[rcrenshaw]

At my organization, we have been using a Pitney-Bowes postage meter, but the lease is expiring and it has become abundantly clear that this service is too expensive. We are researching other options for postage for our constituent gift acknowledgments, and am curious to see what others have found that works well.

I have tried to work a little with stamps.com, but their option of printing directly onto envelopes doesn't seem to integrate very well with Word mail merges. I'm concerned about whether or not the Word merge function with RE will really mess stuff up.

Another concern is that we send out different materials to different donors, which results in envelopes of varying weights and sizes. I really don't want to have to run a lot of different exports and merges each time I run a batch of acknowledgment letters and enter all of the different postage rates.

I've also looked at using USPS online postage printing, but am not sure it's not just easier to buy stamps and stick them on, old-fashioned style. Anyone have thoughts or experiences that might be helpful?

[JBeckland]

This really depends a lot on volume - could you give us some more information about how much mailing you are doing? What kinds of mailings? What are the runs? This will help us put it all in context.

My first thought would be to look at Pitney Bowes competitor Neopost. Both of these companies have new, no-lease machines, as internet postage has started eating into their business.

Basically, the order of mail volume would fall out this way:

Very small mail volume - stamps
Small mail volume - Stamps.com, Endicia.com
Medium mail volume - Non-leased metering machine (with stamps available for small/odd jobs)
High mail volume - Leased metering machine with all the bells and whistles
Very high mail volume - Outsource to mail house for most things, keep one of the previous options for small, in-house jobs

[rcrenshaw]

I would say we are low to medium volume. I haven't been here long enough to judge really accurately, but I would say we send out 20-50 donor letters per week, plus whatever other foundation and miscellaneous items.

A standard acknowledgement run for me is about 15-20 standard-size #10 envelopes and around 15-20 irregular-sized flats for new member packs. Again, the problem with using something automated like stamps.com is that the sizes and weights of the outgoing pieces tend to vary within the same batch.