For this Memorial Day edition of the Tip Jar, let’s pause for a moment to remember the soldiers who have given their lives so that we may be free.
Now let’s think about how we can use that freedom to make the world a better place. On to this week’s tips and thoughts…
- While I’m here just thinking about making the world a better place, my stepbrother Matthew is actually doing something about it. He’s about to fly off to Chad with Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) to set up a mental health program at one of the refugee camps full of people coming over the border from Darfur. We’re very proud of him, and if you’re as impressed as I am, please consider making a donation to MSF to support him and the work the organization does (when all the other aid organizations pull out of a location for safety reasons, they are often the ones who continue to stay). You can give via the charity badge on the right side of this blog, or if you are reading this via RSS or email, you can link to it here.
- Ed Maibach, Lorien Abroms and Mark Marosits have published their “people and places” framework for understanding how marketing and communications fit into an ecological view of public health. The framework identifies the attributes of people (as individuals, as social networks, and as communities or populations) and places that influence health behaviors and health. You can download it free from BioMed Central.
- If you have $500,000 or so, perhaps you should consider blimp marketing. MarketingSherpa gives the how-tos for using blimps in your marketing campaign (free access to the article ends soon). Imagine the possibilities for obesity prevention campaigns (“don’t be a blimp!”), drug prevention (“there are other ways to get high”) and animal protection (“save the whales!”).
- Did anyone catch the irony in John Edwards charging the taxpayer-funded University of California at Davis $55,000 for a speech about poverty last year? (Somehow Stanford got away with paying only $40,000.) Contrast this with the four members of Congress who decided to try to live on the $21 a week that food stamp recipients receive per person. Congressman Tim Ryan kept a blog during the week, and aside from having his PB&J confiscated by airport security and subsequently succumbing to the temptation of a pork chop and airplane peanuts, succeeded in experiencing at least partial poverty first-hand. Katya calls it “feeling the pain as a form of advocacy.”
- Nancy Schwartz points out New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine’s powerful new PSA for wearing seatbelts. In it he talks about how he lost half his blood, broke 15 bones and nearly died because he was not wearing his seatbelt in his recent crash. It’s a great example of using an effective and credible spokesman. I would love to know whether people who do not always wear their seatbelts find this spot as persuasive as I do.
- In Cocoa Beach, Florida today, lifeguards closed one of the beaches after having to perform 200 rescues in three hours due to strong rip currents. Wouldn’t you think that after about the tenth (50th? 100th?) rescue they would get the idea? This is a metaphor for so many health and social problems, I don’t even know where to start.
- How not to spend your marketing budget: I recently received a bunch of cookies as part of a pitch for PR software. They were lovely cookies, but because they were not kosher I couldn’t eat them (but my cleaning lady’s family sure enjoyed them). That wasn’t the egregious part though. Most of what I do is not public relations, and so PR software is not going to help me much. If they had done a little bit of research on my company, it would have been clear that I was not a good prospect for them. I hate to think of how many boxes of cookies they sent out to completely inappropriate companies. Makes me wonder about the quality of research that went into their PR database.
- Happy birthday to my blog friend Richard Kearns, who just turned 56. He celebrated in his own unique style, riding around town on the Poetry Bus and making stops to read his poems and advocate on behalf of people with AIDS. May you have many many more happy birthdays, Richard!
- And finally, a study that confirms what many of us who do research already suspected.
Photo Credit: seamusdidit
Technorati Tags: marketing, social marketing, doctors without borders, poverty, PR
Nedra helps nonprofits and public agencies create positive change on health and social issues through social marketing and transmedia storytelling strategies at Weinreich Communications since founding the company in 1995. She helps organizations make a difference for the populations they serve by strategically designing programs that draw on state-of-the-art behavior change techniques, digital media approaches and the power of stories. 
Hey Nedra, AWESOME article about lawmakers eating on $21/wk. I’m thinking about how I can turn this into a painting or at least a sketch for my blog.
Thanks, Ashley — I can’t wait to see what you do with it.