Thursday, May 9, 2013

The importance of contact information

Hello beautiful swappers!

Imagine this scenario:
You've had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad day.
You open your mailbox and find the most wonderful piece of mail.
It brightens your spirits, turns your day around, and maybe even makes you dance a little jig outside the mailbox.

The very first thing you want to do is email the artist to thank her/him for this little gift of happiness, but alas - there is no email address on the card!

Or maybe there is an email address and you send some immediate electronic thanks, but you love this mail so much you want to return the postal love with a card of your own, and there's no snail-mail address to which you can send it.

So very disappointing!

What, dear swappers, can we do to prevent this?
Include your email and mailing address on every piece you send.

This is a wonderful, lovely, generous bunch of swappers who really want to sent their thanks.
Make their job easier!  The love will just keep going around.

In the meantime, if you've had a situation like the one mentioned above, and really want to acknowledge your mail, I've added a new page to the blog.
See the tab up top that says "received"?
That's a place you can leave comments for each other if for some odd reason you can't reach each other directly.
(and FYI - for the sake of making the "informal mail art exchange" address list easier to read, I'm going to be deleting the old acknowledgement/thanks comments.  You can start leaving them in the new space if you want.)

Thanks for making this such a fun and active group!

5 comments:

big mamabird said...

Oh, this is good, Karen, i have had a few times where I do have the email, but no snail mail address...sad, and then the email wont go through...so sad.

GinaVisione said...

no Girlie... THANK YOU!! :D

Anonymous said...

I recently participated in MMSA for the first time and I received a postcard that had a little printed return address on it from the sender and I thought, 'that's a good idea!" so from now on, I will include that on my postcards. Just that little extra goes a long way.
~Dawn

Unknown said...

Including the snail-mail return address is a good idea if, for whatever reason, the piece of mail is undeliverable.

This just happened with a recent MMSA swap. The postcard was late in coming. For some reason still unknown, the post office was unable to deliver the card to me, but because the swapper put her home address on it, it could be returned to her.

Including a physical address may thus prevent your mail art from ending up in a dead letter pile.

Anonymous said...

I do often forget to write a return address or email...I'll try to do better! :(

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