Searching for a Community Advisor for a Postcrossing Club at a university!

Hello! I hope whoever’s reading this is having a good day so far. :slight_smile:

I’m Arlene, and I’m currently a first-year attending the University of California, San Diego. Over the course of the pandemic, I fell in love with Postcrossing, sending letters to my pen pals, and all things snailmail related.

With that said, I’m interested in sharing my enjoyment of Postcrossing with the students at my university. Because my institution serves over fifty thousand students, undergraduate and graduate, from all across the globe, we are a very diverse place.

I hope to establish a PSA (Postcrossing Snailmail Association) at my school in hopes of introducing other young adults into the world of postcards and written correspondence. Because my school is part of the UC (University of California) system, there are eight other institutions throughout California I want for students to connect with, whether it be about their studies, commonalities, and other similarities they share to get to know other cultures, walks of life, and people they would have never met before. Basically, I’m thinking of creating a Postcrossing system wihin the state of California by first showing students what Postcrossing is, then hopefully, creating a Postcrossing system within the UC system, and potentially, other colleges and higher education institutions across the US (and maybe even the globe!) Not to mention that because my university has a hospital attached to it, I was thinking this club could also send letters and/or postcards to recovering patients looking

Of course, while this is all ambitious thinking, this is where you come in: I’m currently looking for a Postcrossing expert that would serve as this organization’s Community Advisor. This would be a HUGE responsibility in the context of not only working with and creating relationships with college students, but sharing your knowledge of Postcrossing with younger audiences. While I could go on and on about the qualifications necessary for the job, I’d like to gauge interest from the Postcrossing community to see if I can find an individual willing to help me make this dream of mine come true.

Some basic requirements would be being a tech-savvy person who knows how to work around Zoom, willing to take on a new challenge and learn new things, and be patient and understanding throughout this entire process. However, this community advisor can be located from ANYWHERE in the world, as long as they have access to technology for proper communication. Because I’ve never established an organization at an institution before, I’d be swimming in these new waters with you. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m only posting this topic on the forum to gauge interest, but more information will follow once I see individual(s) who would potentially be interested in helping me out.

If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate you for reading! Whether or not you’re interested, I’d be grateful if you could spread the news. I hope to reach Postcrossing experts from far and wide, so spreading awareness of my idea would be very helpful.

I hope that you enjoy the rest of your day! :smiley:

2 Likes

Hi Arlene, glad to hear you’ve fallen in love with Postcrossing - it’s a very special place.

And happy to hear you want to establish a campus club to encourage more students to join.

Beyond that though, I think you’d need to be talking to the founders of Postcrossing @Paulo & @meiadeleite. You can send them a message here: Contact us

Postcrossing is a trade marked, privately owned entity & there will be legal & intellectual property rights issues around trying to “create” a Postcrossing system within the UC or California university system & beyond.

Postcrossing isn’t an open source project, so you aren’t free to do with it as you’d like.

Glad to see the enthusiasm & ambition for getting more people involved in Postcrossing & sending postcards but there are other things you need to consider too before acting. Good luck.

10 Likes

An inordinate amount of time, resources, and skill has enabled this platform to be as slick as it is.
Reinventing the wheel will also take this much. Could the money instead be spent on pizza?

Speaking as someone who has seen the challenges of recruiting and maintaining niche uni clubs, perhaps a place to start be to merge with existing clubs, ie/ the writing club, stamp club, art club, as a place to meet diverse people and participate in postcrossing together, in order to gauge if there is sufficient base interest. Pizza is often incentive for student turnout :stuck_out_tongue:

4 Likes

First of all, I think @LC-Canada makes a great point, and in many ways, there is no need for you to re-invent the wheel. A correspondence club can take on many forms, and participating in Postcrossing, an already established activity just helps you jump start it.

One thought I have for you is this: you will need to reach critical mass. In my experience, any endeavor that involves drawing together people who have a common interest requires a large enough group of participants that it can still function in spite of the participating folks’ competing interests. Most people have a lot of things competing for their time. I’ve been to UCSD and watched the students and faculty go down to the beach to surf at lunch time! That looks pretty appealing! A student who has an interest in joining your group, will also have a variety of other interests and obligations (coursework, employment, other hobbies and interests, social engagements etc.) that will also be demanding of their time. Thus, for any given event or activity you plan, a certain percentage of them will not be able to participate due to conflicting obligations. My critical mass idea is that you still have to have enough interested parties to make the activity/event a success after all of the folks who’d like to attend but can’t don’t show.

An easy example in our context here is postcrossing events. When I host virtual postcrossing events via Zoom, they are open to all. After hosting 5 or 6 of them, I can tell you that if we make a real effort to get the word out and pick a time that is reasonable for a significant portion of the world to attend (given the issue of time zones) we will get 60-70 RSVPs. That demonstrates intent and interest. Even in those cases, when we do really well we usually only get 30-40 in terms of participants. So generally, right around half. I’ve found over the course of my life that these numbers tend to hold true regardless of the type of activity. So, food for thought.

I would note that I don’t tell you any of this to discourage you in any way, just offering the benefit of experience in the hopes of helping you manage your expectations. I think it is in an awesome idea, I wish you well with it, and I’d be happy to help in any way I can.

Don’t let any of this discourage you! If you build it they will come! There will be people who share your passion, no matter what it is for. Often, the biggest challenge begins with just finding them.

1 Like