A Year of LetterMo: Part One

This is part one of a two-part blog entry. Check back next week for part two!

Have you ever found yourself wondering what goes on behind the scenes at LetterMo? While most of the focus is on January and February each year, our admins wanted to pull back the curtain and share all that goes into keeping this amazing community of letter writers up and running. If you have questions or want to know more about something you read here, leave a comment below!

March

After the last letters of February are off in the mail, we pause and breathe a sigh of satisfaction that another successful LetterMo is on the books. Like so many of our participants, we continue to receive letters sent in February throughout the month of March, and we work diligently to answer them all.

Our admins meet early in March to do a debrief of how everything went in February, to identify any projects for the spring and summer, to check in on our finances for the year ahead, and send thank you notes to those who have donated to LetterMo. We continue to schedule a few blog posts (such as this one) as well as mail-in blog entries, which we can receive throughout the year. Otherwise, March is a relatively quiet month as we rest up from the excitement and work of February.

Throughout March, and the whole year, we continue to monitor our Gmail account, LetterMo Facebook page, Facebook groups, and Instagram account to promote connection and sharing of the love for writing letters. We have several admin volunteers who help in the running of such pages, who may post articles, approve new members (on Facebook), moderate comments, reshare stories (on Instagram), and more.

April-June

Through the rest of spring, our admins meet together monthly to begin planning for the next year. We brainstorm ideas of things that we want to accomplish before the next LetterMo, such as creating a paid membership to help support the website, doing a logo design, or developing LetterMo merchandise.

This is a quieter time of year on our website, relatively speaking. We continue to see several thousand pageviews per month from our existing participants and from a trickle of new signups. We use this time to do things like tidy up our participant list–reaching out to those who have not logged into the website for several years so that we can remove stale accounts from the site.

July-September

During the summer our admins begin actively working on the projects identified during the spring. For example, in 2024 we spent this time selecting and working with a graphic designer on a new logo and researching costs and options for launching our membership card this past February. Our web hosting renews during this time as well–our single biggest expense–so this is a time of year when we schedule server migrations, if needed. For example, we anticipate moving to a new host this summer, which should save us on expenses while providing a bit of a capacity upgrade.

October-December

Though February still feels far off, the fall is when things start getting busy at LetterMo. The admin team meets monthly for most of the year, but by the end of fall and early winter, we start meeting every other week to get it all done. 

We are in the final stretch of completing our projects before the next February comes around, making any cosmetic changes to the website (leave a comment below if you noticed the change in colour schemes this past year) and are also working on scheduling announcements for the community. We begin to work on waking up our social media accounts again. While they are never truly dormant, but they do slow down a bit during the off season. We also prepare the new forum topics on the website for the upcoming year. Additionally, the admin team begins working on a calendar of blog posts for January and February: identifying guest blog topic submissions we would like to pursue as well as any interesting topics we might want to write about ourselves.