Day Eight: Media Planning

Media advocacy is critically important in the field of human rights. Today, several members of our team met with a leading NGO that works on cancer issues, and spoke with them directly about their communications and media strategies. The NGO is currently involved in litigation against a big pharmaceutical company, and is looking for ways to spread their message through the media.

Our team focused on press outreach, and provided some suggestions for how the NGO could reach certain international and major U.S.-based publications and news outlets. We also discussed the possibility of placing an op-ed, and perhaps engaging an international grassroots (or “netroots”) base with some simple messaging. It was a fruitful meeting that yielded more work, for certain, but also very energetic ideas.

Other members of the team attended a meeting on corruption in the medical professional field, which is an issue that ties into the project on prison conditions. Numerous former inmates that we interviewed talked about how bad the medical services were in prison, both in terms of quality (how doctors treated patients), and specifically quantity (the ratio of doctors to prisons, which we’ve been told is approximately 250 inmates to one doctor).

Of course, no day would be complete without making a dozen (or more) phone calls to individuals and organizations, trying to set up meetings for later in the week. The team successfully scheduled about eight meetings with organizations and professionals for the following five days.