Make Sure You Have a Back-up Plan for Your Election Direct Mail
On February 13, 2015 the United States Postal Service (USPS) experienced an outage in its Postal One service. To the uninitiated, this is the service that processes mailings and postage payments. All postal documents for mailings are done electronically through this system. Luckily, this didn’t happen back in October, during the height of election season. But realistically, it could happen, and we’re all wondering: what we would do if it did? How would your political direct mail or even election mail, like ballots or voter guides, get out on time if all systems were down?
Thankfully for us, the United States Postal System has published a “Postal One! External Contingency Plan” outlining the protocols for keeping mailings moving when the Postal One system is down. In the case of an outage, the USPS will move to a manual system to process all mailings. You can read the fully Contingency Plan Document here. All mail shops should be aware of these contingency plans and be prepared to handle manual submissions in the case of a system outage. All mailers should also develop their own internal contingency plans based on the document created by the United States Postal Service. The Campaign Workshop will query all our vendors on their election mail contingency plans so if we are ever faced with this during election season, we will be prepared to get our political direct mail and election mail out with as little delay as possible.