Subject: Seeking your advice for Darwin Day Celebration worldwide

From: "R.Stephens" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 03:49:34 +0000

Dear INININ,

As a Darwin Day friend and supporter you will be interested to hear that we have now completed a very successful Celebration of Science and Humanity on Charles Darwin's 196th birthday, Feb. 12, 2005.  For instance, 143 EVENTS in 13 different countries were registered on our Website and they represent many thousands of participants!

Nevertheless, that's just the beginning -- we have an ALL NEW website <http://www.DarwinDay.org> and you are personally invited to examine it and send us any comments that you think would improve its appeal for promoting our cause.  In addition, according to the web site MSN, we are 'linked to' by over 1200 other websites, a major feat for a site such as ours.

Perhaps the best news, however, is that during the past three months we have been improving the automated features of our Website so that we can greatly expand our outreach efforts this coming fall to include many more universities, museums, libraries, educators, professional scientists, and science enthusiasts everywhere.  Importantly we will also include notifying a large number of print and electronic media outlets with the hope of attracting their attention.

We are also very hopeful that our website will be available in additional languages before the end of 2005.  This reminds me that we are eager to identify appropriate individuals or groups in other countries who would be willing to cooperate with us by taking the responsibility to promote Darwin Day in their own country by translating our website, which we will then make available, on our website, for them to use in their promotional efforts.

We have 4 years left to build our project into a truly International Celebration and we here at DarwinDay.org are committed to making significant progress every year.  To do this we would like to ask for a little marketing assistance from you.  Here are 4 things that we believe would not take much of your time and that would help us immensely in accomplishing our ambitious goal.  Can you suggest other actions?

1. We will be making our first announcement about the upcoming 2006 Darwin Day Celebration about the second week in October 2005 via an automated emailing to many thousands of potential participants -- particularly science teachers.  This will give them plenty of lead time to develop their own Celebrations.  We would appreciate it greatly if you would permit us to use your name or signature as a Darwin Day Advisor on such announcements for 2006.  Would you permit us to use your name in this manner?

2. It would be of great value to us if you would write a brief Statement, Paragraph or Essay about Darwin Day, and the importance of celebrating Science and Humanity, over your signature so that we could use it on our website and for publicity.  Would you be willing to do this?

3. If you can help us identify appropriate individuals or groups in non-English speaking countries that we could contact to assist us in those countries specifically, by translating the DarwinDay site into their language and by helping us with correspondence in their language, this would be very helpful in our efforts to become multilingual.  If you can send us names to contact, we will take it from there.

4. Finally, I would like to know if you would be so kind as to be available to answer inquiries about Darwin Day from the press during next years celebration, should we need to refer them to you?

If you are able to participate in one or more of these items we will be very pleased.  With your assistance we believe we can make a 10 fold increase in the number of Darwin Day Events each year leading up to a Grand Global Celebration on Darwin's bicentennial birthday in 2009.

Sincerely yours,

Robert J. (Bob) Stephens, Ph.D.
President, Darwin Day Celebration