Hi Cathy,
We post (within Australia only) our annual community magazine to our current families, past students of Year 12 level (and leaving certificate level back to the 1960s), two years’ worth of future families, plus other specific groups of community constituents. We email a digital version to recipients living overseas.
We have a substantial dedicated alumni section in the magazine, so some years ago we discontinued our standalone alumni magazine.
Re: mailing list, we spend a lot of time de-duping addresses to make sure just one copy goes to each household, to ensure we’re conserving paper, postage and printing resources. We streamline the recipient names to be inclusive of all in that household, eg: “The XX Family” or “The XX and XX Family”, unless it is one person and then it’s just their name. We don’t include a separate cover letter flysheet – agree that it wouldn’t be read.
We get a fair few “return-to-senders”, owing to people moving house but this is an excellent opportunity to keep our database updated. We always email to see if they would like to provide their new address and send the magazine onto them again if they are still keen to get it.
I feel that for the amount of work that goes into producing this high-quality and substantial annual community magazine, that if we were to send it via email only, people would not read it closely like they do in hard copy. I am still a huge advocate of print for certain publications. People are bombarded daily with email traffic. To receive a beautiful magazine in the mail is a rare treat these days!
Hope this helps. :)