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National Summit on Africa
Working with the National Summit on Africa, Hager Sharp boosted Summit attendance, raised media awareness, generated national and international media coverage and positioned Africa-U.S. policy as a crucial policy and business issue.
Our Client's Challenge:
Africa Matters. Hager Sharp worked with the National Summit on Africa to spread that two-word, yet multi-dimensional, message and boost attendance of the final international conference in Washington, DC. The challenge was multi-fold: boost attendance, create media awareness, generate national and international media coverage and position Africa-U.S. policy as a crucial policy and business issue.
The Difference:
Spreading the impact of the Summit meant recruiting and working with nonprofit organizations. We developed a supplemental database of more than 150 non-profit organizations that shared common threads with the Summit's five thematic policy areas. The American Foundation for AIDS Research placed our recruitment ad in their World AIDS day conference at the United Nation.
Our advertising campaign successfully banked on the love that millions of people share for the people, culture, spirit and land of Africa. Our print and radio ads were seen and heard by millions, resulting in conference attendance of over 7,000 people from around the world.
To generate advance media coverage, we capitalized on current news events, armed the more than 2,300 delegates from every state to be our local news foot soldiers, and arranged targeted, cost-effective media buys. The result: more than 400 journalists from 4 continents attended and covered the Summit.
The five days of the Summit displayed the total big-picture enthusiasm and smallest-detail organization of Hager Sharp staffers. Whether preparing for all possible media needs on site or arranging more than 50 on-site interviews with notables (such as Andrew Young, the foreign minister of Algeria and various high-ranking Clinton administration officials), we were 150 percent there for our client and the media. The result: live television broadcasts on CNN and C-SPAN, live internet streaming video coverage on Africast, daily stories from AP, Reuters, Voice of America and NPR, multiple front-page stories in The Washington Post and The Washington Times, and coverage in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, The New York Times, Financial Times and hundreds of other media outlets.
