Postcrossing Blog

Have you ever heard of Geocaching? It’s a fun treasure hunt activity that consists of finding small containers (aka caches) that others have hid all around the world, aided by clues and GPS coordinates. We’ve played it for almost as long as we’ve run Postcrossing, and enjoy searching for these little canisters and tupperwares wherever we go. It’s a fun challenge and a different way to explore the world, luring us to nice places we might have otherwise missed. Some caches are hidden in picturesque parks, others in bustling urban spots — and every single one has its own story and little surprises inside, often including small trinkets left by other geocachers.

If you’re new to the hobby, we encourage you to give it a go! All you need is a smartphone with GPS to get started. There are millions of caches hidden worldwide, waiting to be discovered. But for those of you who are already part of the Geocaching community (and we know many postcrossers are also geocachers), we wanted to give you a heads-up about something special: a World Postcard Day themed souvenir!

From September 29 to October 5, 2024, Geocaching is celebrating World Postcard Day with a twist. If you attend any official Geocaching event during this period and post an “Attended log” for that event, you’ll receive a special World Postcard Day souvenir on your Geocaching account. It’s a fun way to celebrate postcards and geocaching simultaneously!

There are plenty of events happening worldwide during that week, so all you have to do is find one near you, go, and log your attendance. It’s a great opportunity to meet fellow geocachers, exchange tips, stories, and maybe even send some postcards! And if you can’t find an event near you, you can always organize one! There’s still time to plan a postcard-themed Geocaching event — and we think it would be extra fun to combine it with a Postcrossing meetup! This could be a nice way to bring together two communities that love exploration and connection.

For those of us who are both geocachers and postcrossers, this crossover event is a dream come true, combining both hobbies at once. Whether you’re exploring new cache hiding spots or mailing postcards to someone across the globe, this is a good time to share your love for adventure, discovery, and connection with others. So pack your GPS, grab a few postcards, and join the fun!

The World Postcard Day is a little over 2 months away, and we can feel the buzz of excitement starting to grow! Lots of people are eager to get started preparing for the big day (28 special meetups on the calendar already!), and we are too — so let’s talk about this year’s theme and postcard!

The theme for 2024 is “The Timeless Magic of the Post”, in honor of the 150^th anniversary of the Universal Postal Union (UPU). Founded in 1874, the UPU has played a crucial role in connecting people across the globe, fostering international cooperation between postal services and creating a unified postal network. They are an important part of what makes it possible for us to seamlessly send our postcards internationally, ensuring that they are delivered by different postal operators without us needing to worry about the intricate processes behind them. They make the magic happen!

We know some of you have been wondering when our postcard design contest will take place. We love running the contest with our judges and seeing all your creativity — it’s been a highlight of the last few years!

However, over recent years it has become harder to run a global design contest. As you may remember from last year, it can be hard to detect copyright issues with the works submitted; even when being especially careful, it’s easy for such things to slip through, as the tools we can use for that only go so far. More importantly though, we have also noticed a growing number of entries where the images were most likely done by artificial intelligence (AI) software. It’s becoming nearly impossible to tell apart AI-generated designs from the ones you pour your hearts into, and this task will only get more difficult going forward… so, after a lot of thinking, we’ve decided to switch things up this year: instead of our usual design contest, we’ve commissioned an awesome designer to create the official World Postcard Day postcard for 2024.

So, celebrating this remarkable milestone from the UPU with the theme “The Timeless Magic of the Post” was the challenge we presented to NY-based illustrator Rose Wong. You might remember Rose from this blog interview earlier this year, from the Flower Box postcard set, or maybe from one of her countless contributions to The New York Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, etc. Rose brought her unique style to the assignment and created a whimsical interpretation of the theme, honoring the UPU legacy by capturing the enduring magic of postcards and mail.

We love this vibrant design, with its whirlwind of happy mail! This is just how we feel as postcrossers — like conductors of a symphony that spreads magic all around the world!

As in previous years, we’re making this postcard design available for free on the World Postcard Day page so that anyone can print it at a local printing shop or through an online service (like Vistaprint or Moo).

And as we always say, any postcard sent on October 1st is a World Postcard Day postcard — so feel free to mail this one or any other postcards you like. It’s all good! If you’re planning to send postcards on the day, we encourage you to share a picture of your cards next to a mailbox on social media, using the hashtag #WorldPostcardDay, as a way to spread the word.

And now, it’s your turn! Let’s plan some get-togethers, visits to museums and workshops, and brainstorm ways to spread some happiness into the world’s mailboxes. How are you planning to celebrate? 71 days to go!

Friends, wasn’t World Postcard Day the most glorious celebration? The amount of postcards, meetings, posts on the forum, and mentions on social media was dizzying — it felt like being inside a whirlwind of excitement, shared by people all around the world! 😍

I feel like words are not enough to convey all the excitement… but let’s make an effort to document the day, and let’s start with children! Kosovo Post organized an activity at a school in Mitrovica, where they explained postcards to students, how to fill them in with the required information, where to write the address, where to put the postage stamps, etc., and also gave postcards to the pupils to mail to their friends from other classrooms. For many, this was probably their first contact with postcards, which is brilliant! We hope many of them will go on to become postcard and letter writers in the future.

Also, the Musée de La Poste in France had a special event for children, featuring not just postcards but also storytelling, music, dancing and poetry! This was part of the events surrounding their current exhibition “Nouvelles du paradis”, which will continue until March 18, 2024. If you’ll be around Paris until then, don’t miss it! In Portugal, the team from the Communications Museum walked the streets of Lisbon, offering postage-paid postcards to passersby, worth a free entry to the museum!

Dozens of meetups took place all around the world! From Chattanooga to Vilnius, Lahti to Veliky Novgorod, Bangalore to Jakarta! We enjoyed seeing the photos pop up on the forum — as well as photos of people writing or mailing their postcards, and all the tasty ravioli and other stamp-shaped food!

Remember when we put a limit in place for the day to try to reduce the number of postcards requested on October 1st (and thus relieve a bit of the pressure on Postcrossing’s algorithm)? Well, that plan backfired spectacularly! 😂 Maybe we unintentionally made it sound like the slots were special since they were limited…? Human psychology can be a mystery sometimes. The end result was that everyone seems to have interpreted this limit as a challenge, and we had the day with the most requested postcards ever in Postcrossing, just shy of 89,000 postcards! In total and across all the timezones, close to 98,000 postcards were sent and are now slowly making their way across the world. A stressful but very happy day indeed!

Thank you to every and each of you who sent out a postcard on October 1st and made this day the most exciting day of the year! We’re grateful for the enthusiastic way in which the Postcrossing community continues to embrace the event and has thus created something special that people look forward to every year.

And before we forget, today is World Post Day! The theme of 2023's event is “Together for Trust: Collaborating for a safe and connected future”. In the traditional speech for the occasion, UPU’s Director General Mr. Masahiko Metoki emphasized the historical and current significance of post offices as trustworthy hubs for diverse services, ranging from communication and commerce to finance. Recognizing the longstanding trust communities place in postal services, the statement points out that despite their vast reach, nearly 100,000 post offices globally lack proper internet access. To address this issue, the UPU’s connect.post initiative aims to provide every post office with internet access by 2030, with the goal of ensuring digital inclusion and enhancing the range of services, especially for underserved communities. Sounds like a great project!

Happy World Post Day everyone!

The most anticipated day of the year is here at last — it’s World Postcard Day! Today is the day we celebrate the joy and history of sending and receiving postcards, a tradition that now spans 154 years.

Celebratory World Postcard Day events have been taking place for a few days already, and they will continue for a few more but today is the BIG day, and so there will be a lot of postcard-writing! 😍 All around the world, people are setting up their desks or dining room tables, spreading out the postcards and stamps and address books and just writing, writing, writing! We hope you have some nutritious ravioli or stamp-shaped cookies by your side, to power this task of spreading postal hugs around the world. You can send them to postcrossers, but remember also to send them to friends, family and everyone else you think deserves a little love. In particular, think of the children in your life and their delight at receiving a special postcard when they open the mailbox next week… you could be their favorite person for a day with just one postcard!

To us, it’s really heartwarming to think of all the postboxes that will see some love this Sunday. Like our favorite ones in town, which we make sure to keep well-fed!

And as always, if you need a break from writing so many postcards, do come share with us how you’re getting along on your World Postcard Day celebrations in the comments below, on this forum topic, or on social media using the hashtag #worldpostcardday. We’ll be reposting and highlighting some photos and posts throughout the day, hoping to spread the word to even more people, and inspire them to write a few postcards too.

Wherever you are in the world, we hope you have the best World Postcard Day. Enjoy!

We’re in countdown mode for World Postcard Day around here, and the excitement for the big day is growing! This year, October 1st falls on a Sunday, which is perfect as many people don’t work on the weekend — that means more time to celebrate postcards!

With a little less than 2 weeks until World Postcard Day, it’s time to gather your postcards, check your address book, and make sure your favorite pen is inked and writing smoothly. This year’s theme is Postal Hugs, so take a moment to think of the loved ones you wish to reach out to, the friends you miss, or those you might want to send a bear hug to. Whether it’s your neighbors, a cherished teacher, the brave firefighters, or other people in your area who might have faced a challenge this year, send them a token of your appreciation and love. Save one for your local media outlet too, so you can tell them about this nice day! Got more ideas on who to send postcards to? Share in the comments! We’d love to hear them and get inspiration from you.

Like we mentioned in the stats email and on the forum, this year we’re going to set a maximum limit of 10 postcards for each postcrosser to send out on October 1st. If you only have a couple of slots available, you’ll be able to send a couple of postcards. If you have 5, you can request 5 addresses. But if you have 10 or more slots available, you’ll only be able to send 10 postcards on October 1st. While having people sending lots of postcards on the site and hitting records is always fun, it also puts a lot of pressure on Postcrossing: at some point, there just aren’t any more addresses to select. We came very close to that point last year, and this year we fear the problem will be made more complicated by the fact that World Postcard Day falls on a Sunday, a day when usually there is no mail delivery in most countries (and thus, even fewer addresses get thrown in the selection pool). So hopefully this limit will ensure that everything will go smoothly for everyone. Remember that you do need to send one postcard on Postcrossing during World Postcard Day (in your own timezone or during UTC — both work) in order to get the special badge on your profile, once it is registered.

As in previous years, local meetups, special postmarks and other events are on the horizon. To find out more about what’s happening in your area, check out the World Postcard Day events page. If you have young ones around, consider introducing them to the wonderful world of postcards: organize a mini-postcard workshop to teach them about the postal system, and then enjoy a short walk to your local mailbox together. Make sure to capture the moment with a photo and share it with us all! Or, if you have a talent for handicrafts, you can try to make something World Postcard Day-themed… like Jo (aka JustJo) who made this amazing postbox topper for her street! 😍

And last but not least, remember that the traditional meal for World Postcard Day is ravioli — they resemble little postage stamps! You might want to grab (or make!) some ahead of October 1st, so that you’re prepared and can celebrate the day with an extra dose of yumminess.

We wish you a brilliant World Postcard Day filled with joy, connections, and, of course, postcards! Let’s make it memorable and spread as many smiles as we can. And don’t forget to give your wrists a little break and a stretch now and then! 💪 💌 🌍