Ah, election year—a year that though singular, feels plural. As the urgency of campaign messaging reaches a fever pitch, nonprofit leaders may wonder how to keep their fundraising communications from fading dismally into the background. One way to ensure that your hard work doesn't go unnoticed is to perfect the timing of your organization's mailings. Luckily, Carlos Baez, Director of Production & Project Management at AmPhil has some expert advice on how to do just that:

"According to insiders at USPS, October 2024 is expected to be extremely heavy with Political, Election, and Ballot Mail, which will be prioritized over Marketing and Non-Profit Mail. This could result in delays of 2-3 weeks for our client mailings during the month of October.

To mitigate this, we suggest using co-mingle mail and freight drop shipments directly to USPS destination facilities. This should help avoid most delays and ensure in-home times of 2-4 days once the mail reaches the destination facility (4-12 total days depending on the freight shipment time to the destination facility).

Schedule any direct mail for the end of September, if possible, and do NOT cancel or scale back any mailings. Rather, be mindful of the potential delivery delays and work with your printers to mail several days earlier than you originally planned for, especially as you approach October and Thanksgiving week in November."

Some things are unchanging, election year or not: a strong donor messaging  strategy is sure to get your organization through any challenges end-of-year fundraising throws at you.