February Awareness Campaign - Week Three and Four

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Week 3 & 4 (In Progress)

February 25
Pictures have just been uploaded of Doug distributing flyers to students at a college campus. You can see them in the first set of pictures below.

From Doug:

I had a great time distributing these flyers. I would say 70% or more of the reactions I got were positive. Under 10% of people did not take a flyer, and about 20% responded negatively. I used a few different slogans while distributing the flyers. For the most part I used "Death sucks. We should stop it.", followed by "Dying is bad. We shouldn't do it.", and least frequently "Getting old sucks. We should do something about it." I got the highest proportion of positive reactions in the same order (which is why I used "death sucks" most frequently). I distributed about 200-300 flyers total today.

Some of the reactions were GREAT! Groups of people would be about to walk by, all of them looking completely uninterested and sometimes even irritated, and then I would say "death sucks, we should stop it" and suddenly the whole group would stop and one of them would say "what?". And then I'd explain a bit about what the Campaign Against Aging is and what we're trying to do. I got the same reaction from several people who ordinarily would probably not have taken a flyer. One person I remember in particular did a double take as he passed, walked back to get a flyer, and then stopped to read it. "Hard to argue with that one, isnt it?" "Yeah, it is."

I talked to several people and groups at length about what is involved in fighting aging. I explained that aging is not a magical process and that we do not have a clock inside our body that makes us get older. Aging is just a building up of damage over time inside our cells, and that damage can be reversed. I explained briefly a few of the different kinds of age related damage, including lipofuscin accumulation and protein cross linking.

Many people were very enthusiastic about the idea of stopping or reversing the aging process. I got several comments like "right on, man" or "I hope you can do it", and so on. The relatively few negative responses I got were from people who just said "it's inevitable" or "I don't care if I die" or something else equally indifferent as they passed. The people who refused to take flyers did so before I could explain what it was about, so were probably just going by their usual response to the kind of flyers people normally distribute about other topics, like religion or products for sale.

February 24
New pictures posted of the flyers we bought yesterday posted on bulletin boards. Over 100 flyers were also distributed to individuals, with a resulting jump in our daily web traffic from the region. (These pictures are the second set below.)

February 23
We're stocking up on supplies for the campaign as it continues into week 3 and 4. Below you can see pictures of 600 flyers we just had printed in a variety of colors. (This is the third set of pictures now.)

If you're interested in volunteering to distribute cards and flyers, or volunteering in other ways, let us know.

Distributing Flyers

You can also see these pictures on our Flickr account if you cannot see the slideshow below. There is also a full screen version of this slideshow there.

Posted Flyers

You can also see these pictures on our Flickr account if you cannot see the slideshow below. There is also a full screen version of this slideshow there.

Printed Flyers

You can also see these pictures on our Flickr account if you cannot see the slideshow below. There is also a full screen version of this slideshow there.