Customer First Digital Support The Aortic Dissection Charitable Trust

The Aortic Dissection Charitable Trust is a really important charity to us. Unfortunately, I lost someone that was close to myself both professionally and personally back in 2018, who suffered an Aortic Dissection. It happened really suddenly, there was no knowledge prior to him suffering it that it was actually going to happen. It really hit me quite hard! So since then, I've wanted to try and make a difference and when the charity was formed in 2021, that gave me the opportunity to help and raise the awareness as well as raise funds. 

On September 19th, the Aortic Dissection Awareness Day, I set a challenge for myself and the team at CFD to achieve something that I had previously done within 8 Days. This was the ‘To Derby and Back Fundraiser’ in 2021, where I biked over 200 miles, the equivalent of biking from my hometown (Beverley) to Derby (Ben’s birth city) and back. So, this year the team walked their dogs, exercised at work, and got on the bikes to achieve this within 7 days. During the week, we didn’t only exercise to reach our 200-mile target, we also wanted to raise as much money as we could, find out later in the blog for the results! Most importantly we aimed to raise awareness, it was important that not just the team at CFD knew what Aortic Dissection is, but as many people as possible were made aware. Through sharing multiple social posts across all of our platforms, our community engaging and resharing and mentioning it via our monthly email campaigns, it was important we could get the message out there. 

First and foremost, it's really important to raise the awareness about Aortic Dissection. There's a lack of knowledge, both in the general public and still to this day within the NHS. For me, when my friend died, it was the first time I'd actually ever heard of it and the team at Customer First Digital hadn't heard of it either! I appreciate that we're only a small part in the bigger picture, however I want to make sure that people have that knowledge and information around what aortic dissections are and how to ensure they can spot the symptoms, is so important. The second initiative was to actually raise some funds to go to good use in terms of continuous research to make sure a diagnosis can happen quicker.