It seems like everywhere I turn lately, there’s a new campaign to create awareness for a particular disease. The Susan G. Komen for the Cure of breast cancer is probably the best example simply because it is everywhere: sports, retail, news, pop culture. Pink ribbons are prevalent in every corner of our lives.

Why has Komen for the Cure had such success? Breast cancer is not the most prevalent cancer; that distinction goes to skin cancer, which has over one million new cases annually according to the National Cancer Institute. The most fatal cancer? That’s lung cancer, at nearly 160,000 estimated deaths per year.

There are four times as many deaths from Lung Cancer as there are from Breast Cancer. Skin cancer is five times more prevalent than Breast Cancer. So why do we see pink ribbons everywhere? Why has the Komen for a Cure foundation been more successful at creating awareness while other have been less so?

There are four ingredients for a successful awareness campaign:

1. Make it personal. This disease can affect YOU or PEOPLE LIKE YOU. Both my mother and aunt have been diagnosed with breast cancer, and as a result I’m inclined to be supportive of an effort supporting breast cancer. Feature yourself; use a picture or video of you with your family or your hobby to put a face on the disease. Pictures, videos, anecdotes and personal narratives have a tremendous ability to connect people in ways that impersonal stories or statistics cannot.

2. Make it real. There are several ways this can be accomplished, but this tactic is frequently the quantitative ying to the personal yang. It’s helpful to cite statistics to show the impact of health conditions on people’s lives. For example, according to the CDC, over half a million Americans have Crohn’s Disease. And according to statistics from healthetreatment, there are 28 symptoms of the disease, the most severe of which are abdominal discomfort, diarrhea and lethargy. Knowing this level of detail helps the reader to understand the impact of disease on a person’s life.

3. Have a strong, concise call to action. Early in their campaign, the Komen for the Cure Foundation asked women to do just one thing: get checked for breast cancer. The underlying promise of the campaign was that early detection leads to higher survival rates. By encouraging women to get to the doctor for screening and by providing education on how to do a self-exam, the Susan G. Komen foundation convinced women – and the men who love them – that early detection was not only in their best interest, but easy to do as well. This message was well-received by media outlets who were happy to pass along the nuggets of valuable advice to an eager audience.

The fourth ingredient for creating awareness has less to do with the campaign and more to do with acceleration. If you use the above three ingredients to create awareness in the media, you’ll be provided with the fourth ingredient: the ability to raise money for your cause. Media drives awareness, messaging drives activity and activity leads to engagement. Once you have an engaged audience, you’ve earned the right to ask for their participation and have the credibility to ask for their help.

There are hundreds of diseases for which there should be more awareness around the world. Each individual afflicted with a health condition should do what they can to raise awareness for their own personal issue. But having an understanding of communication priorities and knowing where to start will hopefully set you off on the right foot.