Liverpool scores with the young

A variable print job, designed, data managed, personalised and delivered and resulting in a response of 75% is in the realms of the wildest dreams of those that have lived and breathed variable data print since its outset. Even Benny Landa would hesitate to claim an effectiveness rate of this magnitude. Yet this is what the Resolution Centre in Liverpool delivered this year. And the Resolution Centre is Liverpool City Council’s inplant print and mailing operation, not a specialist direct mail or advertising agency.

The aim was to get teenagers into gyms and sports centres as part of the wider national initiative to fight obesity among the young. The city runs 14 Lifestyle Centres across Liverpool, 11 with a swimming pool and all offering a range of health promoting activities. The grey generation is already offered free membership and there are incentives to encourage others to sign up. As part of the anti-obesity drive, those under 17 would also be given free membership – the difficulty being how to reach this age group and get them into the Lifestyle Centre. The offer was in place but there had been few takers. This is where the Resolution Centre stepped in.

The operation usually produces transactional mailings on a range of Océ printers and inserters. Typical jobs would include Council Tax bills. It amounts to 2 million items posted a year with the sort of data integrity that is implied by such a job.

The foundations for the new job were laid two years ago explains document production manager Tony McNulty: “That was when we organised a seminar for service personnel on personalised communications. The delegates were decision makers in the local authority and we showed them what could be done and what the potential for digital printing was and that we had the capacity to do this.”

The ideas crystalised with the authority looking to make better use of the Lifestyle Centres. “They were looking for different ways to get people to go to the gym.” McNulty says, “which led to discussion about what they could do.”

The city has a population of 66,000 under 17s attending 187 schools. Each would receive a temporary membership card personalised with their name, school and class. This could be handed in at the Lifestyle Centre and exchanged for a permanent card. The first concept called for a separate plastic card printed and mounted on a letter, but this was ruled out as too expensive. Instead the team settled on a 300gsm card which could personalised and then be pushed out of the folded letter by each recipient.

The design needed to avoid bleed as this would require extra guillotining in the print phase. In all 33,000 sheets were printed and sorted into colour coded boxes with control sheets and accommodation for spoils. Everybody from marketing, design, outside print suppliers and the Resolution Centre’s staff had checklists to cover their area of responsibility.

Once back at the unit, the job was put through the Océ 6250 for overprinting with the individual’s details and then sent out for folding as this couldn’t be handled in house. There were no spoils during folding and any that were lost in the fulfilment step could easily be identified through the unique reference code and be reprinted.

The planning had already calculated that the letters with the cards had to be sorted in class year sequence and then to the school and that as a courier would be used to drop off the letters, his route around 28 secondary schools and 159 primary schools needed to be worked out.

To increase the pressure the Resolution Centre needed to send out 10,000 a day in order to clear the decks for the main annual Council Tax and Housing Benefit run. Even though the personalisation was limited: name, school, postcode, and part of the date of birth, the take up was staggering 49,000 pupils took up the offer, leading gym staff to complain about the impact on their workload.

McNulty has pondered the reasons why this apparently simple mailing was such a success. “One of the things is that it is so unusual these days for the youngsters to be given anything in their hand. If they get a letter from school it usually signals trouble and there’s rarely anything delivered by the postman. The success speaks volumes about the power of the printed word and the value of having something that can be held rather than an email or digital message.“What is more it has helped the city council score well on government audits about implementation of the anti-obesity campaign as well as being tremendous value for money.

“Now we think we can offer our expertise to other councils as part of the shared services programme. I don’t think you could achieve this level of success if you invited people to the city centre because someone was giving money away.”