Creative Effectiveness in Door Drops

Written by Christian Peterson, Unaddressed and Publishing Products Manager at Royal Mail and member of the Door Drop Hub and Print Council.

Vale of White Horse District Council – Recycling Disc

Like most who are reading this, my household seems to produce copious amounts of waste. Again, like most people, we want to recycle as much of this as possible. But what is recyclable, and what isn’t.

This prompts debate about whether an item or packaging is a) recyclable; b) compostable or c) neither. The variety of items can make this bewildering so we tend to default to our natural positions on the ambiguous items – for me, ever the optimist as much as possible goes into recycling, whereas my wife, a realist chooses the normal waste, the children – well frankly they tend to put in the nearest repository. If we’re lucky.

Local Councils seem to be stepping up their efforts to improve the level of recycling through increasing the variety of items that can be recycled, and to achieve this, issuing clear communications to residents is vital. It appears that in my local area that the use of physical materials as opposed to a digital campaign was deemed to be most effective.

My own Council provided a leaflet that was highly informative and now resides near to the recycle bins. However, I recently saw a communication from our neighbouring District Council delivered using Royal Mail’s Door to Door product which caught my eye.

This combined communicating important information regarding Christmas waste collections with a simple but clever tool to help improve recycling levels – a physical infographic disk that allows one to quickly find out which bin a specific waste item should be dispensed into.

The production of such a tool for every household and business won’t have been cheap but because of its quality and tactility it will undoubtedly have been noticed in the home, and not just by adults – it will have a fascination for children too, so is likely to have a lasting effect.

The key take-home here is that it reinforced the fact that the media of Door Drop is still a fantastic channel for broadcasting key messages to a large target audience. Given the method of delivery and the nationwide reach, we can be assured that all households and businesses in their Council district will receive the message (and highly accurately, as they used a boundary-matching service to achieve this). And of course, being a physical item, it has to be interacted with and can be kept close to hand and referred to for a long period of time, so cut-through to that target audience is high.

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