Parkinsons Awareness Week is an annual campaign run by Parkinsons UK to change public attitudes towards people living with the condition. This year, the charity wanted to encourage people to Up Your Friendly and pledge to do small acts of kindness thatll make a big difference to people with Parkinsons. For the fourth consecutive year, markettiers4dc were tasked with maximising TV and radio coverage with additional audio to boost opportunities throughout the UK.
Research uncovered that an estimated 69,000 people in the UK with Parkinson’s have experienced hostility and rudeness from members of the public. This provided a strong news line for media and working in tandem with Parkinson’s UK, six Parkinson’s spokespeople, including CEO Steve Ford and President Jane Asher, Sky Sports presenter Dave Clark and numerous case studies from across the UK were made available for opportunities. Having regional voices to support the story proved invaluable in terms of contributing to the campaign’s success. Early morning interviews with BBC Breakfast, Good Morning Britain, BBC 5 Live, BBC London and BBC Scotland marked the start of a busy schedule of interviews across a multitude of national and regional TV and radio outlets. This included ITV Lunchtime News, Sky News Radio, ITV Central, BBC Midlands Today, ITV Granada, London Live, and 29 regional BBC stations.
In excess of 220 opportunities were secured for the campaign ensuring that Parkinson’s UK dominated the news agenda both on launch day and beyond and created noise around the issue, educating the public on the signs and symptoms of Parkinson’s.
“This is the fourth time that we have used markettiers4dc to help us with our biggest awareness campaign of the year. Using markettiers4dc always feels like we are in safe hands, and communications between agency staff and our media team works very well. They really understand the importance of treating our media case studies, who are people living with Parkinson’s, with sensitivity, and work hard to ensure we get a packed media schedule for our spokespeople. This year was no exception. Despite the very early Monday morning start, everything ran like clockwork, and the professionalism and attention to detail never faded.”
Jill Davis, Fundraising PR Manager, Parkinson’s UK