Newsletter

Things have proceeded as usual with the invaluable help of Kathi Caccavale, Pat Brangs, Nancy Kelner, Liz Pagan, Bill Henderson, and Eddie Roffman. The proofreaders, as usual, do an excellent job of catching errors that I miss.

Pat handed off the responsibilities for printing and mailing the newsletter over to Kathi Caccavale around September. Kathi noticed that the way the address page was printed did not match Post Office requirements, to wit, the cover page with the address was upside down. The stamp is supposed to be on the side *away* from the fold, not close to it. The reason this is important, apparently, is that the sorting machinery at the Post Office grabs the newsletter by the side away from the stamp when routing it, and if that edge is the stronger spine there is less damage done when the stamp is cancelled. We have received very few reports of damaged newsletters since making the change.

Kathi prints 200 newsletters, and mails out approximately 163 individually, plus another 3-4 in one envelope to Morris arts. She keeps two or three back in case she’s asked to mail to a new member. The rest, around 30, go to The Minstrel, to be put off the following month on the information table.

Kathi moved the printing of the newsletters from Staples to a new printer, allowing us to have a consistent budget from newsletter to newsletter: $119 for the printing, plus about $80 in postage. In addition, the printer prints the mailing address and any Renew and Last Issue messages along with the printing, eliminating the need for label application and hand stamping. The only thing she needs to do once she has the newsletters in hand is affix first-class stamps and drop them at the Post Office. For the December issue, one of the postal workers helped her affix the stamps! It almost couldn’t get better than that!

On the whole, the entire newsletter production process has become pretty efficient.

George Otto