A couple of months back I got a call from Peter Mead asking if we could help out a friend.
Her name was Polly Tommey. She ran a magazine called The Autism File and had been given hundreds of 48 sheets free, but didn’t know what to do with them.
She spoke passionately for two hours about the misconceptions, treatments and difficulties related to Autism.
The issues were quite complex and nothing seemed concise enough to translate to poster.
She then told me her dream would be to speak to Gordon Brown about it, because the Government was spending the bulk of their money on short term solutions, drugs mainly, (some children were receiving as much as £700 worth a week).
If Autism sufferers were treated with a broader, longer term view it would not only be better for the sufferers and their relatives, but would actually be cheaper.
‘We could save millions of pounds’
How many millions I enquired?
“Hundreds”.
There’s never been a better time to offer to save the government money.
We decided to use the posters as an open letter to Gordon Brown offering to save him hundreds of millions of pounds.
Let’s not hector or berate him, that’s easy to ignore, let’s be very polite, human and understanding. Like Polly.
Also, let’s not say who it’s from. Then we have an angle to generate PR. ‘Who is this Polly and how is she going to save all that money?’
Well, as you can see Gordon responded.
One thing occurs to me; is there another medium that could make this message so public?
24/7 presence makes it feel like it’s campaigning harder.
Other media may be great at being private and ‘one to one’, but sometimes you need people to know lots of other people are seeing it too.
