Winner
GolinHarris and International Kids Fund: A New Face for Lai

The International Kids Fund (IKF), a Miami-based nonprofit that relies solely on community donations and is dedicated to helping children overcome serious illnesses, hired GolinHarris to build awareness of Lai Thi Dao, a Vietnamese teenager living with a schwannoma tumor that covered most of her face. Golin was tasked with creating an effort to raise money for Lai's medical costs (about $107,000), to increase awareness of IKF in South Florida, and to engage the general market media – something that IKF had never been able to do.
 
The team sought to target both South Florida residents and potential new donors throughout the nation with national media relations efforts. Through research, Golin found that IKF didn't have a presence in South Florida's English-language outlets. With this, it identified the opportunity to leverage existing loyal media outlets and introduce others to IKF's work.
 
The team worked with the nonprofit to learn more about Lai and her journey to IKF. It also conducted pre-interviews with her family and doctors. Through those conversations, the team learned that Lai's doctors did not know how to help her and that a missionary in Lai's village contacted her brother in the US to get in touch with various organizations that might want to help. She was denied assistance because of the complexity of her surgery, but IKF eagerly took on the challenge of helping Lai get back to a healthy life.
 
Golin utilized this information to leverage Lai's story as an example of IKF's work around the world and position it as an organization dedicated to saving children who suffer from life-threatening conditions. The team organized and implemented a fundraising effort that launched with a press conference. It then contacted several media contacts, like the AP and every daily and TV broadcast station in the market. The first conference landed IKF coverage in English- and Spanish-language networks across the US, one of the IKF's major goals. Golin hosted two additional press conferences – one just days after Lai's surgery, the other months later to unveil her new face.
 
Golin's strategy proved successful, as IKF raised more than $500,000 – four times what was needed to pay for Lai's first procedure and any subsequent medical operations. IKF also reported a record 4,383 new donors. More than a dozen media outlets attended each press conference and a new CBS show called The Doctors took interest and documented Lai's journey during and after surgery.

The judges admired this campaign for its amazing results and how it was executed. “The campaign retained Lai's dignity and didn't make her a character,” noted one judge. Another called it “a textbook example of how to use PR to champion change.”

Honorable Mention
Fleishman-Hillard and AT&T: Rocking the Vote: Engaging Youth in the Election Process

AT&T and Rock the Vote (RTV) capitalized on the 2008 election, and its importance for youth, by hiring Fleishman-Hillard to create a series of online, grassroots, and interactive mobile campaigns to urge youth to use their wireless phones. AT&T set a goal of registering 2 million young people to vote, so Fleishman created a program for customers of any carrier, not just AT&T. They built a text alert system that sent surveys, convention updates, and reminders via text message. It also enlisted teens to blog and vlog from the campaign trail and to report from the national conventions using AT&T handsets. That content was later posted on RTV's Web site. AT&T also sponsored a concert to note RTV's Democratic National Convention presence, where attendees could text their thoughts and stream them in-venue. RTV registered 2.3 million voters. A judge called it a “tremendous use of digital media.”

Finalists

• Fleishman-Hillard and AT&T: Rocking the Vote: Engaging Youth in the Election Process
• GolinHarris and International Kids Fund: A New Face for Lai
• Oasis and Honeywell: FMA Live!
• Nyhus Communications/Porter Novelli/DDB and PRR and Seeds of Compassion: A Five-Day Gathering with the Dalai Lama in Seattle
• Weber Shandwick and US Army: Army Grassroots Initiative