When working with Pledgemine, here's what you can expect for the process of your project from start to finish.

Internal Planning

This will be you and your team determining what type of mailer you'd like to do and gathering content and data. Once you've decided on a mailing, please peruse our Unit Values Guide and select one or a few options for the mailing you're planning. 

If you need guidance on what will work for your content, reach out to your Project Coordinator and they can either answer questions via email or schedule a pre-project planning call to talk options and get a better understanding of your needs for the mailing. At this time we also recommend requesting a production timeline as well so we can help you stay on schedule based on when this mailing needs to be to recipients.

Submit a Project Request

We use a 3rd party platform called Lytho for project requests, proof review and edit submissions. We have a number of tutorial videos and documents to help with this process but you can always reach out to your Project Coordinator for hands on assistance with utilizing this tool.

Once the request is submitted to Pledgemine, your Project Coordinator will review the materials and submission details and reach out with questions. If all necessary materials have been submitted you will receive an initial proof for review within 2 business days.

Design and Data Review

(2+ business days) 

After receiving the initial proof, you and your team can take all the time you need to review the design. The project requester along with any additional reviewers you've indicated as essential reviewers for the project will all need to set approval statuses and return the review in order for Pledgemine to move forward. All reviewers will receive daily reminder emails from noreply@lytho.com (please whitelist this email address) if a review is waiting for your submission.

Each time we receive the review back from you, we will complete any requested edits within 2 business days. This process will continue until the design and data merge is approved.

Approval of the Project

(approximately 2-3 business days)

If all reviewers have set a status of "Approved As Is" on a merged proof, we will move the project forward into our internal approval process. This looks slightly different for one-time mailings vs on-demand mailings.

One-time Mailings

Our team will do internal quality assurance on the design, data and project specifications prior to sending it to print. Once the quality assurance team has completed their checks on live job samples, our pre-press team will export the final job files and send it to production for printing. 

Your Project Coordinator will close out the Lytho request with the official drop date of the project and expected in-homes dates. They will also attach the live job samples along with a link to a survey on how the project went working with us. If you have time, we always appreciate hearing any feedback you may have to continue improving our processes.

On-demand Mailings

For on-demand approvals, the Pledgemine team will not be procesing orders on your behalf. Instead, we set up an online version on your Pledgemine Dashboard so you can upload orders as frequently as needed. There are no minimums on orders or limits to the number of orders you can send.

Creating this online proofer will begin as soon as the project is approved. Proofer creation takes up to 2 business days at which time your Project Coordinator will close out the Lytho project, make the project available for uploads and provide you with the Upload Instructions to help with your first upload or two. Additionally, they will include a link to a survey on how the project went working with us. If you have time, we always appreciate hearing any feedback you may have to continue improving our processes.

Production

(approximately 2-15 business days)

One-time mailings will always have a production timeline created at the start of the project (or earlier). Please see this article for more details on those! Production can take anywhere from 2-15 business days dependent on a number of factors including solution (type of mailer), count, time of year and mail class (i.e. stamp vs indicia).

On-demand orders are processed everyday and will have a variable turnaround time in production depending on the size of the order. When you upload the order, you can select a desired mail date but these are not guaranteed. Please reach out to your Project Coordinator if you have questions regarding a specific orders estimated mail date. 

Mail Delivery

After production is complete, our mail goes to a commingler for processing and mailing. Here the mail is sorted by location and sent to the appropriate USPS locations to be delivered. We have an article that dives into this in more detail here! Projects using nonprofit mail will take 1-3 weeks to deliver whereas first class mail will take 2-7 business days. Business days in this paragraph refers to USPS business days rather than Pledgemine's.