END7 Campaign
The Global Network launched the award-winning END7 campaign in 2012 to build a grassroots movement to garner public support for the effort to end the seven most common neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). The campaign raised $1.2 million for NTD treatment programs in a dozen countries, facilitated more than 20,000 grassroots advocacy actions, introduced more than 7 million people to NTDs through the cutting edge PSA How to Shock a Celebrity and built an active community of student leaders at universities around the world.
Launching a Movement
END7 forged partnerships with diverse influencers to amplify the global conversation on NTDs. In 2012, END7 recruited more than 30 celebrities including pop star Katy Perry, fashion designer Stella McCartney and actor Ewan McGregor to participate in a Twitter Day of Action that reached more than 50 million people with important information on NTDs. The release of our How to Shock a Celebrity video in 2013 sent shockwaves across social media as hundreds of thousands – and eventually millions – of viewers saw the impact of NTDs for the first time through the eyes of celebrities like Eddie Redmayne and Priyanka Chopra. In 2014, Abhishek Bachchan, one of the world’s best known Bollywood stars, joined END7 as our first celebrity ambassador in India to raise awareness of NTDs in a country where more than 500 million citizens are at risk, and later that year we worked in partnership with India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Ogilvy and Little Lamb Productions to produce a Cannes Silver Lion award-winning video and promotional materials for one of the largest NTD treatment campaigns in history.
Building the Next Generation of NTD Leaders
In addition to broad public education efforts, END7 launched a student outreach program in the fall of 2013 that successfully built an international network of young people supporting the NTD control and elimination effort from university campuses. The campaign mobilized more than 1,500 students from 345 universities in 29 countries to plan advocacy, awareness and fundraising events and lead dedicated campus chapters to expand the reach of the campaign.
The END7 Student Advisory Board and Campus Leaders Council were created to educate student supporters about the NTD control and elimination effort, develop their skills as advocates for and ambassadors of the cause and begin to build a talent pipeline to sustain the NTD effort into the future. The programs trained 113 students from 93 universities in 27 countries from 2014 to 2017.
END7 provided monthly action kits to mobilize students around key advocacy and fundraising opportunities, awarded scholarships to support student attendance at major global health conferences and connected students directly with policymakers at the annual NTD Student Advocacy Day, facilitating nearly 100 constituent meetings with congressional offices and garnering support from global health leaders like Barbara Bush, co-founder of Global Health Corps.
Read more about the achievements of our student supporters in the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 END7 Student Yearbooks and check out Student Action Kits on topics like NTDs and Nutrition, NTD Success Stories and the USAID NTD Budget.
Driving Advocacy Victories
More than 10,000 END7 supporters took advocacy actions targeting U.S. and international policymakers ahead of key moments like the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit and annual negotiations around the United States federal budget appropriations process. Student advocates amplified these efforts by publishing op-eds in campus and local papers, running creative social media campaigns and traveling to Washington, D.C. for the annual NTD Student Advocacy Day. The grassroots advocacy energy generated by the campaign helped fuel high-profile advocacy victories and provided policymakers with evidence of the broad base of support for the NTD control and elimination effort.
Mobilizing Critical Resources
100% of donations to END7 were used to fill critical funding gaps for NTD treatment programs in a dozen countries that reached more than 50 million people in all. These contributions helped to deliver deworming pills to more than one million schoolchildren in Honduras, train more than 90,000 community health workers to carry out a national mass drug administration campaign in Myanmar, and taught more than 1,500 people with the NTD lymphatic filariasis in India how to care for their painfully swollen limbs. Every dollar donated to END7 had a ripple effect on the global effort to end the suffering caused by NTDs – demonstrating just how much could be done with modest resources channeled through integrated programs run by strong national and local partners.
END7 supporters planned incredibly creative fundraisers – ranging from the Hogwarts Running Club’s Fantastic Beasts 5k to student-run “dirt cup dessert” sales – to mobilize $1.2 million for NTD treatment.