Lived Experience, Lasting Change: Elevating Cancer Awareness Through Local Voices

In preparation for Blood Cancer Awareness Month 2024, a mission-driven for-profit organization turned to FLEX to lead a national advocacy and communications campaign. The goal was clear: raise awareness about blood cancer through a mix of heartfelt storytelling, coordinated legislative efforts, and media engagement. With advocacy partners already mobilized in five key states, the client needed a firm that could bring structure, creativity, and precision to the campaign’s execution. FLEX stepped in to build and manage the entire initiative from the ground up.

The first step was developing a comprehensive, custom campaign timeline that included critical legislative inflection points and communications milestones. This timeline served as a shared roadmap for all involved—client staff, FLEX's internal team, state-level lobbyists, and issue spokespeople. By giving everyone a single point of alignment, FLEX ensured consistency and clarity across dozens of moving parts.

As lobbyists engaged legislative champions in states across the South, Midwest, and Northeast, FLEX designed an in-depth messaging toolkit customized for each state. This included background research, tailored communications strategies, and talking points that reflected the nuances of each local audience. FLEX also created an integrated communications plan covering media targets, social content strategy, and influencer identification—with an emphasis on individuals who had personal or familial ties to blood cancer.

Over the course of three months, FLEX launched a grassroots outreach effort that leveraged social media and existing networks to identify real people with powerful stories—patients, survivors, family members, and medical professionals—who were willing to become campaign spokespeople. We developed original op-eds, letters to the editor, and social media graphics for each participant, tailoring every piece to reflect their unique voice and perspective. Once finalized, FLEX handled the media pitching process, securing placements with regional news outlets and respected state-level publications.

Our work led to op-eds and letters published in newspapers across states such as Georgia, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Texas, and California. Lawmakers from several of these same states joined the campaign by submitting their own commentary or participating in media opportunities, helping to elevate the conversation at the policy level. This multi-layered campaign not only secured media coverage—it built lasting awareness, drove public engagement, and created a model for how issue advocacy and storytelling can work hand in hand.

By the end of the campaign, FLEX had helped transform a calendar awareness initiative into a coordinated national conversation—one rooted in lived experiences and backed by strategic legislative support. The result was a deeply human, highly visible effort that brought the realities of blood cancer into the spotlight at both the grassroots and government levels.