Postcrossing Blog

Today we would like to share with you two easy ways to make the most of the power of a postcard in brighting someone’s day. In particular, of those who might need it the most.

Post Pals Post Pals is a website ran by a group of volunteers that allows anyone to send postcards/letters/parcels to very sick children. Sending a cheerful post is a very simple and easy way to give this children something to look forward to when they are often isolated and suffering.

The founder of Post Pals is Vikki George who is herself bed-bound for the last seven years due to suffer from ME. Instead of loosing her hope, she spends her time helping sick children through her Post Pals.

Here’s a video that explains it further.

We find this to be a great cause and a good example of how a simple postcard can make a big difference.

Children welfare stamps organisation Kinderpostzegels

Kinderpostzegels is organization based (but not specific to) the Netherlands with the same goal of helping children, but through the use of stamps. Here’s what Lilian Visscher from Kinderpostzegels shared about it with us:

Stichting Kinderpostzegels Nederland (Kinderpostzegels) is a children’s charity with the slogan: 'for children, by children’. The annual Children’s Welfare Stamps Campaign, with 200.000 children selling stamps and postcards to 2 million people is a striking example of this, forming the organisation’s showpiece. In this campaign, children help other children. Kinderpostzegels uses the proceeds to support projects focusing primarily on children. Kinderpostzegels believes it is important to involve children as much as possible in the projects.

Kinderpostzegels believes that all children are entitled to develop their individual talents and abilities. They are one of the most vulnerable groups in society and sometimes need extra help and protection.

Kinderpostzegels is an independent organisation, which means it is not tied to governments or economic or political movements.Kinderpostzegels raises and allocates funds for the benefit of children in the Netherlands as well as outside this country.

The postcrossers from Holland can help children who need extra help and protection, by sending their postcards with a children’s welfare stamp. There are two ways: they can order stamps online from our website or they can make up their postcard with children’s welfare stamp online on www.postmijnkaart.nl.

This means that whenever you are sending (for example) a Postcrossing postcard, you can be helping children just by using their stamps. Neat, uh?

So, two easy ways to help children through postcards. Do you know others? Share them in the comments so that others know about them too!

You know the expression “an image is worth a thousand words”? Postcards do tell a lot about themselves just from the pictures, but what if they could tell you more by listening to them? That’s right, what if you could listen to a postcard? Impossible? We thought so too… until now.

They are known as Polish sound postcards (or Polish Flexi-Disc Postcards) and they existed in the 1960's in Poland initially as a way to give access to western pop music.

But how’s that possible you may be thinking? The trick is that those were not regular postcards but slightly bigger and squared. On the front, there was a photo as any other postcard, but on the back, it had an engraved recording that you could play in a traditional record player. You could even record your own personal message at the beginning of it. Neat, uh?!

To lean more about them, check this video of Mat Schulz, an Australian currently living in Poland that collects these sound postcards.

Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be produced anymore (and almost no one has a record player these days) but it seems it’s still possible to find some in Poland in flea markets or in collectors shops.

Do you know any place that sells them? Then let us know in the comments!

Yvonne is a 64 y.o. grandmother in the U.S.A. and goes by FloridaGirl in Postcrossing. She has a soft spot for postcards with maps and nature, as you can easily see in her favourites. Here’s what she has to share with us.

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

I had saw that someone mentioned swapping postcards in another site. I went searching for where a site would be to do that. I found Postcrossing. What got me hooked was not just the official part of Postcrossing but also the Postcrossing forum when I discovered private swaps and saw that there were so many wonderful cards of places I’ve never seen. The people in the forum were so nice and I started to make friends. Also the cards spurred me to research places that were on the cards. I couldn’t just look at a photo and find it interesting, if it wasn’t clear to me what or where it was, I wanted to find out.
I do continue to do the official Postcrossing exchanges.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

I love maps, rocks, bookmarks and for years I made quilts but I had to stop quilting. That’s when Postcrossing started. I have maps from many places in the US and some other countries (road maps) and have 5 world Atlases.

I also have a collection of rocks that my parents, other family members or I have found; and, some that I bought, for example, petrified wood from Brasil.

My children have been giving me bookmarks for years, since I read so much. I’ve gotten beautiful bookmarks from other postcrossers.

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

That is me at my mailbox in front of my house.

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

My favorite of the animals are wild cats. This is a great card for the tenderness shown by the lions and the fact that I received it as a get well card from a postcrosser who I’ve gotten to know.

I’ve come to love the beauty of the Julian Alps in Slovenia. This just one that showns how beautiful they are.

The Japanese have a beautiful way of showing off their cherry trees.

This one shows olive trees with wild poppies blooming around them. It is one that I think is especially pretty.

Claudia is a creative Postcrosser from Italy, she even illustrates her own postcards. Read more about her in the following Spotlight interview!

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

I discovered Postcrossing reading a newspaper – I immediately thought that it would be a great chance for me to experience the world outside my window in Naples in a brand new way: not just by seeing pictures of new places but also by discovering aspects of people’s lives and cultures through senders’ words. I also loved the idea of establishing random contacts, as this allows the whole Postcrossing adventure to be free from any boundaries of age, color, culture or religion.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

I have many hobbies, but I should admit that I am not dedicated to all of them. I am dedicated in playing with my pets, reading books, watching movies and TV series, drawing, sun tanning and eating chocolate [I’m definitely too active in that :)] Then I sometimes love creative activities such as decoupage, scrapbooking, making beaded jewelry, and sewing bags for my niece or Halloween costumes for my pets. I would love to learn more about cooking and baking, especially foreign recipes.

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

My youngest cat Pepe hidden in the mailbox, ready to scare the mailman to death :)

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

I have received many beautiful postcards and I love them all for different reasons, but I do actually have my top three:

I generally love picturesque street view postcards, as they let me dream about how great it would be to walk those different corners of the earth.

This postcard litterally left me breathless, because when I was 4 or 5 years old my dad built a wooden model of this same ship for me! Now I know it’s the “Endevour”, the vessel in which Captain Cook first sighted New Zeland in 1769.

With this third postcard I want to thank every single postcrosser who accepted my invitation to swap one or more of my favourite postcards with me. It’s amazing to discover that there are people around the world ready to do their utmost to find a postcard you like, just to make you happy.

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

Receiving a postcard is always a big joy for me, but what I love most is to make my own postcards. Ever since I joined Postcrossing, I created my handmade postcards, because I wanted to share more of myself than just the few lines you can write on a postcard…to give them a “personal touch”. So, inspired by my beloved pets (1 mini-pinscher dog, 4 cats and 4 parrots), sketch by sketch, my handdrawn characters – the “Nextlola’s Zoo” – materialized in front of me… hoping to bring a smile to the receivers’ faces. I was hugely surprised by the extent of appreciation from other postcrossers, and because of the enthusiastic support of some of them (very special to me), I decided to try to turn my hobby into a job by printing my own postcards and selling them on my website.

You can probably guess which countries have more members in Postcrossing just by looking at where you send or receive to/from, right? And we even have some statistics to show that too.

But, obviously not all countries have the same population! If we would take a sample of the same dimension in each country, which ones would contain more Postcrossers in it? Or in other words, in which ones is Postcrossing more popular?

We decided to do the math and share the results with you. We took into account the approximate population of each country, the number of users and came up with an interesting list.

And here’s how the ranking of the top 50 look like:

Surprise, surprise – Finland is at the very top. I bet you all guessed that one. But did you guessed all the following ones? Indeed, we had some surprises as well. Tiny Estonia with 1,3 million people manages to have plenty of Postcrossers. Same goes for Lithuania and even more with Macau!

Are there other statistics you would be curious to see here? Let us know!

PS: To calculate the data above we took into account only countries with more than 10 users and excluded countries which were too small or of which we did not have any relevant population data.