To all those readers who were surprised and offended in any way to receive a recent mailing from an insurance company in a Presbyterian Record envelope, my profound apology for not having adequately explained the circumstances.
First, let me assure you of two crucial things: first, Johnson Insurance, an advertiser client of the Record, does not have your name and address. We mailed their material to you on their behalf. The board took great pains to make sure that Johnson does not receive any personal information about our subscribers.
Secondly, as with all advertising carried in the Record, no endorsement by the magazine or the board is implied nor are we in any partnership with the advertiser. Period.
So why did you receive this mailing (which the client requested only be sent to Ontario subscribers)?
One of the inevitable things about publishing a magazine is that costs always go up, while sales, the biggest source of revenue for many publications, are fragile at best and go down at worst.
Newsstand sales have plummeted; and for subscriber-only publications such as the Record, one story said simply that “flat [circulation] is the new up.”
In short, publishing is difficult and expensive. Add to this the fact that Canadian companies are reluctant to advertise in religion magazines, and publishers and owners have to scramble to make ends meet.
That is why the board of the Record decided to accept the proposition from Johnson Insurance to have us mail information about their company's products to our subscribers.
Because this was the first time we had done business this way, however, we were unable to ask every subscriber for their permission to mail them third-party information. That would have taken a whole year to reach every subscriber. (We have now begun that process.)
So we did what we thought was the next best thing. We put ads in the Record before the mailing to let subscribers know that all they had to do was call toll-free, e-mail or write us, and we'd take you off the list to receive anything other than the Record and what is packaged with it each month.
By and large, this worked. At the time of writing, about 99 per cent of subscribers had not objected to the mailing or asked to be taken off the list.
Most of us, after all, are used to the various ways companies try to tell us about their products and services. Marketing takes place because it is effective – in other words, as consumers, we respond to the information and purchase the products and services offered.
But some people have wondered why the Record is engaging in this sort of advertising at all. The simple reason is that it helps pay the bills.
The Record is an independent non-profit, charitable corporation. Its main sources of revenue are subscriptions (almost 60 per cent), advertising (almost 25 per cent) and the annual appeal (almost 12 per cent). The remainder comes mostly from the federal government's Canada Magazine Fund.
On the expense side of the sheet are salaries (for one of the smallest staff of any denominational publication), printing, mailing and administrative costs.
Because we want as many people in the church as possible to receive the Record, we are always looking for new sources of revenue. The latest mailing was one of those opportunities.
Ontario subscribers who have not asked to be removed from the direct mail list may possibly receive one or two more mailings. Also, the board will be evaluating the overall response to this advertising approach and will keep you informed of future developments.
I hope this helps all readers understand our situation a bit better. Thank you for your loyalty. And please encourage others to subscribe. The more readers we have, the less it costs everyone.
