NonProfit PR Awards: Advocacy Campaign & Lobbying: >$50,000 Budget

Campaign: Do It Now Challenge

Winner: R/P Marketing PR & Second Chance Trust Fund/Donate Life Ohio

Second Chance Trust Fund/Donate Life Ohio tapped R/P Marketing Public Relations to increase Ohio residents’ awareness of the need for organ/tissue donor registration. Over a two-year period, the team rolled out the “Do It Now!” Challenge, targeting students at the 30 colleges and universities throughout Ohio.

Such a massive target audience was a blessing and a curse for the team members, who needed to mobilize college students to become ambassadors for organ and tissue donation. The “Do It Now!” theme was designed to push them to proactively seek out the opportunity to register.

Designed as a competition to bring together approximately 15 colleges strategically located throughout the state, the program pitted students against each other to see who would be the most successful in increasing the number of registered donors in their region. Executed over the course of two academic school years, each student team was treated as an “agency” hired by Donate Life Ohio to bring the campaign to life. As a result, each school was empowered to plan and execute their own activities, which included 5K runs, balloon launches, flash mobs in the centers of campuses, YouTube videos and Lunch ‘n Learns.

Thanks to the team’s strategy of creating pockets of advocates who could lead their own efforts, the campaign’s results were far-reaching. The goal of adding 480,000 new donors to the registry over the two-year period was surpassed, with a total of 500,182 new organ and tissue donor registrations.

Honorable Mentions:

American Society of Civil Engineers: 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure—The ASCE designed the report card to educate policy leaders and the public on the deteriorating condition of the nation’s infrastructure, and to offer solutions for improvement. The user-friendly report card format stimulated discussion of the issue and resulted in an estimated $2 million in publicity value.

Coalition to Support Medical Research: Research Means Hope—In late 2008, the CSMR developed new advocacy strategies to achieve sustained growth in the NIH budget. Traditional and online media outreach prompted the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees to approve bills with a collective increase of more than $1 billion for NIH.

Impact Public Affairs & The Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science: Canada’s Medical Laboratory Professionals: Taking our Place as Partners in Health Care—The team advocated to help integrate internationally educated medical pros into the Canadian workforce, which led the federal minister of finance to provide $50 million for a national foreign credential recognition framework.

November 9, 2009