Bridgewater Housing Association
From all-hands-on-deck mailouts to simple digital tenant post
Bridgewater Housing Association provides homes and factoring services across Renfrewshire, supporting around 900 tenants and more than 2,000 factoring customers. With many tenants still preferring post, letters remain essential for rent increases, tenancy updates, applications, complaints, information letters and factoring bills.
Before Postworks, large tenant mailouts meant folding, stuffing, franking and posting hundreds of letters by hand. Today, Bridgewater uses Postworks to send key tenant and customer communications through a simple digital workflow, helping teams save time while keeping paper communications available for residents who rely on them.
The Challenge
Tenant communications still depended on manual post
Bridgewater’s tenant base is largely over 60, and many residents still prefer official communications to arrive by post. Applicants also often request paper forms, even when digital options are available. That made post essential across the organisation, from rent increases and tenancy updates to complaints, applications and factoring bills. But the way those letters were being sent had not kept pace with the organisation’s needs. Every envelope had to be folded, stuffed, franked or stamped, then collected or taken to the post office. For major mailouts, the process became a shared office task rather than a background admin job.
Annual rent increase letters were the biggest example. Around 900 tenant letters had to be split by area, prepared by hand and sent out together. When those deadlines came around, it was all hands on deck.
That meant staff were pulled away from IT work, repairs, customer support and other resident-facing tasks just to help with envelopes. In a small organisation, the impact was easy to feel. Manual post was taking up time, interrupting teams and creating unnecessary pressure around deadlines, collections and the last post.
A closer look at the results
900 tenant letters
Rent increases and key tenancy communications can now go through a digital post workflow.
24 staff users
Mailouts completed in minutes
Major mailouts once took half a day
can now be managed in minutes.
The Turning Point
A new CEO questioned why post was still so manual
The turning point came when Bridgewater’s new CEO joined the organisation. Having used Postworks in a previous housing role, he recognised the problem straight away. Staff were spending hours folding, stuffing and franking letters, even though a simpler digital alternative already existed.
He knew Bridgewater did not need to choose between trusted paper communication and better internal efficiency. Tenants could still receive the letters they relied on, while staff could stop spending valuable time preparing every envelope by hand.
Bridgewater now exports PDFs from its housing management system and drops them into the right Postworks post box. From there, Postworks handles the printing, enclosing and sending. The process is simple enough for teams across the organisation to use. Setting up mailboxes takes just a few dropdown menus, and new colleagues can be trained in around ten minutes. Bridgewater also uses Postworks Receive for inbound post and is planning to introduce Server to help manage higher-volume tenant forms digitally.
“It used to take half the day when we were folding and stuffing 900 rent increase letters. Now it is literally drag and drop”
AndyIT team, Bridgewater Housing Association
The Outcome
Paper tenant communications without the manual workload
With Postworks in place, Bridgewater can keep sending trusted paper communications to tenants and customers, while removing the physical admin that used to slow teams down.
Key Results
📈 Large mailouts without all hands on deck
Annual rent increases and factoring runs no longer pull teams away from core resident work.
📨 Paper letters residents still trust
Older tenants continue receiving official communications in the format they prefer.
🧑💻 A simple tool for every department
Housing, finance, repairs and care and repair teams can all send post through one portal.
🔁 A clearer route for inbound replies
Receive and planned Server workflows help tenant responses move back into the business digitally.
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