Postcrossing's mission is to make it possible for members to "send a postcard and receive a postcard from a random person somewhere in the world."
Membership is free. Currently, there are almost 307,000 participants from 204 countries.
Postmarks was intrigued and decided to try it out.
In short, it has been a wonderful experience. So much fun! Here's how it has gone so far:
After signing up on the site, we requested and received the names and addresses of five members, which we immediately received via email. We were assigned people from Germany, the Netherlands, Taiwan, China, and Russia.
Since February was Black History Month and we are a postal organization, we decided to send everyone on our list postcards that featured Black Heritage Series stamps.
International postcard stamps cost $1.05 each.
As of yesterday, all of our postcards have arrived at their destinations and have been recorded on Postcrossing by the recipients.
People who send postcards write an assigned number on them, and when somebody receives that postcard, that person logs into Postcrossing and records the number so that the sender will get participation credit.
The last postcard of ours that arrived was to Russia. It traveled 5,757 miles. In total, our five postcards traveled 30, 606 miles.
Soon after our postcards began arriving at various points across the globe, we started receiving random postcards from around the world, too.
Three times so far, we have found a lovely surprise in our mailbox.
The three that we have received have come from people in Holland, the Netherlands, and Scotland.
The hand-written messages on all of them were lovely, as were the stamps from their countries.
As soon as we received each of these postcards, we logged into Postcrossing to verify our receipt by recording the assigned number.
In this picture, you can see on the top and side of the postcard what the number looks like.
Participating in this project has been so enjoyable that we're going to remain active in it, and we want to encourage you and your friends and family to do the same.
