Flyer distribution, unlike addressed deliveries, is a mass activity. As such, there is always the temptation for a distributor to cut corners.
If you are instructed to distribute 1000 leaflets in a certain area, who is going to notice if you only do 950? Or 900? Or even 850? Who is going to notice if you only walk half-way down a certain road before turning back, or if you only do one side of the street instead of both? Or if you only deliver to every second or third letter box?
The answer is: we will notice. We have built a monitoring system that removes all of these temptations from our distributors' work so that they can simply get on with their daily round and do it as thoroughly as they can.
* First, we review each distributor's daily track and waypoints (the coordinates of each letter box that they visit) to make sure that they haven't missed a road or skipped letter boxes.
* Then, still looking at a map of their GPS routes and waypoints on computer, we compare the number of deliveries that they have made in certain streets with the verified number of letter boxes in those streets that we have on our database. Each distributor gets a daily score based on how close their number of deliveries are to the actual number of letter boxes in the sample of streets.  We expect a score of more than 90%.
* These audits are enhanced by daily spot-checks in the field to make sure that our distributors insert the flyers, leaflets, brochures, magazines and newspapers that they distribute properly into each letter box. When distributors rush to finish the day's work, they are tempted to stuff the item into each letter box, thereby damaging it. Another common mistake is to insert the flyer only half-way, exposing it to the wind and rain. The only way to remove these temptations from our distributors is daily spot-checks and constant feedback. 

When it rains, our main concern is to keep our client's pamphlets dry. To this end, each of our leaflet distributors carries with him a raincoat which he can immediately deploy when rain threatens. 
It took quite a search to find just the right kind of raincoat for the job. The first requirement was that it had to cover not only the distributor, but also the backpack in which he carries the leaflets. Furthermore, it had to cover the flyers that he is holding in his had, ready to insert into the next letter box. These requirements disqualified most standard rain gear, and we narrowed our search down to poncho type raincoats.
Most of the ones we tried turned out to be too small. Others, even if they were big enough, had the tendency to blow up in the wind, exposing our clients' pamphlets to the rain.
Finally, we found the perfect poncho: it is large enough to cover the bag, the distributor and the pamphlets in his hands, and it also has a wide "sleeve" - more like a slit in the poncho, through which he can put an arm through to keep the poncho down when the wind threatens to blow it up. It this way, our distributors are able to keep the flyers bone dry in most types of weather.
When it rains too hard to keep the pamphlets completely dry, our distributors are instructed to find shelter, and to wait for the rain to pass. Only occasionally, perhaps once or twice a year has it rained so much that we have had to cancel the day's distribution. 

Oishi is an exciting new service in Cape Town that specialises in delivering top-quality sushi and asian side dishes to homes in the Atlantic Seaboard and the Southern Suburbs. They asked us to spread the word. This is what they thought of our delivery of their brochure:

Morning Barrie,
Thanks for the update and the tracking info. I was able to view each of the routes and each flag 'drop'. I think this is a really clever idea of yours to track the drops!
I must add that we were already seeing positive results from the drop on Saturday - new customers ordering with us as a direct result of having receiving a flyer. We also had friends sharing photos of having seen our flyers in their apartment's foyer. Really great! 
Thanks again for the great service. It's really appreciated!
Kind Regards,
Stefano
Oishi

We recently received this email from another of our satisfied clients:

Dear Barrie,
Walda and I would just like to thank you for your professional, efficient and friendly service thus far.
It really has been a pleasure making use of your services and we will continue to do so in future.
Have a great day further!
Yolande Murphy
Harcourts

The other day our foreman was busy distributing a flyer when he found himself walking next to a distributor from a large, well-known competitor of ours. As they walked together, they struck up a conversation.

It turns out that he gets paid in a week what we pay our distributors in two days. After a while, he started complaining that our foreman was walking to every single post box. What you've got to do, he explained, is to skip two and only do every third post box. It cuts down on the distance, and at the same time your boss, if he checks, can see that the street was covered because he will find a flyer in a letter box here and there. If the boss finds some empty letter boxes as well, you just say that the residents must have taken out the flyer already, or that the resident was in the garden and you handed over the flyer instead of putting it in the letter box. 

With our system, a distributor would never get away with something like that. Short-cuts such as the skipping of letter boxes, only doing one side of a street and turning around half-way down a street will clearly show in the GPS data that our distributors bring back to the office. That data - pinpointing every letter box visited - forms part of the report that we give to our clients. 
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Perhaps just as important is the fact that our distributors do not have to devise tricks such as these to survive. They are well paid, motivated, and proud of their work and their productivity. 
Even though the opposition distributor was only doing every third post box, our foreman outpaced him and, as he turned the corner, he saw him way back down the street, taking a break under a tree.  ​