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National Diabetes Education Program

— filed under: Case Study, Health

In 1997 only 8 percent of Americans considered diabetes a serious disease. This was despite the fact that 73 million Americans - one in three adults - have diabetes or pre-diabetes.

One in three children born in the year 2000 were projected to develop diabetes in their lifetimes.

To help turn this epidemic around through prevention and to help people with diabetes live longer, healthier lives, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention created the National Diabetes Education Program. They charged Hager Sharp with developing and managing the program, crafting targeted media awareness campaigns to reach at-risk individuals, creating educational materials for patients and health care professionals about diabetes prevention and control and forging partnerships to carry messages and materials to our audiences.

By 2003 diabetes was a TIME magazine cover story. By 2006 89 percent of Americans reported that diabetes was a serious disease.

We have made a difference.

How did we do it? Our two main awareness campaigns, Control Your Diabetes. For Life. and Small Steps. Big Rewards. Prevent Type 2 Diabetes. have created over 2 billion media impressions through award-winning radio and television public service announcements, print ads and feature articles.

To ensure our messages and materials reach those ethnic populations that are disproportionately affected by diabetes, we formed multi-cultural workgroups to help plan, pre-test and evaluate messages targeted to specific high-risk populations. We produce almost all of our materials in Spanish and adopt and translate campaigns and materials into 15 different Asian and Pacific Islander languages.

To help spread our messages and materials, we've developed over 200 partnerships with organizations and associations at the federal, state and local levels. Joining the partners, we line up celebrity spokespersons such as NBA All-Star Jerry Stackhouse, former Miss America Nicole Johnson and former Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher to help deliver NDEP messages.