Insights From the Team

Loaves & Fishes , News

As we enter the new year, we want to acknowledge your support and participation in this work of reaching prisoners through the printed page. With your help, we were able to distribute 206,000 copies of Loaves & Fishes magazine, 30,000 Lighthouse calendars, and 3,000 miscellaneous tracts, booklets, and bookmarks in 2014.

Now that Jimmy Weaver is retired, he’s able to devote more time to Lighthouse. Things are going smoothly and he’s staying current with data entry and orders. He is also learning more about subscription management and how to troubleshoot undeliverable mail to prisoners who happened to provide a name the prison mail room doesn’t recognize.

My dad (Darold) works part-time from his office in Iowa. His experience and assistance as circulation manager is invaluable as we transition to more books going out in bulk and build connections with our vital distributors. He also enjoys helping to prepare new issues of Loaves & Fishes.

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Issue 25 Progress

Loaves & Fishes , News

We are excited to announce that the funds have come in for printing Loaves & Fishes Issue 25! As it stands now, we will print 95,000 copies and the cost will be close to $15,000.

This issue isn’t quite ready to print, but we hope to send it to press before the holidays, and the books should arrive shortly after the first of the year.

We estimate the postage will cost around $6,200. Our goal is to have enough funds to mail all the subscriptions by the time the books arrive so we can mail them promptly. So far we have a couple thousand dollars to put toward postage, but it will take at least another $4,000.

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The Mail and Cutting Cost

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The mailing of Loaves & Fishes Issue 24 in September generated a lot of incoming prisoner mail. Most of the mail simply requires data entry, but some of it takes letter writing or pen pal management, etc. Here is a picture I just took of the incoming mail bin:

The Lord has blessed us in allowing Jimmy Weaver to join the team here. He has done well in learning our software and workflow, and is looking forward to spending more time here after he retires in December.

Jimmy and I usually get the orders ready for the post office, and we take mail in once or twice a week. Some days it’s mostly a bunch of envelopes containing booklets and tracts, but occasionally we also have a handful of boxes to mail to new chaplains or someone replenishing their inventory.

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Issue 24 Mailing Update

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In a recent email newsletter, we announced that we were able to print Loaves & Fishes Issue 24. This is a major milestone, especially since our publishing schedule has been extra slow the last while.

The books arrived at our facility in Bedford, PA last week (September 15). Our printing company does excellent work, and it always feels wonderful to actually page through a new issue after many hours of looking at it on the computer screen.

Two days after the books came, volunteers from our church plus Jimmy (who works in the mail room) and his wife came to prepare the mailing. Several people worked on the single subscriptions while the rest packed the box subscriptions. Most of the people were new to the mailing process; but it went smoothly, and we finished it all in one long evening!

The singles and bulk subscriptions are leaving this week. The postage for all the single subscriptions and bulk boxes together was some over $9,500. We were able to pay the postage with a little money left.

We needed 105,000 booklets to fill current subscriptions, so we printed 110,000 copies. (We always print about 5,000 extra for new orders between issues and for back issue inventory.)

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