The Anthony Nolan 3000 Lives Campaign
On the night of the UK AMA, our PR team was there to jumpstart a campaign for the Anthony Nolan Trust Foundation.
Anthony Nolan is a charity helping people in need of bone marrow transplant to find suitable donors. They are doing a great job, constantly saving lives and raising awareness of the importance of becoming a potential donor, by joining their database. That’s where we came in: as it turns out, white people have a 90% chance of finding a donor while if you’re Indian, you only have a 40% chance. To complicate matters further, many seem to have got it in their heads that donating bone marrow is a life-threatening process involving pain and unnerving volumes of blood splattered all over the operation room. That is utter malarkey, of course: the only intrusion is in the lower back, it’s all absolutely painless and it will leave the donor with a mere bandaid and mild itching for a couple of days. A small price to pay for saving a life and virtually restoring your karma to the peaking levels it was at when you were an innocent child, as opposed to the rampant and callous sinner you are now.
The first step toward that goal is to spit in a tube and complete a form. No knowledge of advanced calculus, algebra or space science needed. Once deemed acceptable to donate your marrow, you will be a member of the register they use to search for matches. The probability of finding a match is highest within one’s own ethnic group, which is why we need to get at least 3000 Indians registered before this campaign is over.
We figured that if we get celebrities to hold boards with “call to action” messages written on them, that would convince people to join the database and save lives. It’s weird how it works – apparently many of us don’t have enough sense to do stuff on our personal accords, but when our favourite singer or actor tells us anything, we’re hooked. So we did that.
We’ll launch a website soon with all the celebrity pictures, quotes and everything. Until then, here’s a few useful links you might want to check out:
People who are registered and feel really good about themselves
