USING THE MAIL

We've all recieved letters in the snail mail from politicians asking for money or invitations to an event from politicians where they will inevitably ask for money, but most of us don't think (at least I never had before now) about the process that resulted in that letter ending up in your mail box.

Unless you have unlimited funds mailing letters to every address in the state of Illinois is just not possible. You have to take into account the cost of stamps, envelopes, paper, ink, etc... It adds up. It therefore becomes important to make sure these letters are being sent to the right people. The best place to start in terms of mailing lists is the addresses given on petitions. To be honest when I was collecting signatures people would ask me if I was going to send them something and I thought the campaign couldn't use these addresses and told them so (I'm sorry! I unknowingly lied). The only problem with using these is that they are hand written. Kathleen Thomas' campaign has found that about 25% of the addresses on their petitions are next to impossible to correctly make out. Other than the petitions, you can also obtain mailing lists from services (this is what advertisers use).

For different people the campaign sends out different letters. Recently Kathleen Thomas sent out a more personal letter to those that know her on a personal level. These people know she is running, and the letter simply asks for them to review her positions and also asks for their support. These letters are hand signed 'Kathy' (as she is known by friends) instead of 'Kathleen'.

The letters that are sent out to the public have to be much more, well, strategic because you need to get these people to actually open and read these letters (usually fundraising letters). One way in which the campaign tries to meet this objective is by hand writing the addresses because people are more likely to open a hand addressed letter. The way in which the letter is folded also has an impact. If you fold the letter in a nontraditional way so that the header is on top it makes any fundraising slips within the letter fall out creating the reader to actually pick it up (sneaky).

Its a well thought out process, but the main goal is to make sure you get more fundraising letters returned then you actually spend on the cost of mailing these or else its a wasteful process.