This is part two of a two-part blog entry. Read Part One if you haven’t see it yet.
January
Though we think about LetterMo happening only in February, January is when things take off here. Admins meet weekly to prepare for the Challenge month. Almost as soon as the clock strikes midnight on New Years, we see a surge in traffic as returning participants turn their attention to the most wonderful time of year–the Month of Letters Challenge. Our website lights up as people dust off their profiles, introduce themselves on the forums, and reach out to new potential penpals.
Posts on social media and some strategic sharing in other letter writing and postal-oriented communities also bring a wave of new participants. Our admins review each of the account requests from new signups to make sure that they are real people (over 18 years old) before welcoming them into the community, protecting our community from spam abuse. All this activity creates a wave of emails, and sometime in mid-January we upgrade our email service for a month to handle the 12,000+ emails that will be sent by our website during January and February.
We begin writing and scheduling blog posts, soliciting special blog posts from others, and developing the questions for our collaborative blog post series. The admins work on scheduling at least two virtual letter writing socials on Zoom for February, which have been a popular way for our participants to connect and meet one another from across the world. If you follow us on any social media account and enjoy the daily posts through February highlighting different celebrations and reasons to write for that particular day, this is when our admins work on writing them and creating graphics to match.
Our volunteer moderators on social media join us in January as well. It is thanks to their hard work that all those daily posts get scheduled in the Facebook group. Our moderators also work to engage with participants who post on our social media accounts and to monitor what is happening.
February
At last, the month we have been working toward all year has arrived! As seems to be an emerging tradition, our admins kick off February with a quick note of congratulations to one another in the mail. Then we get to work writing letters with everyone else amidst a pile of stationery, pens, and postage while checking our mailboxes daily for exciting new letters.
The admins do meet a couple times during the month and stay in regular contact with one another and the social media moderators on a messaging platform, but the focus is on keeping everything running smoothly and feeding the blog post scheduler. Our admins and moderators regularly peruse the website forums and the social media accounts to make sure questions get answered quickly and concerns get fed back to the admin team for review and action. We repost social media posts where we are tagged by @monthofletters, #LetterMo, or #LetterMo2025. We continue to see new participant sign ups, but that starts slowing down a bit as February goes on.
Before we know it, February 28 rolls around, and we drop our final letters in the mailbox, celebrating another successful LetterMo!
How Can You Help?
First and foremost, by being an active part of the LetterMo community, you make this an exciting and rewarding project for our admins! It is satisfying to work on behalf of a vibrant community, and each and every one of you is a part of what makes it so vibrant.
You can also help support us financially. We are an entirely volunteer-run community, and all-told, our expenses this last year were about $500USD. The single biggest expense is our website hosting, which we expect to be lower in the future after a planned migration this summer. We also spend some smaller amounts throughout the year for things like boosted email capacity in January/February and one-off expenses for things like Membership Cards or future merchandise. You can donate or purchase a Membership Card on our store site–all proceeds go to running LetterMo for another year!
Finally, if you would like to do a bit more, you can let us know you are interested in volunteering. Whether you want to help moderate our social media accounts in January and February, host one of our virtual letter writing socials, or join the admin team, we’d love to hear from you. You can use our contact form on the website, email us, or–if you like to go old-school–drop one of us a letter in the mail.