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The “Purple Angel” campaign: Norman McNamara talks about living with dementia at Christmas time
In a defiant manner, Norman McNamara says, “I am living with dementia, not dying from it.”
For Norman, life is about looking positively towards the future.
Norman says, “I often think ‘Don’t judge me by my past.’ Think about what I am expecting to do in the future.”
Norman lives with a ‘Lewy Body’ dementia.
People with this form of dementia not only tend to experience problems with memory and learning, like those with dementia of Alzheimer type, but also likely to experience difficulty with concentration and complex visual perception (recognising objects and making judgments about where they are in space).
Norman says he hasn’t forgotten who people are, unlike some people with dementia.
Sometimes carers feel embarrassed to take the person they care for to relatives for Christmas, as they know it would not work and they may feel that the relatives would not want to come to them. But Norman advises include people with dementia depending on how they wish to be included.
Norman reports that 2014 will again be a great year for ‘the Purple Angel’.
The Purple Angel is the symbol of hope. It has been adopted around the world by people who care about dementia.
The aim of this campaign is to raise awareness, and to drive away stigma of dementia.
The website is here, though you can also contact Norman on Facebook or Twitter.
Have you ever stopped to consider how you use the internet? (Guest post by @AndyKinsey from 'Labour Online')
The internet is a source of vast swathes of information and data, from the BBC News website to social media like Facebook and Twitter.
In 2008, Barack Obama used this mass of information to help him win his presidential election campaign. He used social media and engineer his victory by taking advantage of big data. He looked at everything from location to interests and beyond, together he gained a profile of individuals, groups and localities, this enabled him to campaign both from the grass roots and from afar.
Since his victory, the Labour Party has began making moves towards becoming more “connected” but we feel this hasn’t gone far enough. Yes, we’ve got the amazing work of Movement 4 Change for ground campaigns, but what about tackling grass roots online?
In the Pew internet study during his the election campaign in over 18% of USA internet users talked about Obama’s campaign, over 45% of these watched at least one of his YouTube videos and a huge 83% of these survey participants of those were aged 18 to 24 and 60% of this age group took part in Obamas social media campaign.
These are staggering figures – let’s put them into today world. There are now more users than ever online in the UK, there are now more users than ever using and interacting with social media. However you look at it, most of those users will be aged 18 to 35 in the UK. Further than this, many users of social media are under voting age, but can still take part in your social media campaign.
So with this information in mind, what can we do as a party to Get Online and Get Back to Power?
1. We start today building social media profiles.?Every member of the party, every party area, every cllr and mp needs an account on twitter AND facebook.
2. Build websites that look good and have great content?Websites can be used to pass information around, blog about news and more importantly collect information about constituents (as well as keep them updated)
3. Plan for the next elections?Yes plural! Today is the time to start looking at the big data we already have and how we can best use that to our advantage in campaigns.
If we, the Labour Party, can pull together we can move past our defeat in 2010 and learn from the lessons of a great campaign of Barack Obama. We can utilise everything we know from contact creator and social media, we can collect information today for use tomorrow and we can win forthcoming elections.
Today, we must start building, because if we don’t they will and we must be at the forefront of technology if we want to win the next elections.
About the Author:
Andy Kinsey is the founder of Labour Online an initiative to ‘Get Labour Online’ with great web design and social media campaigns.
Twitter: @AndyKinsey
Links of interest:
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/6–The-Internets-Role-in-Campaign-2008.aspx
