Children’s Heart Foundation – Hearts at Play
Event Support

The Children’s Heart Foundation held its annual Hearts at Play family benefit on Saturday, February 21, 2009. The event is the Foundation’s biggest fundraiser of the year, and is meant to raise money for much-needed congenital heart defect research. For the 2009 event, HC secured Chicago Bears Cornerback, Charles “Peanut” Tillman, and wife Jackie to serve as Co-Honorary Chairs of the event due to their daughter Tiana’s recent heart condition, cardiomyopathy – one of 35 known congenital heart defects.

Diligent pitch efforts leveraging the Tillman’s involvement resulted in 28 unique media hits across notable print, online and broadcast outlets. HC was able to secure a plethora of calendar items across influential websites like ChicagoParent.com and Metromix, as well as in long-lead consumer publications – CS magazine and North Shore magazine. In addition, Hearts at Play was covered in three different segments across two major Chicago networks, NBC and ABC. Segments included interviews with CHF President, Megan Van Pelt (also incorporated Congenital Heart Defect Awareness Week and National Congenital Heart Lobby Day), and Charles and Jackie Tillman. Finally, we secured Hearts at Play mentions in three popular columns in both Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune – Stella Foster and Elliot Harris (Sun-Times) and Fred Mitchell (Tribune).

We reached a total of 23,182,332 people with our Hearts and Play pre-event/day-of-event outreach.