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Postage & Paper Wrapping for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is a charitable organisation, launched in the UK by Dolly Parton in 2007 as a book gifting programme devoted to inspiring a love of reading. Each month, enrolled children from birth to the age of 5 receive a high-quality age-appropriate book through the post, free of charge.
Central Mailing Services were selected to take part in the Dollywood Foundations tender process for the mailing of 45,000 monthly books across the UK and Ireland.
Before processing the tender, we invited many teams and zoom calls with the client, based in the US, to get a full understanding of their current pain points and future wants and needs and what their forecast would be for the future years.
Parents of the receiving children, asked for a more environmentally friendly wrapping process. Books were at that point wrapped in single use plastic with an addressed carrier sheet and recipients were complaining of the environmental impact. The charity did not like the fact that young children were recipients of plastic bags really.
Current postage and enclosing costs needed to be reviewed to see if there was a more cost-efficient way of posting, based on the format and weights of their current book selection.
Processing times needed to be reviewed. As the foundation was growing, they wanted a forward-thinking partner who had the technology, machinery, and shift pattern to be able to fulfil and despatch within the UK and Ireland in the most efficient timescale.
The past provider had been hand enclosing the books due to the varied nature of the dimensions of the books. They could vary from small thick books for the youngest children to oversize A4 Picture books with pop outs and tabs to pull. The fact that the books had been hand enclosed before meant that the time to posting the books was spread over weeks. Not ideal when you could consider that some households could have two or more children receiving the books.
We advised the client our paper wrapping technology to replace their current single use plastic. Instead of the work taking 2 – 3 weeks, Paper wrapping the books would now take 4 – 5 days in total. Using paper wrap was far better than the polythene from an environmental point of view. In addition, it was seen as far better to send paper wrapped books than ones wrapped in polythene to young children.
We used the full coverage inkjet mono printing capacity of our Domino printers to print partner messages and logos on to the wrap directly. Saving the need for a separate carrier sheet too.
The plain paper used is made from Recycled packaging and general waste, so its fully sustainable and with water based printing and Vegan glue, enabled the outer wrap packing to be properly recycled as it was all plant based.
In summary, we were able to save the charity a significant amount of money and time with their monthly mailings. That saving was put to great use in expanding the work that the charity undertakes, and this has seen the number of children helped soar.
The regular on time despatches now give those young children a date each month where they can look forward to receiving their gift from Dolly Parton, which we all at CMS feel is fantastic. The power of print can never be underestimated.
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