Written by Jeff McKenzie, CEO of Digitalized Software, following this year’s NACUMS conference
It’s been almost two weeks since NACUMS wrapped in Oklahoma City, and there’s one conversation I keep coming back to.
It happened across two different sessions I led, and it kept coming up again at our booth in between. It’s stuck with me longer than most conference conversations do. Usually, the details fade within a few days and what’s left is a general impression: good show, good energy, worth going back next year. This one hasn’t faded. If anything, it’s sharpened.
Most universities aren't actually tracking letter mail
Here’s the part that caught people off guard, including a few who walked in thinking they’d already solved this. Most universities believe they’re tracking letter mail. What they’re actually doing is manually logging an item into a system that was built to track packages, a system that only means anything because a package comes with a carrier tracking number.
Letter mail doesn’t have one, not in any way that holds up. So the item gets logged. It does not get tracked. Those are two different things, and the distance between them is the whole problem. A log entry means someone typed something into a screen. It doesn’t mean the item was actually assigned to the right person, and if it was assigned to the wrong one, there’s nothing to go back to. No image, no record of what was actually received, nothing tying that entry back to the truth of what happened.
Every school in those two sessions had a version of the same story: a recipient who insists they never received something, a search that goes nowhere, and a default answer of, “The Post Office must have lost it.”
The honest answer, more often than not, is that nobody has any way to know. A tracking system built around packages was never capable of answering that question for a piece of letter mail to begin with.
What closes the gap
That’s the distinction we kept coming back to, and it’s the reason Received Digital is built differently from what most schools already have. First, mail gets its own dedicated process, not a package workflow with letter mail forced into it. Second, and this is the part that actually closes the gap, the process starts with an image. That image is the truth of what was received. It doesn’t depend on a tracking number that was never there in the first place, and it’s always there to go back to when someone comes looking for an answer.
The conversation that will stick
Two weeks later, that’s the part of NACUMS I keep circling back to over everything else on the schedule, over booth traffic, over the good news on this year’s attendance. Letter mail turned out to be just as important a topic for these schools as packages, maybe more so, because most of them have never had a real answer for it. The show itself was strong by every measure we track. But this is the conversation that will still be shaping how I think about the problem six months from now.
If your institution has an honest answer for where a piece of letter mail is right now, backed by something more than a log entry, I’d genuinely like to hear it. In my experience, that’s still the rarer case, not the norm.
