Every Letterbox, Regardless

A Zone-Level Economic Evaluation of a Shire's Quarterly Printed Newsletter, Costed per Informed Resident

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement costs one financial year of a shire's four quarterly newsletter editions across seven delivery zones (9,299 dwellings), taking print, artwork and distribution from the shire's own ledger and setting them against a stratified survey (n = 1,204) of residents able to recall at least one item unprompted six to eight weeks after delivery. Delivered coverage holds between 95.2 and 99.1 per cent everywhere, while unprompted recall runs from 29.8 to 44.8 per cent and rises with remoteness. Cost per informed resident is $1.03 in the town centre and $24.71 on the outermost run, widening to $1.17 against $44.13 once recall is restricted to residents who credit the printed copy rather than the shire's emailed or online editions. Three zones holding 11.3 per cent of dwellings absorb 58.8 per cent of distribution cost, and the recall rate that would buy them town-centre cost-effectiveness exceeds 100 per cent in each. Substituting the friction-cost method for the replacement wage, or valuing volunteer distribution at zero, leaves the zone ranking unchanged.

@misc{slop_xjhrzt,
  author       = {Renke Sabel and Ingeborg Nwachukwu and Osei Vandermeer},
  title        = {Every Letterbox, Regardless: A Zone-Level Economic Evaluation of a Shire's Quarterly Printed Newsletter, Costed per Informed Resident},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.xjhrzt},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-quarterly-shire-xjhrzt/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}