Medical Team: Promotion

Okay, so you’ve got a team of US doctors and nurses on the way, and have also negotiated having 4 Indian physicians to showing up for a one day health camp as well. How do you get the word out? Well, immediately, I start thinking of all the things Kem Meyer would say (and then I look reverently at my W.W.K.D bracelet and chant a little mantra about Google vs. Yahoo), but in the absence of Web strategies, Wired Churches workshops, News Releases and the Blogosphere, not to mention all the other cool things that we at GCC and our Comms Dept do so well, I thought I would show you how we do it here in India.

Step #1: Poster Bills
You get the critical information that you need and have hundreds of 18”x24” “bills” printed at a local printer. Then you soak said bills in a watery glue solution, and go to find every available square footage of surface in the surrounding village. Once you find a highly visible section of facing, you smack the glue-soaked bill onto it. Find another section somewhere else. Repeat. You should watch out for sections of space that say “post no bills”, because if you post there, you can be fined by local police or building owners. The odd thing is that the “post no bills” signs look worse, generally, than the bills themselves, but that’s probably not for me to say. Pictured here is actually a house where one of our little bills was smacked. Close-up also attached.

Step #2: Mobile Megaphone
Hire a local auto-rickshaw and then rig it with a makeshift, battery-powered megaphone system. Add music and a nifty jingle about the benefits of health camps, where the health camp will be, and all other relevant details, and then send the rickshaw throughout the entire area of more than 3,000 people.

Step #3: Await the Masses
Having accomplished the above two steps, people will most assuredly show up. Seriously. We expect to have some 200+ people come to the Health Camp tomorrow. Guess we’ll see.