The National Communication Association Student Club hosted guest speaker Diane Moore for their third meeting of the year Monday night in the Central Classroom Building.
Moore is the founder and executive director of Striving for More Than a Cure, a non-profit company whose mission is to provide emotional and spiritual support for children with cancer and their families.
Lynn Harter, advisor to NCASC and a Steven and Barbara Schoonover Professor of Health Communication, introduced Moore to the audience.
“Our goal is to foster connections between students and professionals,” Harter said.
Moore said her motivation to refocus her life came after her 9-year-old daughter Colleen died from terminal bone cancer.
“For five days after Colleen died, I sat at my job and wondered what I was doing there,” she said.
Her presentation was titled “Non-Profit Development: Key Success Factors and Lessons Learned” and focused on her progression after the loss of her daughter to forming her own non-profit organization.
“My life came crumbling down on me … but I decided I needed to address the problems I saw in the hospitals during my daughter’s journey,” she said.
At first, Moore said that she did not originally want to create her own non-profit, but she could not find one that focused on the emotional challenges that families victimized by cancer faced.
Moore used her presentation to explain what it took to make her non-profit successful, going step-by-step though the importance of building your non-profit from the “ground up,” she said.
“Brand consistency is really important,” she said. “You want to make sure you have consistency across all platforms with your name.”
Ultimately, it cost Moore $5,000 to get her non-profit incorporated by the government and three to five weeks to get her 1023 document approved.
Since being approved, Moore has transformed her non-profit into a successful organization, with more than 2,000 likes on Facebook and close to as many followers on Twitter.
“We brought (Moore) in to help teach our students how to foster activism through social media,” said Harter.
Harter added that Moore’s endeavor is a great example of how social medjr200009@ohiou.eduia can help a little-known non-profit gain steam.
jr200009@ohiou.edu
