Los Angeles County Political Mail & Campaign Printing

The question every LA campaign asks first is why not use a printer in Los Angeles. The honest answer is that proximity to a press buys almost nothing on a mail program. Artwork moves as a PDF. Voter data moves as an export. Proofs are approved online. Mail can be entered at the Los Angeles processing facility regardless of where it was produced. What proximity cannot give you is one organization handling the data, the printing, the piece-level verification and the postal entry with a single reconciled record of what happened, which is what a close race needs when a mailing goes wrong. If you need to stand next to a press, we are ninety minutes down the 5 and you are welcome.

The smallest race we produce for is a school board or water district seat mailing a couple of thousand households; the largest is a congressional campaign across multiple counties. City council, mayor, community college board, county supervisor, judicial, Assembly, State Senate, congressional and ballot measure committees all run through the same production controls. A down-ballot candidate gets the same list processing, the same piece-level verification and the same tracking as a federal race, because the consequence of a bad list is proportionally worse when the margin is 200 votes.

Los Angeles County campaign work has included races in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Glendale, Pasadena, Burbank, Santa Clarita, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, Carson, Lakewood, West Covina, Covina and La Mirada.

For Los Angeles County mailings, entering at the Los Angeles processing facility rather than in San Diego usually shortens the in-home window materially, and for a GOTV drop those days are the whole point. We drop-ship where the volume justifies it and enter locally where it does not; the calculation is per mailing, based on quantity, class and the date the mail must land.

A Los Angeles city council district is roughly 260,000 residents; a county supervisorial district is over two million. Those are different production problems. A council race is a targeted universe with many versions; a supervisorial or county-wide program is volume with tight entry scheduling. Both run on the same floor, and the difference is planning rather than capability.

A campaign does not only mail. Yard signs, bumper stickers, door hangers, palm cards, walk pieces, push cards, banners and campaign apparel come off the same floor as the mail, on the same purchase order and the same schedule. That matters more than it sounds: when signs come from one vendor, shirts from another and mail from a third, the candidate is the one reconciling three delivery dates and three color interpretations of the same logo. We print the mail and the field material to the same artwork, so the door hanger a volunteer carries matches the postcard that arrived that morning.

Most mailings cross three or four vendors. Every handoff is a place where a list changes, a piece goes missing, or nobody can say what actually happened. Plavidian keeps all six steps under one roof and one set of records.