Voice-over Postcard Mailing Hack

I want to send a postcard to all my clients and other business contacts to alert them to a special broadcast for which I provided voice-over. On February 2nd, 2009 at 10 pm, PBS will broadcast Forgotten Ellis Island, a beautiful documentary about the Immigrant Hospital at Ellis Island. The documentary is narrated by Elliott Gould, and I provided historical voices as did 3 male colleagues. Naturally, I want to make sure that my clients have the opportunity to see this – the film has very broad appeal but of course, more importantly, I want them to hear how great I sound!

So, what’s the most efficient way to make this mailing happen? I have mailed postcards to clients before. I had them printed at a local shop, and then addressed them by hand because I thought a personal touch was important. A few hundred postcards. This is not happening again. As soon as I found out the air date for Forgotten Ellis Island, I knew it was a job for VistaPrint, where you can design your postcard, upload a mailing list and have your cards sent out for you.. I thought it was still going to be quite an ordeal, because I have a contact database of 3,489 companies. Not all of these will get a postcard – some of these companies have gone out of business, some stopped using voice-over, some never did. I still keep them in my database so I can maintain a history of my communications with them. I use Time & Chaos software to manage all this information.

It turns out to be incredibly simple. I finally took a few minutes to look into the process of turning my Time & Chaos database into a mailing list in VistaPrint-ready format, and it actually took mere seconds to get the list. T&C will almost instantly generate a report containing any data fields desired, and you can export the report into an Excel spreadsheet that can be then be uploaded to VistaPrint. What I thought was going to take weeks to accomplish will get done in less than a day.

The design process was not quite so straightforward for me. For the front of the card I uploaded a graphic sent to me by Lorie Conway, the filmmaker for Forgotten Ellis Island, after getting her permission to use it for this purpose. For the back, I took advantage of LazyMan Anthony Mendez’ offer of a design template (thanks Anthony!). It came to me as a psd file and opened automatically in Macromedia Fireworks (it will open in whatever appropriate editing program you use for such things). I designed the card and uploaded my front and back designs to the VistaPrint website and that’s when my troubles began. The front design is vertical, and my back design is horizontal. VistaPrint put the front design into vertical format, and then it wanted the back to be vertical as well. Somehow I got the design rotated but it didn’t look right. Finally I downloaded a template for Oversized Vertical Postcards and redesigned the back of my postcard and got it uploaded. I then called Customer Support to make sure the recipients’ names were going to print in the right place, and was told that VistaPrint’s mailing service doesn’t support the vertical format. Crikey! So now the front design has been rotated so that I have a design that VistaPrint classifies as horizontal, and I’m back to my original horizontal design for the back. Note well: if you want VistaPrint to do the mailing for you, your designs must be horizontal. If you find anything on their website that tells you this, let me know!

The postcard is now ready to go. All that remains is to edit that big Excel mailing list of mine and upload it to VistaPrint. It will not exactly be cheap, but there is no way I could send out a mailing of this magnitude on my own and still keep what’s left of my sanity. Nor would I be able to look my friend LazyMan Anthony Mendez in the eye and tell him I addressed and stamped that many postcards myself! :)