Postcrossing Blog

Another month starts and it’s time for a new suggestion for the messages on your postcards! But first, let us ask: did last month’s writing prompt help you unlock some creativity and write a bit more on your postcards? We really hope so!

(For those that are new to them, the writing prompts are an ongoing experiment that invites postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcard’s messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!)

December’s writing prompt was suggested by Heepy on the forum. Here it goes:

This should be an easy one, right? Around here in the south of Portugal, the “holy trinity of crops” consists of almonds, carob and figs. Most of the local sweets will include one or more of these, giving them a very characteristic taste and texture. After extensive research, we can confirm it’s absolutely delicious! I could definitely write about it at length on my postcards… 😋

What about you, what is typical from your region? We invite you to pick a favourite local dish or sweet and tell your recipients all about it on your December postcards — you might even inspire someone across the world to try it out someday!

PS – Got some cool ideas for more prompts? Feel free to share them on this forum thread!

December is juuuuust around the corner, and we know that many of our German members have been waiting for the announcement of our yearly collaboration with Deutsche Post. So it’s my pleasure to let you all know that our “Postcards for a good cause” campaign will also take place this year! Hurray! The rules haven’t changed, but for those who are new to Postcrossing or need a little refresher, here they are:

If you’re in Germany, all you have to do is send postcards, as many as you can! If your December postcards are registered before the end of February 2018, you will be contributing to this cause.

And although only postcards sent from Germany count, there’s always a receiver in every postcard exchange — so each time a card from Germany is registered, the recipient will be indirectly contributing to this donation too!

To keep things interesting, there’s also cool prizes for some randomly selected participants (residents in Germany only):

• Two €50 vouchers for www.allyouneed.com.
• Three €40 vouchers for Marke Individuell.
• Three post-themed messenger bags from Deutsche Post.

Pretty cool, right? All you need to do is send a postcard, and you’ll be automatically helping and entering in this lucky draw. As usual, the winners will be picked by Paulo's nifty random number generator in March 2018, at which point we will also announce here on the blog the total amount raised by German postcrossers to Stiftung Lesen. Last year, a grand total of €8,372.10 was raised for this good cause! 😊

Stiftung Lesen is a German non-profit organization, working to boost literacy in the population, especially among children, adolescents and newly arrived refugee families. Literacy and increasingly media literacy as well, are essencial requirements for success in life both on its professional and civic aspects. The funds raised in this campaign help the organisation run its many initiatives, such as reading clubs, libraries or research projects.

So… what are you waiting for? If you’re in Germany, get your postcards and stamps ready! The more cards you send in December, the more you’ll contribute — and the more chances you’ll have of winning a voucher, stamps or one of those neat messenger bags! 📯

P.S. – As always, we respect your personal information and will not share it with any company without your explicit permission. The full details of this campaign can be read here (German only).

This is our friend Lynda (aka LyndaC). She’s originally from Canada 🇨🇦 but travels abroad often and loves sending postcards from her trips, both to her friends back home and to others through Postcrossing. Sadly, it can be a bit awkward to send a postcard from somewhere exotic only to notice when it is registered that all the maps, statistics or flags of that postcard are wrong… so she used to refrain from requesting addresses in Postcrossing while traveling.

To make life easier for the many postcrossers that travel every year and want to send Postcrossing postcards from their trips, we’ve introduced a new feature called Travel Mode! With your account in Travel Mode set to your travel destination, you’ll be able to send postcards while in that location with a local Postcard ID (if abroad) and correct maps, statistics and flags that reflect the postcard’s actual origin.

While you’re busy exploring and writing postcards in Travel Mode, your account will be automatically set to inactive (since you’re not home to receive your postcards), but don’t worry — you’ll be sent all your due postcards as soon as you set it back to Active upon your return.

Lynda tested this feature on a recent trip to Portugal and France, and was happy to report that everything worked without a hitch! 👍

So the next time you travel somewhere, just switch your account to Travel Mode, find some local postcards and stamps, and you’ll be ready to share some nice memories from your trip! We’ve added a FAQ item about the new Travel Mode, but if you still have questions, feel free to ask below.

On last month’s poll results, Maria (aka Maria_Castro) from Portugal suggested we asked everyone’s opinion about the postal services in their country… admittedly a very subjective (and perhaps touchy) topic. Still, we thought it would be interesting to get a feeling of the national reputation of postal operators. Which ones stood out? And would their domestic image match the perception we have of them from abroad?

Overall, the results are pretty heartwarming! The vast majority of postcrossers think their post offices are doing a good job, with a fair amount going as far as saying they’re excellent.

But since the question was about each national post office, the important analysis comes on a country basis. So how do these results compare on a national level? To find out, we had a closer look at the results from countries with more than 50 votes (for more accurate results):

The results more or less reflect the general trend described above, with a few exceptions.

For instance, Italy pops out immediately as the country with the highest number of unhappy postcrossers (80% rate their postal service as poor or fair)… which I confess is a bit of a surprise. Is it the stamp prices? Or perhaps problems in the mail delivery? Maybe some local postcrossers can enlighten us in the comments! Other postal operators with mediocre results were Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Sweden (around 60% on the same metric).

On the happy side of the spectrum, Japan's Post has an extraordinary reputation: 74% of Japanese postcrossers think their post office is doing an excellent job and further 23% consider it good, with less than 3% in the remaining categories. Pretty impressive!

Other Asian countries follow closely behind, with South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan all having roughly 90% happy customers (rating either excellent or good). In Europe, Switzerland has the most content postcrossers, also with over 90% satisfaction, with Austria, Germany and Latvia trailing closely.

Please keep in mind that the answers to this kind of “perception survey” are always subjective… so remember to take the results with a grain of salt. That said, what influenced your vote? And if you were in charge of your country’s postal operator, what would you change?

PS – Any statisticians in the house? 😅  If you’d like give us a hand in future polls, let us know!

We have another exciting meetup report to share with you, all the way from Malaysia 🇲🇾 . The Postcrossing community there is super-enthusiastic and decided to do something special this past World Post Day. They had several simultaneous meetups around the country, took lots of photos and prepared this report to inspire you all to get out there and meet each other!

The 5th Malaysian Postcrossing meetup was held on October 9th 2017, at the Kuala Lumpur General Post Office, in conjunction with World Post Day 2017 celebration and stamp launch. The meeting was held at the hall of the post office building on the 3rd floor. A total of 46+ postcrossers from all over Malaysia participated in this meetup.

Postcard signing activity commencing and some of the meetup cards produced by Malaysian postcrossers

The event start off at 10am with speeches by Mdm. Diyana Lean Abdullah (Head of Stamp & Philately Department, Pos Malaysia) and Dato’ Anuar Bashah (President of Philatelic Society of Malaysia). A short talk on “Development of Postcrossing in Malaysia & How to Promote Postcrossing” was given by Shaliza Atikah (aka Honeysha).

A postcard exhibition and competition was held at the same hall, with a total of 18 exhibition panels from 17 participants. The topics exhibited ranged widely; i.e. anime, maxicards, orangutans, postal related items, Year of the Rooster 2017, weddings, and many more. Each panel consisted of 16 A4-size frames. The competition was judged by fellow meetup participants and the President of Philatelic Society of Malaysia.

Postcard exhibition and competition

Meetup participants — big and small!

This year, the meetup was also joined by a group of students from the school SK Putrajaya Presint 14(1). They were introduced to the hobby of postcard collecting and participated in postcard writing activity and colouring competition. The event ended around 1.30pm with the prize giving ceremony for the postcard exhibition competition and school children colouring contest. A lucky draw event was also held with the prizes being postcards and souvenirs given by the participants.

Group photo of all the participants in the Kuala Lumpur meeting

Another meetup occurred simultaneously in Kota Kinabalu, the state capital of Sabah. The meetup brought together 9 postcrossers at a local restaurant and the Kota Kinabalu General Post Office. They visited the mail sorting area of the general post office and presented the staff with a cake to celebrate World Post Day.

Meeting in Kota Kinabalu with visit to mail sorting area at the post office

A mini meetup also occurred at the post office in Tenom, an interior region of the state of Sabah:

Mini-meetup in Tenom

The next day (10/10/2017), two Malaysian postcrossers (Shaliza Atikah aka honeysha85 and Kamaruzaain A. Kadir aka kamaruzaain) appeared on a segment of the TV programme “Malaysia Hari Ini” to promote Postcrossing and the hobby of postcard collecting. The programme also highlighted the World Post Day meetup, with interviews from some of the participants. The programme segment is available on this YouTube link.

Pos Malaysia and Philatelic Society of Malaysia were supportive of Malaysian postcrossing activities, providing the venue for the meetup, door gifts, competition prizes, etc. Also this year, we are able to collaborate with the Panda Post (China) which provided us with Panda Post cartoon postcards for the meetup participants.

Also, thanks to all the committee members who have contributed their time and energy to ensure the success of this meetup: Kamaruzaain A. Kadir (aka kamaruzaain), Khor Kok Keong (aka kkkhor), Matthew Lai KH (Matthew07), Nurulhuda Abdul Kadir (newrule), Shaliza Atikah (honeysha85), Tan Wei Loon (alansxi86), and Yoong Pooi Leng (plyoong).

Photo credits: Matthew Lai, Natasha Putri, Fiona Wong, Caroline Chia and May Anny.

Thank you guys, that was fantastic! 👍

No matter whether a meeting is big or small, it’s always nice to meet new friends and share the love of postcards with other like-minded people… so have a look in the meetups page for events happening near you, or feel free to organise your own on the forum!