For charities and causes, public awareness is important. Not only does it raise its’ profile, but also help to garner support for sponsorship and participation. Communications is a key driver for generating public recognition, engaging with supporters, and moving them on a personal level instead of simply reaching out to the masses.

Huntington just wrapped up a successful 24th edition of Run For Hope, National Cancer Centre Singapore’s annual awareness campaign and fundraiser for its Research Fund. Here’s how we pulled off a five-month communications campaign that garnered close to 10,000 runners and volunteers for the run.

1. Setting clear objectives

We set out with a main goal of garnering participation for the run. With that in mind, we also looked at the core demographics of past year’s run, and honed in on it to create a strategy that could reach our supportive runners, as well as new demographic groups that we could potentially connect with.

2. The virtue of patients

Cancer is not unknown — in Singapore, approximately 37 people are diagnosed with cancer everyday. However, we needed the public to have an emotional connection with the run, especially when its cause is focused on cancer research. This is where our survivor ambassadors came in. Their stories helped reinforce the message of hope, and that cancer is not a death sentence. This is also the driving force behind cancer research — to increase survival rates through earlier diagnosis and alternative treatments for patients.

3. Having authentic ambassadors

Many causes and charities in Singapore tap on influencers to expand their reach and to engage with millennials. While it’s not wrong to use their social media star power, we wanted to make sure that we were engaging with the right influencers. To do so, our key criterion was whether the personalities either have a cancer story of their own to share or if they believed in the cancer research cause — not their number of followers on Instagram or Facebook.