March 30, 2015
The Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers is comprised of people who are strong advocates for the United States Postal Service, hard-copy, and mail within their organizations and publicly. The Alliance has supported all of the USPS cost reduction initiatives including ending Saturday mail delivery and consolidating plants. Individually, our members ensure that they work with the best mail service providers in the business to prepare their mail as efficiently as possible.
Within their nonprofits, Alliance members also constantly advocate for the critical role of hard-copy mail in raising funds, communicating with members, and distributing publications. They face growing advocacy for digital alternatives by their colleagues, but continue to use data to demonstrate that direct mail, First Class Mail, and print publications still deliver donations, subscriptions, member benefits, and advocacy. Mail is the sine qua non for their nonprofits.
Our members who distribute light-weight, low-advertising print publications to subscribers feel betrayed by the Postal Service that they have worked so hard to support. They were completely blind-sided with Periodicals price increases ranging from twice the two percent average to 8 times the Consumer Price Index (CPI) cap. They do not understand why the USPS did this, nor have they been given a clear explanation of why it was done. The Postal Service completely departed from its longstanding policy of phasing in necessary price signals to increase the efficiency of their processing of Periodicals to avoid rate shock that sends the clear message that they do not want these customers in the mail.
The remand of Periodicals price changes by the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) did not address the wide disparity in rate changes because the regulator polices the weighted average, not the range. The current regulatory regime relies on USPS management and board to make sound business decisions about the range of price changes. It boggles the mind why they would so obviously send away some of their most loyal customers who distribute some of the most desirable content to America’s mailboxes at a time when USPS is starting to stabilize in its quest for future relevancy. But the remand does give USPS a chance to make this right. They have the ability and the authority to revise the rates to fit a much tighter range around the required two percent average, as they have done in all previous rate cases in recent memory.