When funding vanished overnight, this is what the organization did.
In January 2025, President Donald Trump took office for his second term and signed an executive order that turned foreign aid on its head.
The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation had to pause 80% of its operations overnight.
Clinics had to close. Employees weresent home. That meant children would die without the treatment they needed.
For a while, confusion reigned inside the organization. Should they hope for a reprieve? Stay quiet to avoid the administration’s ire?
Madeleine Morris, communications officer at EGPAF, told attendees at the PR Daily Conference what happened next.
“We ultimately decided that we had a responsibility to react,” Morris said.
Their strategy had multiple prongs to gain the attention of lawmakers and the public alike:
- Talk directly to policymakers to help them understand how the cuts impacted the budgets they’d passed
- Use social media to explain the basics of their mission: why is AIDS care important? Why does global health matter to the U.S.?
- Work with “third party validators” who could say the bolder, more critical things the organization couldn’t say directly.
“In times of crisis, you have to lean into your values,” Morris said. “A lot of the fluff, the extra stuff, the cool hashtags — which we all know are dead, right? — kind of go away, and you have to be real. We were able to move forward because we were focused on our mission and our values.”
About a month later, as this campaign was ongoing, USAID funding was drastically cut. That meant more than 10,000 women and 10,000 children would lose access to care.
“We officially launched our campaign, Global Health Cannot Wait, and the goal was really simple. We wanted to drive urgency, help people understand the impact and then put faces to all of the stories,” Morris explained.
That campaign included:
- Going on the record with the media in multiple countries. This is where preparation came in: the organization already had a bench of media-trained subject-matter experts ready to go.
- Social media focused on three content pillars: expert commentary, first-person accounts of impact and basic education about AIDS care.
The comms team had to weather all this while dealing with furloughs: their team consisted of just three and a half people. They also had no budget.
“We were able to get through this crisis and this campaign because we let go of perfection and normal,” Morris said.
The campaign earned lots of media mentions, but Morris doesn’t look at those as the hallmarks of success. She looks at the $800,000 of donations, 67% of those from first-time donors. She counts being asked to testify in front of Congress, with some of their funding protected and cancelled projects reinstated.
“The government is never going to tell us why they did that. They work in mysterious ways. But we do have a lot of reason to believe that part of what brought that project back was our communications campaign and our work there,” Morris said.
Success helped enable the EGPAF to serve 800,000 patients. It also earned them PR Daily’s Campaign of the Year award.
Watch Morris’ full presentation here.
The post ‘A responsibility to act’: One nonprofit’s response to drastic federal budget cuts appeared first on PR Daily.
