Issue day, an export and a mailing house deadline
The journal goes to print on Thursday, and the mailing house needs the address file by Tuesday. The membership officer exports all members from the database into a spreadsheet. Then the filtering begins: remove lapsed members, but keep those in their grace period; remove student members who opted for digital only; keep honorary members and a list of libraries and complimentary subscribers that live in a separate sheet; split overseas addresses because they go at a different postage rate.
Addresses with the postcode in the wrong column are fixed by hand. Members who asked for the journal at their work address rather than home are checked against a note in their record. The file goes off late on Tuesday. A week later, a new member emails to ask why she did not get the issue everyone is talking about, and a member who resigned in the spring writes to complain that he is still being sent it.
Why the mailing file is always a scramble
The rules about who gets the journal are real and specific, but they live in the officer's head and are applied to a raw export each time.
- Eligibility depends on status, grade, grace periods and print or digital preference.
- Complimentary and institutional subscribers are kept outside the membership database.
- Members joining between the export and the print date are missed.
- Addresses are held in inconsistent formats, and some members have a separate delivery address.
- Overseas and bulk deliveries need splitting for postage.
- There is no record of which members were sent which issue.
The deeper gap is that the mailing file is treated as a one-off spreadsheet job instead of a report the membership system can produce.
What a hand-built mailing file costs
Printing and posting copies to people who have left the body is money spent for nothing, and they notice. New members who miss their first issue get a poor first impression of their membership, often at the moment they are deciding whether it was worth it. Complaints about missing journals take staff time to answer, and it is hard to answer them without a record of who was sent what.
For bodies where the journal is also a benefit that advertisers pay to reach, an uncertain circulation list makes it harder to describe the readership honestly.
How we build the mailing file
- Your eligibility rules are written down once: which grades and statuses receive print, how grace periods work, and how print or digital preferences apply.
- Complimentary, library and institutional subscribers are brought into the same system as a subscriber type, so there is no second sheet.
- Members choose print, digital or both from their account, and choose a delivery address if it differs from their main one.
- Addresses are standardised and checked against a postcode lookup when they are entered, so the file does not need fixing by hand.
- On the cut-off date you set for each issue, the file is produced automatically, split into UK, overseas and bulk sections in the format your mailing house asks for.
- Members who join after the cut-off are listed for a catch-up posting of the current issue, if you offer one.
- Each issue's recipient list is saved, so any question about a missing or unwanted copy can be answered from the record.
| Member situation | Rule applied | In the file? |
|---|---|---|
| Full member, print preference | Eligible | Yes |
| Lapsed, within grace period | Your grace rule | Yes, until the grace period ends |
| Resigned in the spring | Not current | No |
| Student, digital only | Preference | No, sent the digital edition link |
| University library subscriber | Subscriber type | Yes, bulk section |
Who should receive the journal is your body's decision. The file simply applies that decision the same way every issue.
Issue day afterwards
On the cut-off date, the mailing file appears in the officer's inbox already split and formatted, with a short summary of totals by section. The officer checks the summary against the last issue and sends it on. New members who joined after the cut-off receive their copy in the catch-up posting.
When someone writes to say they did not get the latest issue, the officer can see whether they were on the file, at which address, and go from there.
Does issue day look like this for you?
- The mailing file is exported and filtered by hand for every issue.
- Lapsed or resigned members still receive the journal.
- New members miss their first issue.
- Complimentary subscribers live in a separate spreadsheet.
- You cannot say who was sent a particular issue.