AIDS Memorial Quilt On Net, Sponsors Sought

In Fight Against AIDS, Interactive Media Will Be Used to Raise Awareness, Educate

SAN FRANCISCO -- The NAMES Project Foundation, based here, just announced plans to launch a World Wide Web site to boost its communications mission, centered around the AIDS Memorial Quilt, to raise awareness, educate, and garner support in the fight against the epidemic which already has claimed three million lives worldwide.

"The Quilt's power to raise awareness about AIDS, to challenge complacency about the epidemic, and to soften hard hearts and open closed minds, will be greatly increased by its presence on the Web," said Anthony Turney, executive director of The NAMES Foundation.

The website will be launched on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day, to take advantage of the heightened awareness of the epidemic at that time.

It will be constructed by vivid studios, one of the biggest names in website development, with credits that include, among many, Microsoft's Windows 95 website, and innovative Net hunt sites The Rift and Johnny Mnemonic.

"It's exciting for us because we're at a point where we can actually do something like this and we can put something back in," said Henri Poole, president of vivid.

The NAMES Project is actively seeking corporate sponsors to help fund the website, and is offering various sponsorship levels of acknowledgment on the website. (Contact: 415-882-5500)

Beyond The Statistics

Conceived to show the enormity of the epidemic through the humanity behind the statistics, the Quilt is a huge folk art project currently comprised of some 31,000 3' x 6' panels visually representing people who have died of AIDS, created by the people who loved them.

Physically displayed, it would cover approximately 32 acres. And it grows larger every day.

According to Greg Lugliani, communications director for The NAMES Project, 50 to 100 panels are mailed unsolicited to the foundation each week.

At this rate, the Quilt will comprise 45,000 panels one year from now, Oct. 6, when it is displayed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., three weeks before the presidential election. It will stretch 15 blocks from the Capitol to the Washington Monument.

This will be the first time the AIDS Memorial Quilt has been displayed in its entirety since it was first launched in Washington in Oct., 1987, when it had only 1,920 panels.

Nevertheless, parts of the Quilt are displayed at about 2000 different locations worldwide each year. The largest display of the Quilt outside Washington, 15,000 panels, was exhibited recently at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.

Some six million people have seen at least parts of the Quilt.

Expand Quilt Research

Still, as a location-based exhibit, the Quilt limits the number of people it can reach.

It is also a tough communications task to make people aware of the Quilt, let them know where it will be displayed, and schedule displays in locations where there is a strong demand for it.

The Net will help overcome some of these challenges.

Immediately, the website will be an information source and communications vehicle for every aspect of the Quilt's mission, including answering the two most common questions: 1) How do you make a panel?, and 2) When and where will the displays be exhibited?

"Certainly there will be more than 2,000 displays next year, owing to this presence on the Web," Lugliani said.

This will require much work and coordination on an international basis. As a practical matter, the electronic medium of the Net is expected to yield many efficiencies to both the internal and external communications efforts.

"Because we are an organization that has 40 chapters around the country and 30 chapters outside the U.S. borders, it makes a lot of sense for us not to have to rely on telephone and mail," Lugliani said.

Quilt On CD-ROM

Ultimately, people will be able to view the Quilt's images without having to attend an actual display.

"People are affected by this that can't actually go see the Quilt, because it doesn't go everywhere in the world," Poole said. "But the Net does."

A few months ago, The NAMES Project started a program to archive the Quilt on CD-ROM.

"The Quilt will live on long after AIDS has been eradicated," Turney said.

Digitizing the Quilt will make it possible to give people access to its images via the Web and other digital platforms, such as multimedia education packages for school systems and libraries around the world.

Lugliani said the process of photographing the blocks of the Quilt, each comprising eight panels, is almost complete. Then each individual panel will be photographed, digitized and put on CD.

From a broader perspective, the website will be the focal point in the formation of a digital community helping to fight AIDS.

It will serve as a resource and educational tool for information exchange among users, and provide links to other online AIDS service and support organizations.

The website also will have areas for online discussions, with discussion boards and special events users can participate in.

"The idea of the Quilt is to personalize the statistics behind the disease. We're very interested in having people add their own comments about people they know who may be represented in this site," Poole said.

"The Net itself is more of a tool for communities than it is for anything else," he added. "By its nature it's a communications mechanism. Personally, I think it's closer to a telephone than to a newspaper. It's perfect for allowing people to build communities that may have physical constraints otherwise."

"There may be people trapped in some small town in America going through some personal hell and not having any place to go, and by getting networked, and finding people who are going through similar experiences, they can find some comfort in dealing with some of the issues that are coming up," Poole said.

The website also will be used by The NAMES Project Foundation to sign up members, register addresses, conduct fund raising and accept donations online.

On To Washington

The AIDS Memorial Quilt remains, of course, the foundation for all these efforts, and it's upcoming display in Washington is a key event to galvanize visibility and support for its mission.

Politically, NAMES does not itself engage in political lobbying, but the Quilt serves as a rallying point for those in the AIDS fight who do.

"Traditionally the Quilt displays in Washington have been sort of the focal point for various political activities by different groups, running the gamut, from protests, to visits to politicians," Lugliani said.

"The display does take place before a presidential election and that's not coincidental," he added. "It's to get the issue of AIDS addressed by the candidates. To date, that hasn't been the case and we hope that in the next election, that candidates do come out and come up with some ideas."

According to Lugliani, the website will play an instrumental role in this effort.

"Volunteers are most important at this time for us," he said. "The display in Washington is going to be a good volunteer recruitment tool as well, and registration."

Lugliani said the foundation will use the website's Dec. 1 launch date, World AIDS day, to launch the Washington effort as well.

"We'll probably do some advertising and a media event, and that will commence the journey that will take us to Washington next year," he said.

He also appreciates the fact that a website enables direct communication with constituency audiences, bypassing the third-party traditional media.

"On the political side," Lugliani said, "I think that over the next year, having this website, we'll be thinking not only of the traditional media that we use to get our message out, but more about this website that we're in control of."

Reaching Teens

NAMES recently launched a High School Quilt Program for HIV prevention to bring panels of the Quilt to high school campuses across the country.

A two-year beta test for the program involving 80,000 students responding to surveys said that seeing the Quilt made them more likely to take precautions and reduce their chances of getting infected.

"That's a very hard audience to reach, the teenagers, who have notions of immortality and really think they're not at risk for anything," Lugliani said. They are also physically difficult to reach, and Lugliani sees the benefits of interactive media in extending the campaign to this demographic.

"Knowing that the Quilt has proven abilities to prevent HIV transmission in teens, being able to reach more teens electronically can prove useful," he said.

"As more and more schools move into the ability to access websites and take advantage of CD-ROM products and multimedia kits," he added, "then we're already in a position to take advantage of that, and really maximize the HIV prevention work we've started."

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