Horizontal activities include public relations (PR). Lifting The Burden relies on external funding and sponsorships to carry the Global Campaign forward. For this reason alone, communications are essential to raise awareness of the Campaign and reach potential donors. PR communications are managed according to a strategic plan.

Communications plan

The Campaign's whole audience is global and huge. Headache affects 50% of adults in the world and many children. An effective communications plan to reach half the world's population can be achieved only with an extensive network of local delivery agents and significant budgets. It is recognised that reaching the general public on this scale cannot be a primary short-term objective of the communications plan.

Audiences and desired responses

The following are the primary audiences and their desired responses to the Campaign.

Partners:

"We're proud to be involved in this Campaign and excited about what it can achieve."

General public (including 50% of the adult population with headache):

"Headache is not a trivial illness"

and potentially:

"I feel strongly enough about this issue to help the Campaign by making a donation."

Potential sponsors (pharmaceutical companies, and major employers for whom headache absence is a burden):

"It is worth investing in this Campaign."

GPs and other primary-care specialists:

"The work this Campaign is doing has really helped me deliver a better service to my patients with headache."

Governments and health-care policy-makers:

"Headache is a serious health issue. We should make efforts to try to alleviate the burden of headache."

PR objectives

in the short term (6 months to 1 year):

• to excite partner organisations about the Campaign;
• to publicise selected activities in relevant countries in order to raise awareness of the Campaign;
• to establish contacts in target countries who can undertake local PR activities;
• to identify and approach case studies for use in media work;

and in the longer term (beyond the 1^st year):

• to establish a global PR campaign with local delivery agents and central control to deliver the desired reach and awareness;
• to maintain an effective internal communications plan that informs, engages and excites all partners and other internal audiences.

PR strategy

Lifting The Burden will achieve these objectives by focusing on internal audiences in the short term and by using selected media relations tactics to begin the process of raising awareness of the Global Campaign externally.

PR tactics

Explanatory materials for various audiences - the stakeholders in the Global Campaign, sponsors and potential sponsors and the media - include WHO's Fact sheet on headache disorders [reference 1] and the "blue book" [reference 2].

These materials and others, printed or electronic, will be produced in the Campaign's priority languages: Arabic, Bengali, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi/Urdu, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Awareness initiatives include this website, where all materials are posted.

PR messages

The overarching message is:

The Global Campaign's central purpose is to bring better health care to people with headache, thereby reducing the burden of headache worldwide.

The two key secondary messages and their supporting arguments are:

Headache is common and disabling the world over:

• an estimated 10-15% of people worldwide have migraine;
• migraine is the cause of an estimated 400,000 lost days from work or school each year per million of the population in developed countries;
• about half of all adults in the world have recent personal experience (in the last year) of a headache disorder;
• other headache disorders are, collectively, responsible for even larger losses than migraine;

and:

Effective treatments for headache exist, but do not reach most people who need them:

• people with headache are unaware of these treatments;
• doctors and health-care providers do not offer them;
• governments do not support systems to provide them.

These messages form the core of all communications with all audiences and cannot be repeated too often.

References

1. World Health Organization. Headache disorders. Fact sheet no. 277. Geneva: WHO 2004.

2. World Health Organization. Headache disorders and public health. Geneva: WHO, 2000.

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