Postal speak: make the system competitive. (Out on a Limb).

Major national and local newspapers have been screaming bloody murder recently about Postmaster General John Potter's recent suggestions for changing the way the U.S. Postal Service does business. PMG Potter has been pushing an overhaul for the glacial Postal Service to become a viable and efficient delivery medium for the foreseeable future.

He's offered a vision of turning the post office into a superstore of services that he believes will ensure a service that will remain effective amid challenges from alternative delivery technology.

The Wall Street Journal, among others, claims that the USPS's attempts to work out special deals with mailers could hurt their advertising. They also righteously complain about the rise in first class mail rates, the most politically sensitive of all classes of mail.

To be sure, newspapers have a vested interest in seeing, even cheering, rising postage rates. Every time the USPS gets a green light to raise rates, newspapers see their insert business go up. After all, these same newspapers compete with the USPS for the circulars sent out by retailers to local communities and neighborhoods. Their insert prices become less expensive to retailers wishing to saturate local retail store markets with sales literature and brochures.

If we could have The NonProfit Times delivered to you less expensively by inserting ourselves into major newspapers that would bring it to your office or home rather than mailing your issue, we'd do it. That's the battle that goes on as newspapers applaud rising rates to make their own insert and delivery service more pricing viable.

The self-interest is about money and plenty of it. Nonprofits are not bystanders to this almost yearly battle over rates. If you could communicate your message and meet new donors through newspaper inserts, for example, or email them less expensively than the postage rates you are paying, you'd be the first to jump at the opportunity.

Even though nonprofit rates are now tied to commercial rates, the argument and the outcome on rates, monopoly and costs, this battle will affect nonprofits' ability to acquire and maintain donors.

PMG Potter recently argued that the monopoly the post office enjoys needs to be supplemented by offering retail services such as emails, faxes, electronic delivery services and the like. He has even proposed a "commercial government enterprise," which supposes the best of a monopoly can be combined with entrepreneurial trappings. This, he claims, will ensure the post office's future. Not likely.

Having been stung by Federal Express and United Parcel Services' ability to move around the post office monopoly with their delivery services that essentially took the most profitable of package and overnight letter revenues, the post office is trying to fight back. But there's a problem: they are exempt from taxes, antitrust suits and many labor laws. Their base for competition is already skewed with no promise of a beneficial outcome.

Allowing them to have an inroad into the for-profit world at a nonprofit price almost ensures an unfair battle that neither moves the post office toward efficiency nor allows its customers the benefits of the new services it purports wanting to offer.

As one of the biggest third class mailers in the country, nonprofits need to encourage the post office to be as efficient and competitive as possible. That means, unlike some newspapers that speak an editorial message dripping with self interest, they should unite to demand the post office be exempted from the private express statutes and become a competitive player in the vast changing and technology charged world of communications.

There can be no halfway. They are either a full-fledged competitor or not. Only then can nonprofits be assured of access to communicating with their donors at a price and efficiency the postmaster general promises.