The core of building a network for your Happiness Postbox is having willing recipients, and a source of people who are willing to contribute letters, artwork, poetry, or anything else they think of to bring a smile to someone’s face.
In this article, we’ll cover how you can effectively build both elements to have a strong network of people for your Kindness Postbox.
Who Should Be Receiving Your Letters?
Let’s focus on the recipient of your letters first. For the original Kindness Postbox, we chose the residents of a local care home to work with, but you could send your letters to anyone you think deserves to have their day brightened. Care homes, orphanages, homeless shelters, and hospitals are all examples of places with people who could benefit from a Kindness Postbox.
In this article, we’ll talk about our experience with care homes, but the principles will be the same for any place you decide to send your letters to.
The most important thing before you begin is to make contact with the recipients. If you’re not sure of where you want to put your box, you can search “care homes in my area” or other similar searches on Google to get a list of potential places to work with. In our case, we knew our target venue and made contact with the Event Coordinator in our local care home, but if your target venue doesn’t have someone in a similar role, then a general manager should be your first port of call.
Once you’ve explained what you want to do with your Kindness Postbox and gotten permission from the venue it’s time to start working on gathering letters.
How To Get Letters
You can be as creative as you’d like with how you gather your letters. From placing the box in a community hub like a local hall or shop to going into schools to engage with children. The sky really is the limit.
Here are some ideas to get you started!
- Work with local schools to get letters from children. (Make sure to get parental permission first.)
- Place the box in a central location where your local community can engage with it.
- Put out a petition online to get people from further away to send digital letters that you can print out for the postbox. (See our article on building a buzz.)
If you are placing your box in a public area, we would recommend checking on it every few days and making sure it is safe and secure.
Connecting People
If you choose to run your Kindness Postbox as a pen pal system with reciprocal letters you’ll need to make sure to get addresses from the senders. If you’re working with children on this be sure to get parental permission for every step of the process.
