New: Gather Voices App for August Recess Challenge

We’re about ten days away from the August Recess Challenge! Are you ready? Here’s what you can expect if you’re new to the Challenge and some tips that will make your experience the best it can be.

Each year, Fight CRC hosts August Recess Challenge to get advocates to engage Members of Congress while they are in their home districts. It’s an annual grassroots advocacy campaign with weekly challenges like meeting with your Member of Congress, calling your representatives, or engaging with them on social media.

The Challenge is for anyone – from those who don’t know who their elected officials are, to those who are on a first-name basis with them.

If you’ve participated in the Challenge before, you know that your representatives can get very busy during the August recess. So, if you haven’t already, be sure to call their district offices soon to find out when your representative will be in town and make an appointment to meet with them or a staffer to make your voice heard. Find your representative here.

The Screening Age

This year’s August Recess Challenge is focused on the American Cancer Society’s (ACS) recently updated colorectal cancer screening guidelines. As you may have heard, ACS now recommends beginning screening at age 45 rather than at age 50 for individuals with average risk.

This is great news for the CRC community and it’s important that we share it with our representatives! Many of them may not know that there is a growing incidence of early-age onset colorectal cancer and so a big part of August Recess Challenge will be educating your Members of Congress and their staff on what the early-age onset population is facing and what the new ACS screening guidelines mean for us.

We will provide you with all the background information you need, talking points, and other resources to help make sure your meeting – or other outreach – is successful. We’ll be sharing those in the coming days, so make sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and receive our email updates to get the latest. 

There’s an app for that!

Something new to this year’s Challenge is the Gather Voices app. So often it’s a personal story that resonates. And seeing and hearing the person tell their own story is the most meaningful and effective.

We know that traveling to meet your representatives can be difficult if you’re in treatment, lack access to transportation, or are juggling other priorities to make the time, or perhaps nerves get the best of you in situations like these!

The Challenge is all about making your voice heard! Nearly three-quarters (72%) of Congressional staffers think social media enables them to reach people they were not reaching before. For this year’s campaign, one of your challenges is to use the Gather Voices app to video your story and share it via your social media or post it on your legislator’s social media Facebook page.

And we want you to get an early start as it may take a few tries! Here’s what you need to do to get involved:

Download the app on your device.  

 

Download these helpful tips to get you started!

 

And finally, before you start recording, practice using the following talking prompts from the app: 

1. Introduce yourself and tell us where you’re from.
2. Tell us how colorectal cancer has affected your life.
3. Why is access to colorectal cancer screening so important?

Email us at Info [at] FightCRC with any questions about the Gather Voices app.

Don’t forget to share all of your August Recess Challenge social media with the hashtags: #coloncancer #fightcrc #crcadvocacy.

See you in August!

 

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