Original Sharewell research · 2026 edition

How people build group cards together

Original, privacy-safe aggregate findings about group card participation on Sharewell from 1 January through 30 June 2026.

Published by Sharewell Research on 24 July 2026. Analysis period: 1 January–30 June 2026. Next scheduled review: January 2027.
Headline findings

The typical active card received 12 messages

Across 2,201 eligible cards, 1,593 received at least one valid contribution. Among those active cards, the median was 12 messages and the mean was 14.5.

12median messages per active cardn = 1,593 active cards
0.5 hrmedian time to first contributionn = 1,593 active cards
15.7%of valid messages included a photo3,622 of 23,108 messages
Participation depth

Most active cards moved beyond a handful of signatures

The 90th-percentile active card received 30 messages. To keep abandoned creations visible in the analysis, the table also reports message counts across every eligible card, including cards with zero contributions.

MeasureValuePopulation
Eligible cards2,201Non-deleted cards created in the analysis period
Cards with at least one contribution1,593 (72.4%)Eligible cards
Valid messages23,108Non-deleted messages posted on or after card creation
Mean / median messages per created card10.5 / 8All eligible cards, including zero-message cards
Mean / median messages per active card14.5 / 12Cards with at least one valid message
90th percentile, active cards30Cards with at least one valid message
Median / 75th percentile time to first contribution0.5 / 8.9 hoursCards with at least one valid message
Messages containing a photo3,622 (15.7%)Valid messages
Occasion mix

Farewell, retirement, and birthday cards led named occasions

Occasion labels are user-entered and multilingual, so they were grouped with a documented keyword mapping. Categories with fewer than 25 cards were combined into one suppressed row.

Occasion groupCardsShare
Other or unspecified70432%
Farewell and retirement69831.7%
Birthday52523.9%
Thank-you1195.4%
Get well773.5%
Sympathy452%
Suppressed small cohorts331.5%
Methodology

Designed for citation without exposing a single card

The query logic is reproducible in the Sharewell codebase. This public page contains aggregate outputs only.

Population and window

All 2,201 cards created from 1 January through 30 June 2026 with no deletion timestamp. The fixed completed window avoids partial-month reporting.

Valid contributions

Messages marked deleted were excluded. A message also had to be posted on or after its card’s creation and before 1 July 2026. 0 records failed the timestamp rule.

Privacy threshold

No raw messages, images, card titles, recipient names, organizer details, emails, IP addresses, or IDs were extracted. Occasion cohorts below 25 cards were suppressed and combined.

Time to first contribution

Elapsed hours from card creation to the earliest valid message. This measure uses 1,593 active cards and excludes cards with no contribution.

Photo rate

A message counted as photo-bearing when either its standard or high-resolution image field was present. The analysis inspected field presence only, never image content.

Reminder impact

Not estimated. No randomized or otherwise causal comparison was available in the period. Sharewell will not label an observational difference as a reminder effect.

Quality, bias, and reconciliation

What these numbers do—and do not—represent

Selection bias

This is a descriptive census of eligible Sharewell records, not a representative survey of every group card created online. People who choose Sharewell may differ from other card makers.

Free-text occasions

Occasion values can be missing, custom, or written in English, French, and Spanish. The “Other or unspecified” group is therefore large and should not be interpreted as one occasion.

Public-counter difference

Before 1 July, the operational counters contained 10,607 stored cards and 118,112 stored messages. Index totals are lower because they use a six-month window and deletion/validity rules.

Snapshot generated 24 July 2026. There were 3 eligible cards with a missing occasion value. Three occasion cohorts totaling 33 cards were below the publication threshold.

Press summary

A short, citation-ready summary

Sharewell Group Card Index 2026: In a privacy-safe analysis of 2,201 non-deleted group cards created from January through June 2026, the median active card received 12 messages. The median first contribution arrived within 0.5 hour, and 15.7% of 23,108 valid messages included a photo. Sharewell published aggregate results only and suppressed occasion cohorts smaller than 25 cards.

Attribution: Sharewell Group Card Index 2026, published by Sharewell Research, 24 July 2026. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 with attribution.

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