3. Promote Your Café

Register your Cosmic Café

1.Select a name, time, and place.

  • It’s fun to come up with a catchy, playful name for your café. Try for something clever and memorable!
  • Science Cafés tend to be held in the evenings during the week, but can also be held on weekend afternoons. Unless you are dealing with an already-established group, avoid Friday evenings, Saturdays, and Sunday mornings.
  • Pick a venue that people are excited to visit and invite their friends to. Typical venues for science education events, such as science centers or lecture halls, often do not make the best meeting spots for Science Cafés. An unconventional venue is an important part of the atmosphere for the overall event and will reach new audiences.
  • Go where your audience already congregates naturally. Science Cafés have been held in pubs, coffeehouses, bookstores, restaurants, art galleries, malls, and even bowling alleys.

2. Put your Cosmic Café on the map by emailing us

Spread the word

1.Tips for promoting your café

2. Post this customizable Cosmic Café-specific flyer on bulletin boards, etc.

3. Send this press release describing a Cosmic Café and the Cosmic Café topics to local media.

4. Use the Cosmic Café specific messages (below)for electronic media and print-calendar listings.

Electronic and Social Media Messages for Cosmic Cafés

Time to send last-minute reminders, and electronic media is a quick way to reach a lot of people.

For more information on using E-mail, List serves, Blogs, E-newsletters, Facebook, Twitter, Meetup.com, and Foursquare to reach folks potentially interested in your café, download “Promote Your Cosmic Café Using Print and Electronic Media."

1. Catchy Openers

Time

  • Maybe you know what time it is, but do you know what time is?
  • Are we living in the past, present, and future all at the same time?
  • Can you slow down time by speeding up?

Space

  • What if the “emptiness” of space is actually something?
  • What will the view from Earth be like in 20 billion years?
  • How do you make sense of something that looks like nothing?

Quantum

  • Are the all secrets of the universe hidden within the atoms in your body?
  • Teleportation is here. Small detail: you’ll have to be destroyed to be transported.
  • Quantum physics: making phones smarter, computers faster, and medical scans clearer.

Multiverse

  • Multiple universes: science or philosophy?
  • We are not alone. Our universe may be just one of many.
  • Is alternate reality actual reality?

2. Text to round out a posting

  • Make sure any promotional message includes the café date, time, and location, as well the topic.
  • Explore the surprising, evolving story of two concepts we’re all familiar with—space and time. NOVA’s four-part The Fabric of the Cosmos series uses space and time as windows on the epic quest to understand how the universe (and the atoms in your body) really works. Come to our cosmic café to learn how scientists have discovered a world more fantastic than our senses alone could perceive.