In recognition of C. diff Awareness Month, this past November Peggy Lillis Foundation (PLF) launched our new public education campaign, “See C. diff.” The campaign was based from Cdiff.org and included a range of educational media. We are delighted to report that the campaign did incredibly well reaching hundreds of thousands of people across our website and social media.

Given that only a third of Americans have heard of C. diff, raising awareness of the disease is a critical step in helping those afflicted and marshalling the human and financial resources to end the epidemic. Every day we hear from C. diff sufferers and caregivers who say they’d never heard of it before their or their loved one’s diagnosis. That lack of awareness compromises efforts to prevent C. diff infection as well as delaying treatment, which can be deadly. PLF developed “See C. diff” to raise awareness among the nearly 70% of Americans who haven’t heard of this potentially deadly but preventable infection.

Driven mostly by grassroots social media outreach as well as organizational partnerships and some modest paid advertising, “See C. diff” reached over 80,000 individual people! The campaign generated over 267,000 impressions. Given that we spent very little money promoting it, it’s a pretty incredible number. We only have a total of our 4,500 active followers on our website and social media accounts; so, we’ve reached 15 times our typical audience.

Throughout November, we saw several other indicators of the campaign’s reach, including:

• We had the third highest average engagement rate among all C. diff Awareness Month hashtags exceeded only CDC and Pfizer
• We were 7th (Twitter) and 12th (Instagram) in terms of total exposure among the top 25 “influencers” on social media for C. diff Awareness Month
• See C. diff videos were viewed over 5,500 times
• We were also in the top 20 of all influencers under the general hashtag #cdiff

Everyone at PLF is incredibly grateful to our grassroots supporters for sharing their stories with and amplifying the campaign. We are also grateful to the many organizations who shared our content. This campaign was generously funded by unrestricted educational support from BD, Ferring Pharmaceuticals, Merck, Summit and ThermoFisher Scientific.

To learn more about “See C. diff” visit the website Cdiff.org.