Postal Rates for Charities Likely to Rise Soon; Nonprofit Groups Lobby for a Delay

By Holly Hall

Postage rates for charities are likely to increase as early as May, following a ruling announced last week by the Postal Regulatory Commission.

The commission’s ruling — issued in response to the U.S. Postal Service’s proposal to increase rates for all mailers — endorses the service’s plan to increase postage for nonprofit periodicals by an average of 11.7 percent. The commission said that rates should increase by 6.7 percent on average for nonprofit standard mail, lower than the 8.9 percent proposed by the Postal Service.

Nonprofit standard mail includes both letters and some larger-sized mailings known as flats. Last year, charities mailed 11 billion fund-raising and other letters and 3.6 billion flats to constituents, according to the Postal Service.

The Postal Regulatory Commission — the independent body that evaluates all postal-rate changes — disappointed many charities by expanding the Postal Service’s plan to introduce steeper-than-average increases for some charity mail: flats that cannot be processed in the service’s automated mail-handling equipment, for example, and letters that exceed the maximum weight limit of 3.3 ounces.

The Direct Marketing Association’s Nonprofit Federation, which represents more than 400 nonprofit mailers, has called on the Postal Service to delay the new rates by one year.

Federation officials, who have estimated that postage rates would more than double for many nonprofit organizations under the increases recommended by the commission, said they are particularly concerned about big postage increases for flats and heavy letters, because many of its charity members use such mail pieces to recruit new donors.

Because those mailings contain note cards, address labels, or other gifts known as premiums, they often cannot be processed by the service’s automated equipment.

A delay of one year, federation leaders said, would allow charities to test whether they can meet several new requirements to earn discounts, the final details of which were released by the Postal Service last month, and take other measures to offset what they called a “shockingly high rate increase.”

Meanwhile, charities that use premiums complained that, if postage rates do go up in May, they will have only weeks to prepare.

“These new rates would hammer us,” said Mimi Brody, director of federal legislation at the Humane Society of the United States, which has relied heavily on premium mailings to recruit many of its 10 million donors. “The new rules would come down so fast there’s no way to deal with them.”

Before new rates can go into effect, the commission’s decision must be reviewed by the nine presidential appointees on the Postal Service’s Board of Governors. They may reject some or all of the commission’s recommended rates and send them back for revision, approve the rates under protest, or accept them.