St Mungo’s is on a mission to end homelessness and helps support people to rebuild their lives. It is currently providing beds in the UK for 3,000 people.

Improving communications

Back in 2012, the rental income team at St Mungo’s would print around 1000 rent statements a quarter and mail them to housing clients. It was a manual and time-consuming task. A team member would print the documents from the rent accounting software, and five to six area managers would sit and fold them into envelopes before adding stamps and posting them out.

The rental team leader at the time, Dydy Sodeinde, set out to make the workflow more efficient.

Recognising the pain points, Dydy set goals to:

1. Free up area managers’ time to focus on supporting clients.
2. Make the process more auditable and legally compliant. There was no way of tracking a document to see a record of its posting date.
3. Review the process workflow to see if they could save time and money.

The solution

Dydy chooses Aceni’s Hybrid Mail online print and post application from Datagraphic.

Now the Head of Rental Income Services at St Mungo’s, Dydy explains the impact of that decision:

“Hybrid Mail was a no-brainer for me! You can print and mail a statement for around two-thirds of a stamp price. And Datagraphic do all the printing, envelope stuffing and postage in that price too. If you use Hybrid Mail for only that reason, you’ll see success. But it has met our expectations and been helpful in many ways, some we didn’t initially anticipate.”

Dydy continues:

“You get a great reaction from colleagues to the news they don’t need to stuff envelopes again! Busy people get distractions, and it was often hard to find out if they had sent statements out. You need accountability with documents that have to arrive by a given date legally. Hybrid Mail’s reporting screen provides me with that reassurance, an audit trail of production and post out dates.

Purchasing enough stamps was another thing for me. At statement time, I had to ask the Office Services Team in advance to buy stamps in bulk. I don’t think about that with Hybrid Mail. It’s pay-as-you-use, so I upload and send mail when I need to and pay for what goes out.

When you work with Hybrid Mail, you find it has lots of uses. We now send other documents like bulk communications on news, rent increase and arrears notification letters. With the pandemic, we have been able to adapt quite quickly and move everything electronic. I can build different mailing packs on-screen that Datagraphic put together and send without any more involvement from the team here. It’s very easy to use, especially when you need to work from home.

The last thing I’d say is about scalability. When I started using Hybrid Mail I didn’t know years later I’d need to send out ten times as many documents. Being able to do that extra level of work in the same time without additional people or resources is fantastic and very efficient for St Mungo’s.”

Dydy Sodeinde
Head of Rental Income Services at St Mungo’s