About our Spring 2026 Changes

Background

First off, we want to thank everyone for participating in Lifted! Whether you've sent or received a message, one time or dozens of times, we thank you for participating in this campus-wide event that has brought so much joy to our community over the past 10 years!

Since we began in 2016, we've seen exponential growth in participation, especially in the past couple years. If you head over to our Popped page, you can see that over 10,000 cards were sent in Spring 2025 alone!

As the number of messages continues to grow, running Lifted becomes increasingly difficult. We're a small group of students, and while we'd love to stake and attach balloons to an unlimited number of messages, putting on a large-scale event like Lifted requires a lot of work, including ordering materials, transporting materials, printing cards, blowing up balloons, cutting flowers, staking cards, sleeving cards, and more. We work late into the night to set up Lifted, but we don't want to work too late.

Additionally, since we started keeping track in Fall 2024, we've noticed that approximately 25% of recipients fail to pick up their cards. There are a few reasons for this, such as not checking your email or forgetting. Over the past couple years, we've tried to mitigate this through better email deliverability, more reminders, allowing recipients to swap to eLifted messages, defaulting to no attachments, and more, but this number remains steady. Having a large number of unclaimed cards increases paper, balloon, and flower waste and creates extra work for our team.

What We've Changed

We've brainstormed several ways to address these challenges, including putting a cap on the number of messages that can be sent. However, we did not want to limit this. Starting in Spring 2026, Lifted messages will be sent to recipients virtually by default, with the option for recipients to request physical cards with two clicks. Previously, they were sent physically by default, with the option to request virtual cards instead.

Other than that, nothing else significant has changed. If you want physical cards, simply click the link in your You've been Lifted! email to request them, and we'll take care of the rest!

Conclusion

We hope that this is a good compromise that allows us to continue to grow Lifted while also being mindful of our resources and the environment. We will continue to monitor how this change goes and make adjustments as needed in future semesters.

If you have any questions or feedback, you are always welcome to send us an email at lifted@cornell.edu!