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Many churches rely on weekly newsletters or bulletins to maintain communication with their congregations. These items need to go out on time every time, and with as little cost as possible. For larger congregations, time runs short, since in order to get newsletters to families to inform them about the weekend, the newsletters must be mailed on a Tuesday or Wednesday. Some churches use staff time or recruit volunteers to attach mailing labels and appropriate postage. Others outsource these functions, paying a premium for someone else to do the work.

But many churches are discovering the benefits of an investment in mail addressing equipment, including time savings, cost savings, greater productivity, and better quality and control of mailed items.

When manually preparing newsletters for mailing, one volunteer can usually peel and affix about 250 labels per hour. An automated mail addressing and postage system can speed up the process, with the capability to address up to 22,000 pieces per hour—the work equivalent of 88 people.

"We mail 2700 newsletters every week, as well as quarterly letters," says Suzanne Crutcher of the United Methodist Church of Davidson, North Carolina. With that volume of weekly mail, the church recognized the need for their own mail addressing equipment, and they purchased one. "Now our mailings to our congregation are quick and efficient," says Crutcher. "We used to run labels and apply them manually. That required eight people for almost two hours every week, so we're saving up to 800 hours a year in labor. And since we now do bar coding, we're saving over $5,000 a year on postage alone."

An addressing system offers postage savings of up to 30 percent less than regular bulk rate mail. You'll also get quicker service from the Post Office because the mail has already been bar coded, so the Post Office doesn't have to run it through their equipment.

Another advantage of mail addressing equipment is the opportunity to reduce mailing costs by eliminating the need for labels. A box of 2500 labels costs from $20 to $55, with the cost of printing addresses on the envelopes much lower than that. Also, there is usually at least one paid staff person working with volunteers to affix labels, so the use of mail addressing equipment frees that staff person for other tasks.

When outsourcing addressing and mailing services, churches rely on the vendor's time schedule. This means the church is running the risk of their job being set aside because of demands of larger customers, which can result in their time-sensitive mail arriving late to the congregation.

The two main printer designs used in mail addressing equipment are shuttle head and fixed head. Shuttle-head printers can print text and graphics anywhere on the mailing piece from top to bottom, but are usually limited by width.

With a shuttle-head printer, the print heads move back-and-forth across a stationary piece. The piece advances and stops for each section to be printed. This action is similar to a desktop printer. Although this process is slower than fixed-head printing, it allows the entire piece to be printed in a single pass through the addresser.

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