San Francisco Opera Guild

San Francisco Opera Guild Testimonial Video Transcript

San Francisco Opera Guild's, uh, role here is to raise money for the company itself as well as to provide education and outreach in the community of San Francisco and the greater Bay area. San Francisco Opera Guild sends a variety of invitations and mailings out all year long. We send thousands and thousands of first-class — we had been doing thousands and thousands of first-class, uh, invitations and so on. And that was a big problem for us, because the cost was so high.

One big help of using the, the SmartMailer system is that we no longer have to use individual address labels that have to be printed — purchased by us, printed, and then put onto our, our envelopes by volunteers. So now, that system allows us to print those envelopes directly from the machine in order — alphabetical, zip code order, so that then, the volunteer would simply have to do the insertions, and then it works fine, it gets out in the post office.

We sent the Opera Ball opening mailing and we sent that to about, I don't know, maybe two thousand people in that bulk way, and it went within three or four days so that it reached our people on time. The Opera Guild probably will have the opportunity to do more mailings. We'll certainly do mailings of a larger size. For example, invitations that are bigger or weigh more. We did that with our, our big opera ball invitation mailing last summer. Normally we would never have been able to afford something that would have cost us 83 cents a piece, as it was. That invitation which was beautiful and heavy cost us 8 cents. So that was why it was a big value to us and I think we probably will try to do more as we can.

One of things that has been, uh, great fun for us is that we can put little messages on the envelopes, which we couldn't do before, and instead of uh, a pretty basic typeface for a mailing label, we're able to change different faces and so, and sizes. So that the address, the printed address, can be bigger, nice to read, and looks a lot, uh, it almost looks like a printed piece as opposed to a mailing label. One of the things that's happened, is that when we started working with your system, we were able to get rid of a lot of those names that were doubles or even triple in some cases, bad addresses and so on.

I was very aware that my church who has a mailing list of about a thousand, sends out multiple mailings. I sometimes get three a week, all first-class. And I knew, too, that they were looking at ways to save money, so I walked into the operations guy one morning and I said, "I think I've got an idea for you."

For any non-profit, when we're sending out a lot of mail, the cost of postage was, it was and is a big problem. For us, that, we, we spent thousands of dollars a year on first-class postage. For us to be able to save that kind of money and at the same time have some flexibility on the size of the piece and the weight of the piece has been a huge advantage to us.