Objective

Every 6 minutes someone in the US is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD). That’s 90,000 new people a year in addition to the one million people currently living with the disease. We also know that many of these people are unable to see a specialist in the disease, whether that’s because of how far they live from a specialist, how hard it is to get appointments, or a wide range of other reasons. So we know just how important it is for them to learn important information about this neurodegenerative disease. April is Parkinson’s Awareness Month, so this is the best time of year to get everyone talking about PD. This year, we had a grant from Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma America to help us reach new and diverse audiences with helpful information about Parkinson’s disease. Our objectives were as follows:

•           Raise Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Parkinson’s Foundation awareness

•           Drive visits to Parkinson.org/Awareness

•           Push people to engage with #ABCsOfPD on social media

•           Reach more Spanish speakers

Strategy

We decided on the theme, ABCs of PD, for Parkinson’s Awareness Month because it would allow us to tell the story of Parkinson’s disease in 26 bite-sized pieces. Each letter represented a different aspect of PD with a definition, so we could showcase some of the lesser-known issues related to the disease, like anxiety or vertigo. We used our Google search terms, top pages and feedback from our Helpline to curate the list. We made sure that each letter had a corresponding webpage with additional information so people could easily learn about the disease. Once our English ABCs was solidified, we began on Spanish. This proved more challenging than expected because the translated words didn’t always start with the same letter, or didn’t have additional content pages. We wanted to make sure that the Spanish ABCs were representative of information our Spanish-speaking audience was searching for. So tweaks were made to complete the ABCs in Spanish.

Then, we planned our strategy for reaching new and diverse audiences. With the average age of diagnosis of Parkinson’s being 64, reaching people offline and online are equally important. To do both, we developed collateral that could be used in many different ways. We created a worksheet flyer in English and Spanish that included the ABCs and definitions on one side, with the back being a blank worksheet where people could fill in the ABCs that they personally are experiencing. We wanted people to make the ABCs their own. This was posted on our landing page for people to download and was sent to all staff and constituents to print and use at local events.

Knowing that this is a time of year that people with Parkinson’s feel inspired to do more, we created toolkits to help make it easy for them. Our toolkits, in English and Spanish, included a template Proclamation to honor April as Parkinson’s Awareness Month, pre-written social media posts with downloadable graphics, an email blurb and other streamlined ways to get involved.

Next, we built our Awareness Month landing page to highlight the ABCs and how to get involved. We wanted all traffic to be directed to this page to centralize the campaign. With this singular call to action it made all promotion much easier and more streamlined. We also created fun flip cards on the landing page which featured the letter on one side and the definition on the other. We also posted links to the aforementioned toolkits so anyone who wanted to do even more, could easily find out how.

With the collateral set, we planned our promotions. For our non-digital audience, we ran a TV media tour, radio media tour, mailed physical copies of our newsletter, and had staff host grassroots events. For our digital friends, we posted daily on current social media to our existing audience and ran digital ads campaigns on new and existing platforms to attract new audiences to the Foundation. We also kicked off the month with ringing the closing bell at Nasdaq!

Results

This was our most successful Parkinson’s Awareness Month campaign to date. Our audience loved the theme and really made it their own. Here are some top highlights:

Website

• Landing page - more than 85,000 pageviews.
• #ABCsOfPD worksheet - 1,500 downloads
• Toolkit - more than 500 clicks  
• Social media toolkit - over 1,100 pageviews 

Media

• Media Tour – 41 interviews
• 3,434 digital, broadcast and radio placements
• Ad value of $1,059,963
• Audience of more than 26 million

Organic Social Media

• Social media pages - more than 30,000 new followers
• 185 unique posts (not counting Spanish!), which earned 924,2300 unique impressions.
• Average engagement rate was 4.6% -(higher than the engagement rates over the last 3 months and higher than PAM 2023!)
• Hashtag #ABCsOfPD, was used more than 1,000 times across platforms. 

Paid Digital Ads

• • • • 7,073,129 impressions 
      • 501,817 video views 
      • 87,659 clicks to the website 
      • A strong 1.25% CTR across channels 
      • 182 post comments 
      • 623 post shares 
      • Although driving revenue was not a primary goal, these ads drove at least 36 donations with a total revenue of $2,627.20 and average donation size of $72.98.

Aside from the numbers, we received photos of people across the country hosting bingo games with our letters, making banners, sharing their own ABCs, etc. The Parkinson’s community was truly engaged in this campaign, more so than we can fit in the word count here, and we are so proud to see how much information we could share with this group. Our full results report is uploaded as a link.

Media