Giving voice to the vulnerable—that’s at the very core of advocacy. And that’s something I found to be my calling when I embarked on my first advocacy campaign.
I was asked to find people to sign up for the National Marrow Donor Program. A blood bank contacted me with an urgent need—a young child needed a bone marrow transplant right away. The child was already in intensive care, his life hanging in the balance. In short, we had only days to help the blood bank gain the most exposure it could to raise the odds of securing a match.
My team and I immediately began identifying people who might sign up for the program. Then we had to figure out ways to reach them in a way that would resonate and incite action. While our goal was to communicate the message that signing up for the registry could save this child’s life, we also wanted to build community with the message. We wanted people to begin to feel a sense of contributing to a greater good. We wanted them to feel that they were also potentially improving the quality of life for neighbors and for other people nationwide who they might not even know.
Now, this all happened in those archaic days before social media, so we had to rely on phone calls, fax machines and other Jurassic means to make it all happen. But, in less than a week, we put together a regional campaign that helped the registry achieve a one-day signup larger than the accumulated total of signups it had seen in the 10 years prior.
These days, according to U.S. News & World Report, the likelihood of someone finding a suitable match through the National Marrow Donor Program is as high as 99 percent. In 2014, according to U.S. News, the program has banked some 11 million potential bone marrow donors.
Helping businesses bring attention to issues of great importance has been a passion for my firm, Moore Communications Group. By using the tools and resources of public relations, marketing, advertising, grassroots/grasstops engagement, and one of the strongest tools in our kit—advocacy.