ME/CFS Awareness Week has wrapped up and we can not thank you enough for supporting it with donations and fundraisers, participating in event activities and interacting with our Awareness Week posts on social media. Every little bit counts and thanks to the community, this year’s ME/CFS Awareness Week saw 64,943 people interact with the campaign across social media!
This year’s online Facebook event received nearly double the responses of last year and had a huge reach of more than 8600 people. Public posts in the event also doubled.
Personalised ‘Missing Posters’ were a huge success. This year for #MillionsMissing we asked as many people as possible to make their own posters and to share, share, share them on Saturday 8 May to mark the beginning of ME/CFS Awareness Week. More than 500 of you made posters from Australia, the US, Europe and the UK. We are so thankful for the support the community showed for the posters and invite you to see the collection in the 12may.org Gallery.
This year some familiar faces joined us for the #sayME challenge alongside our amazing ambassador, MotoGP World Champion and motorcycle racing legend Casey Stoner. Thank you to everyone who reached out to their local members asking them to participate – as a result, 18 politicians from both state and federal Government took the challenge to say “myalgic encephalomyelitis” on camera. In total the #sayME video’s received 25,131 views!
We would like to applaud Inga for her amazing work on An Existence Project, a stop-motion animation created painstakingly over six years. The film provides awareness and insight into the physical and mental impacts of ME/CFS, and how friends and family can provide support. We shared Inga’s film as part of the event on 12 May and it received more than 11,000 views. We encourage you to have a look here if you haven’t seen it yet.
Donations are being counted and so far more than $9,117 was raised by community members who ran fundraisers during ME/CFS Awareness Week! A massive thanks to Anna for starting and hosting the Blue Sunday social media tea party on 16 May, which raised more than $1,800 for Emerge Australia – you can check out the Blue Sunday posts by searching the tags #BlueSunday2021 or #TeaPartyForME2021 on your preferred social media platform. And a HUGE SHOUTOUT to Taylor who raised $10,570 for OMF Australia through her Facebook fundraiser!
We were so moved by the stories you shared and we loved smiling at your #sayME challenges. The Emerge Australia team sends our deepest thanks to all the community members for taking part in the event in any way you could. The success of this event wasn’t possible without your amazing response and we can’t wait to do it with you again next year!
