New Digital Platform Helps Expands Hospital’s Community Beyond its Physical Walls
MEMPHIS, Tenn., Jan. 23, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Nearly everyone can relate to the mission of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital: Finding cures, Saving children®. Now, ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude, is launching a shareable storytelling platform — St. Jude Inspire — for the families who rely on St. Jude as well as all the millions of people around the world supporting this important and impactful work.
This digital storytelling platform will provide an opportunity to invite new, diverse and younger audiences to join the ever-growing and inclusive St. Jude family by relating stories of the people who make St. Jude so unique and yes, inspiring. That means featuring the children, brave parents, adult survivors, special visitors, and all the generous donors and volunteers — celebrities and people from all walks of life — who make this groundbreaking, life-affirming work possible.
“We want families to know about St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital when they need us the most and for our entire community to spread the powerful message of what St. Jude does. To do this, we are meeting people where they are most engaged: online, on mobile devices, on Instagram,” said Richard Shadyac Jr., President and CEO of ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. “St. Jude Inspire allows us to share in tangible, intimate ways the magic and promise of our world-renowned research hospital.”
With St. Jude Inspire, the Memphis-based research institution and hospital, which freely shares discoveries worldwide, will come to life through great storytelling in words, images, sounds and videos. Virtual visitors will be able to experience for themselves how children can still be children at St. Jude: young patients traveling the halls in red wagons and hearing a parent describe what it means to them that families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food – because all they should worry about is helping their child live.
“Donors today are savvy, connected, and informed,” said Emily Callahan, Chief Marketing & Experience Officer, ALSAC. “We want them to know about the work they’re supporting and to see first-hand the impact their time and donations make in helping to improve the lives of so many children fighting to beat cancer and other life-threatening diseases. St. Jude Inspire is both a celebration of our existing community and an invitation for new communities to join our family.”
Featured stories at launch include Mack, a nine-year-old boy who is learning how to walk following an amputation. “Wait, I’m doing it?!,” he says in the video of his first steps post-surgery. Learn about a tiny Louisiana town, population 12,000 that has raised about $18 million, and counting, for St. Jude, and the man who started it all after losing his own daughter to cancer. And you’ll meet Nick, a young, talented basketball player discovering the rapper within thanks to a new friendship made at St. Jude.
Since 1962, St. Jude, founded by the late entertainer Danny Thomas, has been integral in pushing the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20 percent to 80 percent. The work continues. Over time, St. Jude Inspire is meant to spark conversation, engagement and sharing among new audiences who can help contribute in the fight against childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases.
SOURCE ALSAC/St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
