RE: Managing large physical mailings ...

That is a highly developed industry with competitive margins. The only question in your case is whether the entry level price is worth the possible savings for your very small "big" list. I'm out of date with the prices.

The only folks I know personally in the industry are at www.datamann.com. If you don't meet a sensible entry level price for them, they might be able to refer you to someone specializing in small charitable lists. Unless they have changed greatly since I knew them well they are "true believers" in the DMA rules and against junk mail waste in duplication.

One last suggestion: If you don't meet a reasonable price point for their general services, you might consider a one time duplicate cleansing so you can focus on attempts to insert new duplicates into your fully merged list.

If you rationalize new addresses from all sources to the same format and check for duplication on insert you can manage the process down to a few classic cases such as middle initial, zip versus zip+4, and 2 line versus 1 line street/building address. (ugh, and don't let me forget hyphenated last names that sometimes come through with only one part or the other!) Still with only 20,000 for the merged "big" list, you should be able to kick out suspected duplicates for human eyeball processing.

Good luck! I appreciate anyone whose goal is to minimize duplicate mailings of any sort!

Regards,

mwf

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I'm new here and I have a few weeks before the next "big" mailing goes out (only 20,000). I've never dealt with bulk snail mailing before, but it seems to me the problem of isolating duplicates from multiple data sources was solved many, many, many years ago.

Do y'all do this much yourself? Or do you outsource it? If you do it yourself, what advice would you have for a newbie in this area?

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