Royal Mail loses 14.5 million items a year, says Postwatch
Howard Lake | 3 May 2004 | News
If your direct mail campaigns aren’t performing to target, that might be because your appeal letters are among the millions of items lost by the Royal Mail each year.
Postal watchdog organisation Postwatch claims that 14.5 million letters are lost every year in the UK by the Royal Mail: 60% of them are delivered to the wrong house. Once misdelivered, the chances of them being redirected are small: 5% of householders put mail they receive for another house straight in the bin. Those people that do put misdelivered mail back in the post or through the right letterbox can take up to a week to do so.
Postwatch has urged consumers to complain to the Royal Mail when they receive misdelivered mail. It says that only one in ten of those who have received mail for another house have complained to Royal Mail about it, and as a result the Royal Mail is not aware of the scale of the problem.
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What can charities do if they believe they are being affected? Their first contact should be their business mail contact at the Royal Mail who handles their account. If you don’t have one, then you might want to encourage your supporters to take part in Postwatch’s campaign. Given the scale of direct marketing by charities, any action could well benefit a whole range of charities.
Postwatch’s Web site includes a downloadable complaints form and a diary form to help track the number of misdelivered items.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.