I was very amused this morning to find some flyers had been delivered to myself and a few colleagues in the Communications Office at work, although it seems there may be a bit of an identity crisis!
Daryl Willcox Publishing, who apparently provide “online services for media relations specialists” say “you’ve got the story, we’ve got the contacts” but it seems they haven’t got the contacts…
The flyers were addressed as follows:
- “Miss Ian Lovell”, Comms Officer – I’m guessing this one is for me, Miss Eleanor Lovell
- “Mr Eleanor Fern”, Press Officer – for Richard Fern?
- “Mr Richard Dunn”, Head of Press and Media Relations – for Peter Dunn?
- “Mr Annie Rowley”, Director of Communications – for Ian Rowley our Director?
For a company that claims to have the contacts – this doesn’t give me great faith in their services. Not only do they get the names wrong but surely they could have figured our genders out?!
Suffice to say the flyer will go straight in the bin (after we’ve all laughed about it and i’ve named and shamed them).
Lesson – get the basics right!
What a balls-up!!! Someone needs to learn how to mail merge correctly, don’t they? I had a direct-mail fail the other week too when someone sent me a marketing letter but didn’t pay the correct postage on the A4 envelope meaning that I had to (without knowing who the letter was from) a) go to the post office in the city centre to collect it, and b) pay for the additional postage. I invoiced the company concerned for my time in lost earnings and the additional postage costs. Needless to say they haven’t paid the invoice. I also will not be doing any business with them. You have to wonder how many other letters they sent out making the same mistakes.
Hi Ellie, I’m Daryl from Daryl Willcox Publishing and for starters I’d like to say sorry for sending you those incorrectly addressed items and thank you for bringing this to my attention.
It does indeed look like something has gone wrong and we’re investigating. In twelve years of business this is the first time we’ve experienced an error of this type.
We use mailing data from a number of respected sources in the PR industry and the mail merge and fulfillment is handled by a third-party mailing house. It looks on the face of it that something has gone wrong during the supply of some of the data or during the mail merge. I appreciate this kind of mistake looks really shoddy and I’m determined to get to the bottom of it to make sure it doesn’t happen again, but one thing I can say for sure is that this does not reflect the quality of our media database or other services we provide.
I’m really sorry about this and I’d like to extend my apologies to anyone else out there who received incorrectly addressed items from us in this mailing.
Thanks Daryl – I am very impressed by your prompt response! It’s good to see your media monitoring in action!
Thanks also for the blog post explanation.
I’ve just heard back from the third party mailing house we use. They’ve done a thorough investigation and identified that some of the names got mixed up during the process where the mailing is split into postcode regions before being labelled up and despatched. It appears less than 4 per cent of the mailing was affected.
Despite being a relatively small proportion this is of course no comfort to you guys and it should never have happened in the first place. We’ll be working with our supplier to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Thanks again Ellie for bringing this to my attention.
Epic fail from DWP! Although kudos on picking up the thread in a matter of hours/minutes, and sticking it on the corporate blog.
The only answer to utter PR disasters? Transparency. It’s the puppy dog eyes of the digital age.