RHA’s Positivity Postcards

Nope! We’re not looking to sell you anything or make any money here—we’re simply using your mailing address to send you a postcard, and then we’re deleting your data.

RHA receives funding from the Department of Housing and Residence Life (HRL) at GT to host unique and engaging events, activities, and projects for on-campus residents. We’re using some of our funding this year to facilitate this project and cover all associated costs.

We’re allowing a small number of non-residents to request postcards from us and have set strict quotas to ensure that we don’t focus too heavily on sending postcards to non-residents. While we can mail up to 2,250 postcards to on-campus residents, we have a quota of 100 postcards for faculty/staff, for example. Alumni, off-campus residents, and other groups likewise have similar quotas.

Despite our constituency being comprised solely of residents, we know that residents engage in communities that extend beyond the walls of their residence halls. Students that live on campus have friends who live off campus, and residents have formative relationships with many different faculty and staff on this campus. Simply, residents are connected to more than just residents—they’re connected to Georgia Tech at large. It’s this larger connection and circle of influence that we wanted to reflect in this postcard project.

Further, we think this project is more exciting when its bounds are a little broader. It’s certainly exciting to get a postcard from somebody who lives two doors down from you, but it’s even more exciting to get a postcard from somebody who taught you linear algebra two semesters ago or from an alumnus who now lives halfway across the globe in France. It’s also more exciting when your friends—some of whom may live off campus— get to engage in the same fun activity that you’re engaging in.

Nevertheless, we plan to facilitate this project in such a way that a resident is involved in every mailing of a postcard. If a non-resident writes a message, for example, we’ll make sure that their message makes it to somebody who lives on campus. A message from an alumnus, for example, will go to a resident instead of going to another alumnus or a faculty member. Likewise, if a faculty or staff member receives a postcard, the message that they’ll be receiving will be from an on-campus resident. This way, we ensure that residents remain at the center of the project are involved in 100% of postcard interactions generated by this project.

The only identifying information that will be on the postcard is your first name. Postcards don’t have return addresses on them, so your mailing address won’t be listed anywhere on the postcard. For all intents and purposes, this is an anonymous project! All somebody else will receive in the mail is a postcard with a short message from you signed with your first name. If you more comfortable providing a fake first name or alias, you are more than welcome to do so.

Nope! We’re doing all of the hard work for you on the back end. When you fill out this form, you’ll write a general message, and when we print these postcards we’ll print your message onto one of them. That postcard will be randomly sent to somebody who fills out this form, and you’ll receive one postcard from the stack of postcards that we print, too. That postcard that you receive will likewise have a message on it that somebody else wrote.

Maybe it’s easier to think about it this way… We’re collecting two pieces of data at the same time: (1) mailing addresses of everybody who wants a postcard and (2) kind messages to put on all of those postcards. When it comes time to print these postcards and then send them out in the mail, we’ll randomly combine those two pieces of data—that we’re gathering on this form—such that each postcard has a random address on it and a random message on it. The implication and end result of doing this is that everybody who fills out this form will receive a postcard in the mail, and that postcard will have a random message on it that was written by some other member of the GT community.

While possible, it is highly unlikely. We are randomly printing out the messages that we receive onto the postcards in a random order, so you will probably not get a message from the same person who ended up with your message.

Yes, we can send postcards internationally—it’s okay if your mailing address is outside of the United States.

Unfortunately not. To simplify the postcard production process for us, each person who requests a postcard will receive one randomly designed postcard. On the postcard request form, however, we’re asking each person to rank the postcard designs from their favorite to least favorite. We plan to print postcards according to the distribution of results that we receive for that question. Accordingly, if most people really prefer one design over another, we’ll print more of the design that more people like, thus increasing the odds that any one person receives a preferred design.

No—one postcard per person. Duplicate submissions will be voided.

Please review your mailing address BEFORE submitting your request. We anticipate receiving an influx of hundreds, if not thousands, of requests in a relatively short period of time. We do not have the capacity to field emails and other messages related to corrections or mistakes. Postcards will be sent to the addresses we have on file, and “lost” mail that can’t find its way to a recipient due to an incorrect address will be discarded by USPS.

Postcards are being shipped by USPS First Class mail.

We are happy to provide this service at no cost to participants. That said, however, we face limited capacity as a student organization and anticipate fulfilling hundreds, if not thousands, of requests for postcards. Since we’re not charging for these postcards or postage, we do not guarantee that each and every postcard will make it to the proper mailing address with 100% certainty. While USPS excels in what they do, even a 0.5% – 1.0% delivery failure rate means that up to 30 people who request postcards (assuming we fulfill all 3,000 postcard requests that we’re capable of processing) may not receive one. We do not plan to issue replacement postcards for postcards that get lost in the mail or that do not get delivered successfully.