Remember, political direct mail that arrives after Election Day is a waste of money. Ideally, I’d recommend giving yourself a full week in advance of Election Day for your final mail drop. You should always drop your last piece (the piece dropped closest to a collection point) five or so days before your collection point if you’re really pushing your schedule. You will need to account for your 2–4 mail days after the drop date. To start, work backwards from your campaign collection points. Now you can get to work building your mail schedule. One other important point on mailing around absentee voting is that ballot return rates typically follow a reverse bell curve (meaning the largest return rates tend to be shortly after ballots are mailed out, a lull in the middle of that period, and another uptick in returns right around Election You want to send out your mail directly before campaign collection points in order to get the most bang for your buck and talk to people when they are paying the most attention. Name recognition should be achieved in other ways, generally speaking. Some campaigns will try to make the case that they should send out political mailers early in the campaign in order to boost their "name recognition," but in most cases, this will not be a good use of your political mailer dollars. When building your mail schedule, it’s important to realize that the vast majority of voters won't pay any real attention to your race until about a month before a campaign collection point. Many states also have multiple voter collection points these days, so think carefully about Election Day as well as early and absentee voting periods, and mark each major collection point out first on your drop schedule. Your drop dates should be based around important campaign collection points. Typically, collection points are voting dates, but depending on the goal of your mail they could also be other important milestones (for instance if you’re sending fundraising mail, it would likely be tied to trying to get donations in the door before filing deadlines). It’s helpful to print out a calendar and mark each prospective drop date so you can visualize the tempo and timing of the mail in one place (and yes, I know it may seem silly, but the activity of printing it out and looking at your plan is actually a useful exercise, just as writing out your campaign plan is a necessary step to running a successful campaign). To determine when you should drop your political mailers, you should build a mail schedule that will contain the drop date for each mail piece. But since your direct mail consultant and printer can’t really be held accountable for what USPS will do once you give them the mail, they usually will talk in terms of the drop date. You can expect political mail (which should carry a special red tag so that it’s treated as First-Class mail and gets where it’s going faster than other bulk mail) to actually be in mailboxes an estimated two to four days after the drop date. Delivery at the SCF means that your mail is actually getting delivered a step further into the USPS process than the mail you just drop in your mailbox, and it helps ensure faster delivery times. Most political mail consultants are set up to deliver to SCFs, but it’s worth checking with your own consultants to confirm. Most political direct mail consultants will talk about the political mailer sending date in terms of the "drop date." This is the date that a printer physically delivers your political mailers to United States Postal Service (USPS), typically at a Sectional Center Facility (SCF). Sophie Thurber (she/her) When Should I Drop My Political Mailers?įor any campaign that is investing in political mailers, the timing of that campaign mail is a crucial question.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |