By Dick Mooney

Most established support groups make several large mailings a year involving such media as dues notices, donation requests, meeting reminders, and newsletters. Some groups that don't have formal nonprofit status pay full first class rates. Nonprofit permit holders pay about half of that. But all of them complain about how slow the U.S. Postal Service is. How would you like to speed up your mail at little or no cost to you. Read on!

First, let's look at what happens to your mailings when they arrive at the United States Postal Service Distribution Center. In very general terms, it goes like this: All letters are automatically right-faced and cancelled by a magnificent machine called an advanced facer-canceler and fed through an Optical Character Reader (OCR). An OCR is a marvelous machine that reads English, or French, or Swahili for that matter. The OCR reads the address of your letter, prints a POSTNET Bar Code on the envelope and fires it at lightning speed through a high-speed bar code reader. This machine reads the bar code and directs the letter to the right state, then to the city, and then to a mail carrier route. Average OCRs process about 36,000 pieces of mail per hour, day after day. Throughout the nation, these machines process almost 100 billion pieces of mail annually.

If all goes well, you can mail a letter in Chicago and the OCRs will direct your letter to a prosthetist in Los Angeles without further human viewing or assistance of any kind, provided, of course, that the OCR can read your address.

If the machine can't read your address, it spits out your letter to hand sort, which, at best, has a throughput of 600 units per hour, and perhaps less. The clarity and style of your address alone may well determine whether your mailer takes two days or two weeks to get delivered.

Wonderful as they are, OCRs are very skittish machines. They know what they like for breakfast, and they don't deal with change very well. If they don't get what they like, they reject without hesitation. However, with a little care, you can avoid the dreaded hand sort and speed the delivery of your mail. Here's how.

Almost all support groups have access to a personal computer these days. Many have been using computers for some time to keep their membership and visitation records and to produce address labels for their mailed media. If you're just automating or are producing addresses with a typewriter, here's what you need to do. If you've been producing automated labels for some time, here are the changes you might want to make in the way you print labels.

Your address labels should look like this:

JANE SMITH
34456 EAST 28 AVE
NEVADA CITY CA 95959-8976

• Use no punctuation of any kind. That's right. None. Every time you get the urge to toss in a period or a colon, or perhaps a dash just to separate a suite number from an address, beat down the temptation. The preferred format is absolutely no punctuation of any kind (except the dash in the middle of the zip code, which is actually a numeral).
• Use all upper case letters--clear, clean, crisp, precise, single-spaced, capitals throughout.
• Use a uniform left margin - non-linear left justification gives the OCR a headache.
• Perhaps most importantly, the address must be typed or machine printed. All hand-written addresses and hand-written corrections on addresses guarantee slower hand sorting.
• Regarding placement of the address on the envelope, basically, if you center the address on the envelope and offset it just a touch toward the bottom, you'll be in good shape.
• Try to use 10 or 12-point San Serif type, unaltered, i.e., not bold, not condensed, and definitely not italic. The Post Office has a list of some fifty fonts that OCRs like to see--you can call to get a copy, but good old garden variety Helvetica is still the best.
• Use dark ink on a light background. Black-on-white is the best. Those fluorescent yellow labels that are being promoted throughout the land are bad news. Mauve, brown, dark blue, and red are just as bad. Throw out all your colored labels and for best OCR processing use black-on-white only. Avoid reverse printing (white-on-black), gold print, black on metallic, and any form of scripted font. All will cause major indigestion in the OCR and guarantee rejection 100% of the time.
• Avoid preprinted form labels with underlines or boxes around them and tiny words such as "Name," "Address," etc. OCRs will reject these universally.
• Avoid frontal clutter. Comments such as "Open Immediately" and "Personal," if they must be used, should be well above the top line of the address. The OCR scans from the bottom of the envelope just about full width until it finds things that it can recognize. If it encounters an aberration; that is, anything from an ink blotch to a cute graphic, it immediately stops its scan and sends your envelope to hand sort. If you must place anything other than the address on the label, put it well above the address.

If you follow these rules, you can just about guarantee that 90 percent of your mail will make it through the jittery jaws of the OCR and be delivered more quickly.

I am indebted to my friend, Lloyd Rain, Director of Purchasing for Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon, and to HigherMarkets.com for the material for this article.