More than 2,300,000 people around the world are living with Multiple Sclerosis. As yet, there’s no cure. Because symptoms of MS vary hugely and are often invisible, raising awareness of the condition is a challenge.
Each year on World MS Day, MSIF brings its member organisations across the globe together to share stories, raise awareness and campaign for change. For the last three years I’ve been part of the team that reimagines the World MS Day campaign, bringing an invisible disease into full focus.
A global campaign requires some careful strategic thought. It needs to resonate in cultures right across the world. The messaging needs to translate effectively. And in this case, all MSIF’s member organisations needed to be able to take part, no matter their size or level of resources.
For World MS Day 2015 I came up with the campaign message ‘together we’re stronger than MS’, to celebrate the incredible strength in the MS community. The campaign invited people to say thank you to those that give them strength to face their MS day after day.
My design partner Becky illustrated animals from different parts of the globe that find their strength in numbers. Together we created a campaign toolkit of digital thank you cards, web banners, posters, postcards and ways to take part in World MS Day.
The World MS Day campaign touched the MS community in 88 countries around the world in 2015. On Twitter, the campaign reached 16.4 million users in English alone.
The campaign message, ‘together we’re stronger than MS’, was warmly embraced, and the social media hashtag #strongerthanMS continued to be used after World MS Day, so MSIF decided to reuse it for the 2016 campaign.
We were honoured at Neo when MSIF invited us to partner with them long-term to create the 2016 and 2017 World MS Day campaigns.
*I worked on this campaign as part of a brilliant team at Neo.
Rosy Creative 