postal /distribution charges

A question about : postal /distribution charges

Hello,

I was hoping someone could help me with any ideas, on the cheapest way to distribute awareness posters in postal tubes, to various addresses across the UK and later the British Isles.
If i can tell you a little about this an introduce myself.
I lost my daughter of 23 to Methanol Poisoning last year, while she was travelling with her boyfriend.They purchased a sealed bottle of gin from a local shop in Indonesia and it contained high levels of Methanol. We as a family have been campaigning to spread awareness to prevent other travelers from these dangers.We created and produced posters, we are hoping to distribute to doctors surgery's and colleges and university's. We have received Government approval for this, but not funding. We are raising the funds ourselves for the 20'000 posters we have produced, we will be packaging ourselves, an addressing, but the quotes so far, for the postage are coming out very expensive. The Post Office is Ј2.80 per tube and any others I have contacted are not much different. A distribution company will do the 20,000 but at a cost of Ј28.000,which is way past our fund raising at the moment.We would be looking to send between 500 and 1,000 at a time, to different addresses as required. As this is all new to me, I was hoping someone could help with ideas or any knowledge of how we could send them the cheapest way.Your advice or ideas would be much appreciated.And I thank you for your time in reading this thread. Kind regards.

Best answers:

• Have you considered contacting the Students Union to see if they could help distributing, using larger uni's as central points? I may be cheaper to send one large parcel to larger city uni's and getting student volunteers to take posters to their local colleges and doctors surgeries. I'm sure the union would be keen to help this cause and students are often very generous with giving their time for free.
• Agree, it's the tubes which are putting the price up. The suggestions for bulk distribution are good, but if you do send any individually then get them folded by the printers to A5 size (preferably) and that brings postage down to normal second class stamp.
  So sorry for your loss, btw.
• I would like to thank you for your help and suggestions, i will be looking into this as it is a great idea and would help immensely with keeping the cost down.
  Thank you for taking the time to reply to my thread, it is much appreciated.
  Kind regards.
• Good luck with your campaign. Maybe highlight this if you haven't already on social networks as you probably aware many young people use them
• I regularly send posters out to a variety of hospitals/uni/Doc surgeries
  I usually send a couple of A3 posters folded in half to fit into a c4 ( a4 size) envelope
  things that WILL make a difference in price in the long run are;
  lighter weight envelopes - the lightest you can easily source are 80gsm
  the usual ones are 100gsm - those few extra grammes will make a difference in postage charges over a lot of mailings.
  contact your local Voluntary Services Council - sometimes they can facilitate you being able to use their franking machine for postage- franked mail is cheaper than stamped mail
  see if you can get some sponsorship - maybe an alcohol manufacturer - you could tackle them from the " if they had purchased authentic brand they wouldn't have been poisoned" idea .
  if all else fails consider buying a franking machine and postage via those options - it might have a fairly large outlay of about Ј1000 for the machine - but it could work out cheaper in the long run
  I wish you the best of luck in your venture - your loss is unimaginable to me, but your courage is such an inspiration.
• This may not be the suggestion you are looking for but if I were you I would take a few steps back and think through what you are trying to achieve.
  You have a specific message to communicate and you need to figure out exactly who you are trying to communicate that message to - your audience. Then you need to figure out the best ways to communicate that message to the audience.
  Is an expensive poster which may or may not be hung on the bulletin board of a doctor's surgery or a student union the best way to communicate to young people today?
  Or perhaps you could use social media such as twitter, facebook etc. Reach out to media covering travel and activities of interest to young people. Imagine if you persuaded someone like Russell Brand to tweet your message to his millions of followers.
• Could you not bulk drop them to the local partnership NHS trusts and get them to deliver via their internal networks.
  the a5 folded idea is good. keeps cost down well - if you do it via ukmail or tnt post you should get it down to about 28p an item or less.
  social media is the way forward as well it could get your message much further and faster and cheaper than anythig else - and more likey to hit your target market. look at stephen sutton or alice pyne as to how it can work very well. get a good hash tag and work at it.
  good luck