Meet the Mailers Podcast: Being a Problem Solver with Ben Harris and Paul Bobnak

Who Mailing What’s Paul Bobnak sat down with Ben Harris, PS President, to podcast on how Production Solutions is revising its missions to emphasize solving problems for its clients and partners.

Q: You know that the word “production” in the company name is pretty significant because of all the challenges that direct mail programs face. How can Production Solutions help non-profits deal with them?

A: So one of the shifts for us as recent as this year as we started to look at our vision, mission, and values and where we need to go from here based on what’s happening in our clients’ business and the industry at large and we homed in on the word “solutions” instead of production. We feel one of our kind of revised missions if you will, is the world needs trusted problem-solvers, and the word “trust” is key in that statement and sort of leans into the word “solutions”.

From talking to many of our clients and agency partners at the end of last year and even continuing this year, they’re looking for new ideas …any innovations that can help them in their businesses. They’re looking to budget accurately and reduce costs. They’re looking for the service experience to be accurate, easy and consistent. [W]here they spend their time has become even more crowded. They’re looking for omnichannel support and integration, and the other one is to help them with any technology or sustainability efforts that are at play. So those are the five themes that I would say you could talk to any fundraiser today would say, “Yeah, those are those are our challenges as well”, and how can we show up and be a problem solver with those challenges in mind, because some of them are based in production or print and mail, but some of them are starting to expand beyond just print and mail from that standpoint.

[W]hen we talk to our employees about some of the challenges that our clients are facing, I would say just in general, since late 2019… on average our clients’ costs are up anywhere from 40 to 80% in less than three years. So a lot of that is postage and I think the post office …you know there’s two sides of it, right? There’s this sort of runaway cost increase side, but it’s also important to not demonize them too much because they’re super important to direct mail fundraising, right? So we tend to focus on all the negative, but there is a lot of good that is there as well in terms of some of the postal promotions and some other things that if you can leverage those as well, it can help offset some of the costs.

I think there’s a limit in terms of what we can do within our business, primarily focusing on direct mail and how we can help clients integrate from an omnichannel perspective. We’ve done a lot of Informed Delivery management for clients. We’ve helped them take advantage of some of the USPS promotions, the tactile, sensory, and interactive, and then the emerging and advanced technology promotion. In 2023, we saved clients over $1.5 million, leveraging the Informed Delivery promotion… up 27% from 2022. So just a sign that shows you that clients are more apt and willing to have a digital integration with their mail piece, and that’s just a small digital integration, as you know.

But those are some of the things that I think if you’re in print or direct mail only, you can be leading with those. In addition to making sure that from a production standpoint or a quality control standpoint, if a client has a URL on there or a QR code, you’re checking those for accuracy, that they’re going to a live website or landing page. You know that can be problematic if you’re printing that and sending it out and you’re trying to drive clients to some landing page and it’s not working, you can, you know, flag the client on those types of things.

But I think one of the more interesting sort of points that I’ve heard from some of the industry colleagues and the agency partners we work with is that direct mail has become more of a channel of influence. Kind of all boats rise in the tide. [I]f you cut back on direct mail – while it may save you money initially – the influence that it has on all the other channels today will be sort of stunted.

So which kind of leads into the attribution of where this donor, where does this gift come from? [M]aybe AI will help solve some of this, but just continuing to be able to identify … we sent a direct mail piece. We did a landing page. We did a digital ad and Paul or Ben responded, where did they actually come from … did something influence them, it may not be that the gift came through on direct mail. This may have come through on the landing page, but the direct mail piece brought more attention to the digital ad, because the timing was done.

Listen to the rest of the podcast here!