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Missionary Letter Website Growing
PROVO, UTAH -- DearElder.com now serves all missions of The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and drastically cuts delivery time
on mail sent to missionaries. Letters to foreign missions that travel
through the Church's pouch system arrive in one or two weeks and the
service is free, letters to the Brazilian missions take one or two
days and the service is free, and letters to the Provo, MTC can be
delivered the same day, however, there is a 34 cent charge for
postage. Letters to all other missions are sent for the cost of
postage.
The service was created by two BYU students. Dave Bateman, 23, a
junior majoring in business from Billings, Mont., and Benjamin
Zimmer, 24, a senior majoring in English from Port Orchard, Wash.
began working on DearElder.com in summer 2000. Bateman put in 18 hour
days for four months programming the site and launched it in October
2000. Advertising is the only source of income and the men do not
plan on making money from the project.
Originally the site worked with volunteers printing the letters and
stuffing envelopes. But Zimmer then wrote a program to automate the
process of handling the about 2100 letters per week, and the project
now owns a folding machine.
While the Church has approved email for missionaries, Bateman and
Zimmer don't anticipate decrease in demand for their service. "Most
of the letters we receive are for missionaries in Third World
countries and don't have access to email. We will still be able to
provide service to those missionaries," Zimmer said.
Their service also sees some competition, from
BrazilMissions.com,
a service handling mail to LDS missionaries in Brazil, and Mission
Mail, a non-profit service at
http://www.missionmail.org/ .
Source:
Web Site quickens missionary communication
BYU NewsNet 12Jan02 I2
By Jason Gifford: NewsNet Staff Writer
See also:
New Website Eases Letters To Missionaries
Mormon-News 10Nov00 I4
By Kent Larsen
E-Mail Again Allowed for LDS Missionaries
Salt Lake Tribune 10Jan02 N2
By Peggy Fletcher Stack: Salt Lake Tribune
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