Operation Santa

Operation Santa is a 100+ year old USPS program which matches children, who have mailed letters to Santa, to anonymous givers who believe in the spirit of generosity and giving. Due to growing operational costs and ensuring the children's PPI was not compromised, USPS was almost forced to end the beloved program.

That's where my team at MRM stepped in and reimagined the program as an online "adoption center" fueled by the children's' letters that were thoroughly vetted and PPI redacted. Instead of individual post offices using volunteers to manually redact info from the letters, make copies, and implement a cumbersome process to allow the public to mail anonymous gifts, we figured out how to efficiently digitize and redact the letters, building a secure database that fed the front end site where the public could browse each letter and choose one for adoption.

From there, we used USPS's internal POS mailing label system to recognize QR codes so the public could bring their gifts to any post office for mailing. The postal employee could scan the QR code which would print a shipping label only the postal employee could see, keeping the child's address private while giving the sender anonymous tracking info to ensure their gifts were delivered.

Four years later and this program has rolled out nation wide. We reduced USPS's operating costs for the program by almost 50% and have increased revenue from shipped packages by around 30%. But most importantly more than 2,000 children have had their letter to Santa "personally" answered, and the holiday spirit and this holiday tradition continues to live on.