Nonprofit printing & mailing · United GMG · Mount Prospect, IL
Nonprofit Printing Services & Direct Mail
Appeal letters, donor postcards, and year-end mailings — printed and mailed since 1927, at the nonprofit rate.
Rates effective July 12, 2026 · USPS Notice 123
The meeting, first
Bring the appeal. Leave with a plan and a number.
Tell us the piece, the rough count, and the date that matters. One conversation covers the printing, the list work, and the postage — in writing.
01 The work
Dozens of nonprofits. Every appeal season.
United GMG prints and mails appeal letters, donor postcards, and year-end campaigns for dozens of nonprofit organizations from our Mount Prospect, Illinois plant. Nonprofit letter postage runs $0.257 per piece against $0.467 commercial, and eligible organizations can mail on our permit at their nonprofit rate.
- Recurring A national scholarship foundation’s annual scholarship mailing — the same package, refined every year.
- Seasonal A homeless-services nonprofit’s recurring appeal program — spring and year-end, letter through drop.
- Everything A faith-based client who brings us every piece of their program — letters, envelopes, event signage, and the mail itself.
No logos, no name-dropping — donor programs are their owners’ to talk about. The work itself is what we can show you. This page is the nonprofit lane of our commercial printing services in Chicago — everything that plant does is available to your organization.
02 The pieces
What we print and mail for nonprofits
Four jobs cover most of a development calendar — and none of them needs more from you than a file, a list, and a date.
Outer envelope
The letter
Reply slip
Remit envelopeEvery appeal package runs as one job — proofed as a PDF before anything prints, then printed, folded, filled, and sealed.
Appeal letter packages
The letter, the outer envelope, the reply slip or card, and the remit or business reply envelope — printed, folded, filled, and sealed as one package. Fall, year-end, and spring appeals run through this plant every season, and multi-wave appeal campaigns are planned the same way: one schedule, letter through drop.
Donor postcards
Save-the-dates, event reminders, thank-yous, and short appeals. A postcard skips the envelope and the inserting entirely — often the least expensive piece on the calendar, and the fastest one through the plant.
Year-end and event mailings
Gala invitations with reply sets, annual reports, and the December appeal — the mailings where timing is the whole job. The schedule is built backward from your event or giving deadline and fixed in the estimate.
Personalized, in plain words
Names merged into the letter, different asks for different donor groups, and reply cards personalized to match. Send the spreadsheet exactly as you have it — you approve a PDF proof before anything prints.
Waves, segments, and split lists are all normal here. Plenty of organizations print with us and mail part of the run themselves, or mail in two waves off one print run — say so at the quote and the job is planned that way.
03 The budget
How nonprofits save on printing
The savings live in three places: the format — we will tell you when a cheaper piece does the same job — the run, where standard sizes and combined quantities price lower, and the postage, where the nonprofit Marketing Mail rate of $0.257 per letter against $0.467 commercial is the largest line most budgets can move.
Eligible organizations can mail on our permit at their nonprofit rate.
Rates effective July 12, 2026 · USPS Notice 123 · Mixed tier
What a whole appeal costs — printing, list work, and postage together — is worked through piece by piece in our direct mail pricing guide; a 5,000-piece nonprofit appeal letter is its own worked example there.
04 The postage
Nonprofit postage rates, explained
USPS’s nonprofit Marketing Mail rate is $0.257 per automation letter at the Mixed tier, against $0.467 commercial. Authorized nonprofits — most 501(c)(3) organizations qualify — apply once through USPS, the minimum is 200 pieces per mailing, and eligible organizations can mail on our permit at their nonprofit rate.
Two things surprise most development teams. First, the authorization is a one-time application to USPS, not something you renew per mailing — if your organization has never applied, we walk you through it before the first job. Second, you do not need your own permit to use your rate: an authorized nonprofit can mail on our permit, postage passing through at cost, which is exactly how most of the appeal mail leaving this dock is entered.
| Mail class | Per piece | ×10,000 pieces |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing Mail, nonprofit | $0.257 | $2,570 |
| Marketing Mail, commercial | $0.467 | $4,670 |
| First-Class, presorted | $0.707 | $7,070 |
| The nonprofit rate saves | $0.21 | $2,100 |
Rates effective July 12, 2026 · USPS Notice 123 · Mixed is the sort tier most mailings qualify for
The floor is USPS’s own: 200 pieces or 50 pounds per mailing. Deeper sorts price lower still — the difference shows up in the postage statement, not in a promise. First-Class is the faster, forwarded-and-returned class; Marketing Mail is where the nonprofit discount lives. Which class fits which mailing is its own question — keep our guide to USPS mail classes next to this table, and the full class-by-class pricing lives on our mailing services page.
05 The parish calendar
Printing for churches, parishes, and faith-based organizations
Parish mail runs on the same calendar every year — and it is some of the most exacting mail we produce.
Appeal packs for stewardship season. Offering and collection envelopes. Event programs, bulletins, and the letter from the pastor that has to reach every household by a feast day, not around it. Multi-language versions — English, Spanish, Polish — split across hundreds of parish addresses in one run, each version counted, matched, and mailed together.
What parish teams ask us first: whether a church qualifies for the nonprofit postage rate. Almost always yes — religious organizations are squarely inside USPS’s eligible categories, and the $0.257 letter rate applies to appeal and stewardship mail the same way it does for any authorized nonprofit. Bulletin and program-book printing rides the same weekly schedule — ask about a standing order once, and it simply arrives.
06 The run
How your mailing runs here
Three promises carry every job through the plant — the same three whether the mailing is 500 pieces or 15,000.
A PDF proof, before anything prints
Every job stops at a proof. Nothing runs until you approve it, so the fastest schedules belong to teams who review it the day it arrives — and the date math is built around your review, not ours.
The list, cleaned
Addresses checked, moves updated, duplicates out — and your donor file stays private: used for your mailing, never sold, shared, or reused. List cleaning and data management is its own discipline here.
“Please run NCOA and check for duplicates.” — how development teams ask for it, verbatimBuilt backward from your date
An event, a feast day, a giving deadline — tell us the date that matters and the schedule is fixed in the estimate, drop date included. Letters in readers’ hands by the day you named is the whole point of the plan.
One story with the numbers on it is already public: our Northwestern Medicine direct mail case study follows a grateful-patient program from first mailer to major gifts — the same plant, the same run promises, at health-system scale.
07 Questions we get
Nonprofit printing questions, answered
Q.01
Can you mail at the nonprofit rate on our behalf?
Yes. If your organization holds USPS nonprofit authorization, we prepare and enter the mailing on our permit at your nonprofit rate — postage passes through at cost on the invoice. If you keep your own permit, we mail on that instead. Either way the rate is yours, not ours.
Q.02
How does our organization qualify for nonprofit postage?
USPS authorizes eligible organization types — religious, educational, charitable, and similar categories, which covers most 501(c)(3)s — through a one-time application. If you have never applied, we walk you through it before your first mailing; once authorized, your Marketing Mail letters mail at the nonprofit rate — $0.257 against $0.467 at the Mixed tier.
Q.03
Will our letters reach donors by our date?
The schedule is built backward from the date you name and fixed in the estimate, drop date included. After the drop, First-Class delivers on USPS’s 1–5 day service range; Marketing Mail’s standard is set by the origin and destination ZIP pair — for a hard date, we plan the drop around that difference.
Q.04
Can each letter carry the donor’s name?
Yes — names merged into the letter, the ask varied by donor group, and the reply card personalized to match, all from the spreadsheet you already keep. You see it on the PDF proof before anything prints.
Q.05
Do you stuff the reply envelope and remit card?
Yes. Folding, inserting, and sealing the full package — letter, reply slip, remit or business reply envelope — is the standard job here, and it is checked against your approved proof piece by piece.
Q.06
Can we print part of the job ourselves and have you mail the rest?
Yes. Print-only, mail-only, and split jobs are all normal — some organizations personalize a few hundred pieces in-house and send us the rest to mail. The schedule is simply planned around the handoff.
Schedule a meeting about your next mailing
Bring the piece or just the idea, the list as you have it, and the date that matters. You leave with the format called, the schedule fixed, and the printing, list work, and postage priced in writing.
Better printing. Lower postage. Stronger results.
