Heads Up Arts Marketers: New Postal Regs Start Nov. 23rd

In the past couple of weeks, I have received many questions from arts marketers about the new postal regulations going into effect on November 23rd.  Here are the essentials you need to know. 

 

1) If you are sending any mailings out after November 23rd, you will need to make sure you have completed a NCOA (National Change of Address, CASS Certification) on these in the past 95 days.  This new 95 day rule was passed by the US Postal Service on September 23, 2007 to address the huge issue of UAA mail.  (UAA = Undeliverable as Addressed Mail.)  An estimated $2 billion of mail a year is undeliverable due to out of date or incorrect addresses.

 

 

2) This replaces the former 185 day NOCA/CASS Certification rule for automation rates, and it expands the NCOA requirement ot all automation, pre-sort, and presorted 1st class mail.

 

 

3) Starting on November 23rd, the Post Office will refuse to receive any presorted or bulk rate mail, including 1st class bulk mailings, unless it receives the certificate of update from within the prior 95 days.  This means that if you plan to send out a mailing on December 1, you will need to provide a certificate that shows your mailing list was updated no earlier than August 28th.

 

 

4) This is an on-going requirement for every mailing.  Starting November 23rd you will need NCOA certification that is up to date within 95 days prior to every mailing.

 

 

If your organization has not had us do a NCOA update of your house list as a part of your database research or list purchases, we can provide this service to you now in advance of your next planned mailing.  Having us do NCOA costs a fraction of a penney per record.

 

As an integrated service, ArtsMarket provides our clients with a list of all your customers that NCOA cannot match or that show as havingmoved outside your market.  We match these for you by your customer I.D. so you can update and clean your database to maintain accurate audience data.  you can decide to change addresses and keep the customers in your database, or eliminate names that are no longer deliverable or that have moved outside your market area.  We estimate about a 4-5% churn on any list per year based on the many lists we regularly NCOA for our clients.  We just did one metro area NCOA for a client and found close to a 10% churn!  Imagine how much your organization can save on printing, alone, by maintaining an accurately updated database.

 

 

Q.  If our volunteers process our mailings and bring them to the post office for first class bulk rate, do we need NCOA?  We never did in the past!

 

 

A.  Yes, you will need to NCOA any mailing you do starting November 23rd, 2008, even if your volunteers do the work.  The Post Office won’t accept your mailing for processing without the certificate.

 

 

Q.  Our mail house can do NCOA.  Why should we have ArtsMarket do it?

 

 

A.  We charge the same per address NCOA that is standard in the industry, based on a minimum order.  If your list is smaller than the minimum we can batch it with others and save you a bit, something your mail house is not likely to do.  But the real advantage is that we provide an additional service of giving you back the changed addresses so that you can update your in-house database.  Why does this matter?  Let’s say you plan on sending an end of the year first class mailing for donations – just standard delivery.  What if 10 addresses out of a hundred have changed and you don’t know it.  You stand to lose!  Our goal is for you to succedd with all your direct marketing and fundraising, whether you are doing a bulk mailing or sending ten targeted fundrasing letters!

 

 

Q.  What if we are moving more and more to email for our direct marketing.  Should we still do NCOA?  Why worry about physical street addresses?

 

A.  Our industry is evolving more and more to email marketing.  As you go forward, chances are your organization will want email appends on all your database households.  Accurate permission-based appends such as we recommend require accurate household addresses as a basis for append/match accuracy.

 

If you have more questions, contact us at staff@artsmarket.com