Postcrossing Blog

Advent time is here already and the holidays are inching closer by the day… so it’s time to get our yearly campaign with Deutsche Post back online, to make sure your postcards count for a good cause! This will be the fourth year we run this campaign and by now I guess most of you know how it goes, but just in case:

So 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 2017, you’ll be contributing to this cause.

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 as well!

To make things even more interesting, there will also be some nice prizes for the participants:

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

Nice, right? The winners will be picked by Paulo's random number generator in early March 2017, at which point we will also announce the value raised by the German postcrossers to Stiftung Lesen here on the blog. Every year, we’ve been raising a little bit more than the previous year, and last year the total was a very impressive €8,857… but can we do even better this year? 😊

Stiftung Lesen is a German non-profit organization, working to increase literacy in the population, especially among children and adolescents. Their activities include reading clubs and projects to promote the learning of German language by refugee families in the country.

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

We all know how it works: find a nice postcard, write it, and mail it off. Then, after a few days, weeks or even a little adventure later, our postcard finds its way into the recipient’s mailbox. But what happens in the meantime, after we post it on a postbox? We’ve written about mail sorting centers before (e.g., here, here or here), and the magic that goes on behind the scenes… but it’s always nicer to see it with your own eyes, right?

That’s what a group of curious postcrossers in Germany thought too, so they got together some time ago, and asked Deutsche Post for a tour of a mail sorting center — which they got, due to their persistent and persuasive requests! They turned it into a Postcrossing meetup, took pictures, sent postcards and even wrote about it for our viewing pleasure. 😊

Here are Claas (aka Speicher3) and Christine (aka Reisegern), the meetup organizers, to tell us all about it:

In the morning of June 19th, we were welcomed by employees of Deutsche Post to the “Briefzentrum 28 Bremen” (that’s the official name of Bremen's mail sorting center). This is one of more than 80 sorting centers for mail in Germany, that every day process about 66 million letters from 140,000 mailboxes throughout the country. So this is the place where postcards come to after postboxes are emptied.

Wow… they take quite a tumble! We could even see what happens to letters containing keys, coins or other loose parts when going through the machines. Can you imagine? You’d better not send things like those on a simple envelope…

The mail that arrives is sorted by size, and then a machine checks the postage and puts a special cancellation mark on the mail. Perhaps you’ve already received a postcard with a postmark from Bremen?

It shows the outline of this distribution center’s zone of responsibility and one of the city’s landmarks: the Town Musicians of Bremen (a donkey with a dog, cat and rooster standing on top of it), from the famous Grimm Brothers fairy tale!

A machine further down the line reads addresses. Did you ever notice the orange bar code on postcards from Germany? This code is printed onto the card in the sorting center, and it contains all the important information about the card’s destination.

There are plenty of impressive machines in the giant, busy hall of the sorting center. Within those machines, letters and postcards dart back and forth at breathtaking speeds.

As soon as a Postcrossing postcard makes its journey through all these machines, it finally arrives in a yellow box, together with hundreds of other letters and postcards, which will be sent to the sorting center closest to the recipient’s address. And from here, the postcard will be delivered by a mail carrier to a happy postcrosser.

If the postcard is being delivered to another country, it will instead be forwarded to the international sorting center in Frankfurt, where it will be delivered via air mail. Every day, busy and focused employees make sure that our mail will be delivered quickly and reliably.

Postcrossers were visibly impressed by all the machines and the dizzying speed at which our postcards passed through the sorting center.

After the tour was over, the meetup participants did what is a traditional part of every postcrossing meetup: sitting together, talking and writing postcards!

The cards that were written during this special meetup didn’t need to take the detour through a mailbox though — about 1000 of them were mailed directly from the inside of the sorting center in Bremen. The participants gained insight to the world of mail delivery and learned a lot about the adventurous journey of their postcards!

A big thank you to the Deutsche Post and the friendly employees of the sorting center in Bremen, who enabled us to have this very interesting day.

Thank you Deutsche Post — and thank you Claas and Christine for this wonderful report!

Late last year, Deutsche Post and Berlin’s Museum for Communications launched a video competition themed “Why do we still write letters?”, where people could post videos explaining the charm of written mail. They got over 400 video submissions, which you can see on their YouTube channel. They’re sweet, touching stories of why we still put pen to paper to write to to each other.

We only heard about the competition once it was over, but were happily surprised to find a video about Postcrossing among the entries! Have a look:

Johannes (aka joze-post) made this charming video, which does a great job of portraying the randomness of Postcrossing. He didn’t win the competition… but he stole our hearts with the cheerful music and fun details about some of the postcards. Well done Johannes! :)

February is finally behind us, and it’s time we announce how many cards were sent from Germany last December… and of course how much money they raised on the Postcards for a good cause campaign!

Ready? Go on, think of a number and then scroll down to find out!

Postcrossers in Germany sent 88570 postcards during December, raising a total of €8857 for Stiftung Lesen! That’s a record! 😀

Congratulations to all the postcrossers and a huge thank you to Deutsche Post, for committing to this cause. What a brilliant number… you really outdid yourselves this year!

As usual, it will take us a couple of days to sort out the prizes. We’ll get in touch with all the winners via email soon.

December is just around the corner, which means it’s time to dress Postcrossing up for the holidays, and to launch our yearly campaign with Deutsche Post to make your postcards count for a good cause! By now you know the drill, so without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, we’re proud to announce that…

So if you’re in Germany, all you have to do is keep sending postcards! If your December postcards are registered before the end of February 2016, you’ll be contributing to this cause.

And though 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 as well!

To make things even more interesting, there will also be some nice prizes for the participants:

• Two 50€ vouchers for www.allyouneed.com.
• Three 40€ vouchers for Marke Individuell.
• Two high quality pen sets, from Pelikan.
• Ten custom-designed Postcrossing stamp sheets (international).

The winners will be picked up by Paulo's random number generator in early March 2016, at which point we will also announce the value raised by the German postcrossers to Stiftung Lesen here on the blog. Last year, we broke our 2014 record and raised a very impressive total of €8,382.40… can we do even better this year? 😀

Stiftung Lesen is a German non-profit organization, working to increase literacy – especially among children and adolescents. They promote reading through several different activities, such as the “My first letter” contest.

So… what are you waiting for? If you’re in Germany, grab a pen and your stack of postcards and stamps, and start writing some postcards! The more cards you send, the more you’ll contribute to this cause – and the more chances you’ll have of winning a nice prize! :)

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