first half of the century. In remote areas, there simply weren't enough consumers of electricity to make commercial electric utilities viable. Consumer-owned REMCs were established to provide electricity to markets where there was no commercial incentive to do so. Most REMCs provide service close to cost, but prices are still typically higher than those of commercial providers.

But unlike electric consumers, users of delivery services have a choice. For packages, they can use UPS, Fed-X or other services; for letters, they can use e-mail. This freedom of choice is good for consumers, but poses a serious threat to the survival of the USPS.

To continue the analogy with electric service, expedited delivery companies and e-mail are gradually carving away the USPS's prime markets. In time, only a few "REMC-type" markets will continue to use the USPS with regularity: the shrinking segment of the population without access to the Internet; and the market for delivery of parcels for which time and reliability are unimportant.

As its prime markets are eroded, the USPS will be forced to service less attractive, more expensive, remote market areas -- without revenue from its traditionally most lucrative services. This will cause costs to rise even further, and service to deteriorate even more.

The USPS's future problems will be exacerbated by its non-competitive nature. Without the impetus to efficiency required by commercial profit motives, leagues of entrenched bureaucrats and workers with union-like seniority will be add crippling overhead at a time of shrinking revenues.

While it is possible that the government may increasingly subsidize the USPS with taxpayer dollars, or privatize the delivery of mail altogether, it seems virtually certain that the delivery of letters to sparsely-populated areas will eventually become prohibitively expensive, or simply unavailable.

What can institutional mailers do to prepare for these changes in the future? S&A recommends several possibilities:

• Move to online mailing. Start tracking e-mail addresses for your constituents now. For economic reasons alone, institutions in the know will increasingly use e-mail to communicate with alumni. Get your system up and running as soon as possible, to gain a competitive edge over less foresighted institutions.

• Support efforts to establish a world standard for online monetary transactions. The one weakness of e-mail as a medium for communication with constituents is the difficulty of managing transfers of funds. Although credit cards can be used, it isn't generally possible for alumni to send your institution a check via e-mail, and many are reluctant to send credit card info, even using secure channels. This will change soon, as standards for Internet security and transfer of funds are established.

• Provide PERMANENT e-mail addresses for alumni. Whether made available through your own institution's computer system, or ordered from a service provider like ALUM.ORG, take steps now to avoid losing track of constituents who move or change service providers in the volatile years ahead.

• Encourage the establishment of world standards for e-mail addresses, starting with your own institution. Simple e-mail addresses will make life easier for everyone. For example, addresses like username@school.edu or username@organization.org or username@domain.com will be easier to manage than more complicated systems of assigning addresses. Other conventions, such as a standard limit to the number of characters to the left and right of the '@' sign will also be helpful in the years ahead.

• Support services to improve security; to provide registration services for constituents such as FOUR11.COM; and to unify the registration of digital objects such as DOI.ORG.