Yesterday I went to Lifelong AIDS Alliance to meet with their director of marketing, Asia Rau. I normally do not pay too much attention to any person’s race but I did notice that this girl did not look ethnically Asian.
Lifelong has about a hundred paid staff members and goes through about sixteen million dollars a year. They are located in Capitol Hill, Seattle’s gay and art neighborhood.
I asked about her personal history and she told me that she had done event marketing for the city of Seattle for about twelve years and had been with Lifelong for about a year. I asked her about the hierarchy of Lifelong and she told me there was a head executive and these seven departments: case management, the “chicken soup brigade” (a food program), housing, prevention education, insurance, development, and marketing. At this time I learned that Erick, the guy I know from the HIV CAB, is the head of prevention education.
She told me that Lifelong has existed for 25 years, and that the last big merger was consuming the chicken soup brigade and the Northwest AIDS Foundation to become Lifelong. She told me that their private fundraising efforts comprise less than a quarter of their income, and that insurance work was the single most funded area of their work. She told me that state government funds that.
Chicken Soup Brigade is important because it gets them funding for all terminal illnesses. She explained some of the branding that they use in the marketing department. Their insurance has one name (Evergreen), their food program has its own name (CSB), and sometimes they use the names “Lifelong” or “Lifelong Alliance” to hide the fact that they are associated with AIDS. She told me that some demographics are disinclined to visit any place associated with AIDS, so they use other names.
I told her I wanted marketing materials specifically targeted at straight people and she told me that Lifelong receives no funding for this from any source. I asked why and she told me it simply was not available despite their seeking it. I asked if she kept an anthology of the marketing campaigns done by Lifelong over the years and she told me this has never been done. She told me that her department’s record-keeping was below the status of the organization when she arrived and that she had been trying to organize it. I asked her if she would be done in six months and she told me it might be a year.
Throughout our forty-five minute talk she referred me to Erick for more answers. Now that I have a better understand of who he is I am a lot more interested in him.