What We Solve
Direct mail and in-house print for your most important communications.
Your most important message, the one that needs to be read, understood, and acted on, is competing with a hundred emails, a dozen push notifications, and an endless scroll. What if it didn't have to compete at all?
The quick read
Some communications carry more weight than others. A donor appeal, a recruitment packet, a discharge instruction, a board proposal. These arrive into inboxes alongside a hundred other messages every day. Direct mail averages 4 to 9 percent response rates depending on list quality. Email response rates sit at 0.12 percent. The question is not whether to use email. It is which of your messages are too important to compete with a feed for attention. SumnerOne helps organizations move their highest-stakes communications into print: direct mail, in-house color, and large format.
Start here
Your most important communications are competing for attention in an inbox that never empties, and the response rates keep slipping. The question worth sitting with isn't whether to send more. It's which of your messages are too important to compete with a feed at all.
A few honest questions
A few questions worth sitting with. There's no score and no sign up. Just a clearer picture you can take into a conversation.
Quick answers
For high-stakes communications, the data is clear. Direct mail response rates average 4 to 9 percent depending on list quality, compared to 0.12 percent for email. Research involving over 171,000 participants confirms that people comprehend and retain information better on paper than on screens. That holds across compliance documents, care instructions, learning materials, and marketing appeals alike.
A useful rule: use digital for speed and frequency, like reminders, updates, and quick announcements. Use print when the stakes are high, when the message needs to be read carefully, understood completely, and acted on with confidence. Patient discharge instructions, donor appeals, recruitment packages, board presentations, and compliance notices are all candidates for print.
For many organizations, yes, and the technology has moved faster than most people realize. Today's light production color machines deliver full-bleed, full-color output including postcards, brochures, booklets, and coated covers, with inline finishing options like lamination and saddle-stitching. The gap between in-house and commercial print quality has largely closed. SumnerOne helps organizations assess which materials make sense to bring in-house and sets them up with the right equipment and support.
A human can stop here. What follows is the deeper research, the in-house production picture, and the full set of questions, for anyone who wants to keep reading.
The Problem
The average person receives over 100 emails a day. Most go unread. The ones that get opened compete with calendar pings, Slack threads, social feeds, and whatever just surfaced on the second monitor.
And it's getting worse. A 2025 study found 70 percent of people had unsubscribed from at least three brands in the prior three months. Not because they stopped caring, but because they were overwhelmed. More than half had switched to a competitor over a brand that wouldn't stop messaging them.
This is the world your communications live in. The recruitment package, the discharge instructions, the donor appeal, the board proposal: every one arrives into an environment so saturated that even well-crafted messages get skimmed, scrolled past, or never opened. The problem isn't your content. It's the channel.
You already know this. Not from a marketing report, from your own life. You know what it feels like to skim an email you meant to read closely, to watch your attention fragment across a dozen open tabs. Now picture your most important message landing as just one more notification in that stream. That's what your audience faces every day.
The numbers
Source: Optimove 2025 Consumer Marketing Fatigue Report
The research
For over a decade, researchers have documented what they call the screen inferiority effect: across dozens of studies and tens of thousands of readers, people understand and remember more when they read on paper than on a screen. It isn't nostalgia. It's how the brain handles the two media.
The numbers, again
Sources: Canada Post / ANA 2024 Response Rate Report
The framework
This isn't an argument against digital. Email is fast, scalable, and essential for the day to day. The point is simpler: not every message is routine, and the ones that carry weight deserve a medium built for weight.
Use digital for speed and reach.
Use print when the stakes are high.
The best communicators don't choose. They sequence the two on purpose: a printed recruitment mailer with a QR code to a personal landing page, a physical donor appeal followed by an email reminder, a printed welcome kit that opens a digital onboarding. Pair the trust of print with the trackability of digital and each channel makes the other work harder. And you can measure the whole thing.
Some of your most important communications are already competing, and losing, in the wrong channel. Let's look at what you're sending and figure out what belongs in people's hands. Start the Conversation →
In-house production
Here's a conversation we have almost every week: someone tells us they outsource their color printing because they assume it requires a commercial print shop, specialized operators, and equipment they can't afford or fit in their building. Then we show them what today's light production machines can actually do. And the conversation changes.
The technology has moved faster than most people realize. What used to require a dedicated print shop and a trained press operator can now be done by a marketing coordinator, a school communications director, or an office manager, on equipment that fits in a standard office footprint.
SumnerOne works with Canon, Fujifilm, Konica Minolta, and Kyocera, specifying and supporting the right machine for what you actually need to produce.
We're building a short set of questions to help you see this clearly. Here's the one worth sitting with now. Check anything that sounds like you.
What's possible in your building
Today's light production color machines print CMYK plus extended gamut: a wider, more accurate range of color than standard CMYK. The saturated look you associate with a commercial shop now comes off a machine in your own building, on demand, with no three-day wait for someone to fit you in.
These aren't aspirational. They're everyday output with the right equipment and the right partner behind it.
Large format usually gets filed under "signage," but it's the same principle as everything else here: reach people physically, in the spaces where they're already paying attention.
A prospective student in a hallway. A patient entering a lobby. An employee passing a display every morning. Same strategy, bigger canvas.
The gap between in-house and outsourced print used to be obvious to the eye and the hand. Inline finishing closed it.
What comes off today's machines feels like it came from a professional shop. Functionally, it did. The shop just happens to be down the hall.
The oldest criticism of print, "you can't track it," is no longer true.
You can see who scanned, who visited, and who converted. Print that proves itself.
Where SumnerOne fits
Producing this kind of work yourself used to mean a commercial shop and a trained operator. For most teams, that's out of date. Where you start just depends on your scale.
A right-sized setup for small teams.
Built for marketing and communications teams that want to produce more of their own work, without a commercial shop or a trained operator. Picture a single, simple bundle:
Production at full scale.
When you're producing at high volume across many teams or locations, thousands of packets, patient materials, brand-consistent work in every office, the answer is a fully staffed print operation of your own. (The print world calls this an in-plant.)
Wherever you start, you're working with one partner who knows both ends of this road. We'll help you see which path fits, and show you the cost side-by-side before you commit to anything.
The same partner who helps you reach more people also keeps your equipment running when it matters most. See how SumnerOne's service model works →
Print that gets read
What are the communications that matter most to your organization, the ones that absolutely have to be read, understood, and acted on? Let's talk about how to make them land.
Every SumnerOne engagement begins with listening. We'll learn about your organization, your audiences, and the messages you can't afford to have ignored. Then we'll show you what's possible: on your schedule, in your building, with equipment and support designed to make it easy.
Call us directly at 800.325.0985. You'll talk to a real person.
FAQ
For high-stakes communications, the data is clear. Direct mail response rates average 4 to 9 percent depending on list quality, compared to 0.12 percent for email. Research involving over 171,000 participants confirms that people comprehend and retain information better on paper than on screens. That holds across compliance documents, care instructions, learning materials, and marketing appeals alike.
A useful rule: use digital for speed and frequency, like reminders, updates, and quick announcements. Use print when the stakes are high, when the message needs to be read carefully, understood completely, and acted on with confidence. Patient discharge instructions, donor appeals, recruitment packages, board presentations, and compliance notices are all candidates for print.
For many organizations, yes, and the technology has moved faster than most people realize. Today's light production color machines deliver full-bleed, full-color output including postcards, brochures, booklets, and coated covers, with inline finishing options like lamination and saddle-stitching. The gap between in-house and commercial print quality has largely closed. SumnerOne helps organizations assess which materials make sense to bring in-house and sets them up with the right equipment and support.
The answer depends on your volume, materials mix, and current outsourcing spend, but the comparison is often more favorable than organizations expect. SumnerOne can walk through a side-by-side cost model for your specific situation.
The "you can't track print" objection is no longer accurate. QR codes, personalized URLs (PURLs), unique offer codes, and integrated tracking platforms close the loop between the physical touchpoint and the digital response. You can see who scanned, who visited, and who converted, giving print the same attribution chain as digital channels.