November 28, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
To grab people’s attention during the competitive holiday fund-raising season, Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy, in Hackensack, N.J., hopes that it’s found the right way to tell a compelling story.
The charity says supporters respond better to kids and families telling their stories about living and coping with Duchenne, a form of muscular dystrophy that affects children. So in the hopes of putting more children directly in touch with potential supporters, the charity managed to attract donated services from Fotobabble—a Berkeley, Calif., startup company whose technology allows people to add a voice to photographic images.
The charity’s “One Voice” campaign encourages supporters to create an online vocal postcard to ask friends and others to give.
Parents of children with the disease and other supporters can upload a photo to the company’s Web site and record a short solicitation message from their child (or anybody else) using their computer’s microphone. They can share the appeal with their friends through Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks—and encourage others to make their own vocal postcard.
The audible postcards are part of year-end fund-raising effort in which 10,000 direct-mail appeals and 10,000 e-mails are being sent to urge recipients to make their own audio postcard.
“This provides a technology that’s much more personal,” says Will Nolan, the charity’s director of communications. “We hope this will reach a tier of donors we haven’t reached before.”
The group’s goal with the online postcards, he adds, is to raise $100,000.
The 16-year-old charity will use the money to help pay for cardiac research into the disease. At least six youngsters with Duchenne whose families are involved with Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy died from heart-related complications this year.
“We want to share the voices of the kids who have these diseases,” Mr. Nolan says. “Nothing beats hearing from kids themselves. It’s not coming from the organization a person may not know. It’s coming from a kid that they know.”
