Seohyun Birthday Project Summary
Seohyun's birthday project was first planned in mid-February and we are proud to announce that it is finally done! Our project has officially come to an end on Seohyun's birthday, and as promised, here is a summary on the donations and the message book!
Part 1: Donations
For the first part of our project, we asked fans to donate to UNICEF, an honorable foundation that has a special meaning for Seohyun and Seomates. Our initial goal was to cover the amounts of 3 gift packages which cost approximately $150. We were genuinely surprised to see the generous donations from fans. In fact, we exceeded our goal over 3 times, raising above $500 in total!
We'd like to sincerely thank each and every person who donated to our project! As a result of your charitable donations, we were able to purchase:
2 "Story Books For Happy Endings" packages - 16 story books will go to schools, children's centers, and families in countries around the world.
2 "Measles Vaccines to Protect 100 Children" - 200 children will get vaccinated from a preventable disease that kills hundreds of children on a daily basis.
2 "Emergency School Kits" - notebooks, pencils, story books and other supplies will be provided to children that have suffered from the chaos of natural disasters or war.
We were also able to choose a 4th package that was initially not part of our plans, the "School-in-a-box" kit! This package includes a blackboard, exercise books, teaching posters, pencils and much more that will be sent to a school in need!
Lastly, we chose and notified the winners of our raffle that people were automatically entered into when they donated. (We are sorry we didn't announce the winners via our twitter/tumblr, but we didn't want to announce their real names or email addresses without their consent). Eventually, the prizes were ready to go and mailed out!
We are so grateful and proud to have exceeded our goal and it is all thanks to the participation of our very kind donors. Thank you for making the first part of our project such a success!
Part 2: Message Book
The second part of our project consisted of sending Seohyun a meaningful message book filled with handwritten letters from fans from all over the world. Our aim was to collect as many postcards from a variety of different countries so that Seohyun would know she was appreciated far and wide. The "United Nations of Seomates" was thus created to show our international unity as Seomates. To make it even more special, we decided to add a "passport" portion that would be attached to each postcard in order for Seohyun to learn more about the fans that sent in messages! Furthermore, we asked fans to give us interesting facts about their countries, because we thought Seohyun would definitely appreciate the fun trivia. With our never ending prodding, we finally managed to collect over 40 postcards and passports!
At first, we received very few postcards in the mail... It wasn't much, but we were ecstatic anyways!
As the days passed, more and more continued to arrive, and before we knew it, we had received over 30 from a variety of countries!
The deadline came on May 4th and look at all the postcards that piled up!
Once the deadline was over, it was time to get the passports printed and assemble all the postcards together! Everything had to be hole-punched twice in order for the rings to go through. It was a long task considering the amount of postcards, passports and pages we had.
Afterwards, the passports had to be cut down to size and added in behind every postcard. For those who opted out of submitting a selca, a Keroro picture was used as the passport picture (because we all know our maknae's love for Keroro!). Here are two passport examples:
With everything added in, including intro pages, country facts, postcards and passports, this is what the message book looked like:
The cover of the message book:
An envelope on the back side of the front cover was included with the official UNICEF certificate. We also included a short letter to Seohyun explaining why we chose UNICEF and its packages.
Here are a few pictures of the introductory and country facts pages:
And finally, the back cover of the message book:
This is how thick it ended up!
With the message book finally complete, all that was left to do was pack it and ship it off to Korea! We placed it into a box and wrapped it with pink paper and ribbon (Tiffany would approve!) Afterwards, we placed the box in a shipping box and it was ready to be sent off to Korea. We have received confirmation that our package has safely arrived on June 21st. ^^ The package has been delivered to Seohyun by a korean fansite!
We have officially completed our very first project as Seolely Juhyun! Thank you so much to everyone who donated and took the time to participate. Without your help, this project would be nothing. We are extremely grateful for all the support and love we received from so many and we hope to come back with even better projects in the future for Seohyun! Thank you again! ^^
Seolely Juhyun
(Leda, Mari, Melody & Joey)
