National HIV Testing Day: CVM partners with AIDS.gov to get the word out

June 27th is National HIV Testing Day. This week, Community Voice Mail launched a campaign with AIDS.gov to inform our clients around the country about free or low-cost HIV testing resources in local communities. Every nine and half minutes, someone in the United States becomes infected with HIV, and AIDS.gov estimates that 1 out of 5 people that have HIV don't know they're infected. HIV is five times more prevalent in the homeless population than in the non-homeless population. It's important to know if you're infected, and the only way to know is to get tested.

Using our national communication network, here's what we're doing to inform our clients and agencies (and lots of others) about local HIV testing resources:

• Sending broadcast voice messages to 20,000 clients. Click here to listen to the message sent by our Aiken County (SC) CVM Manager. CVM Managers in all our cities are sending similar messages
  
• Sending broadcast email messages to the 3,600 clients who have given us their email addresses
  
• Sending broadcast voice and/or email messages to our contacts at 1,800+ social service agencies in 45 cities, encouraging them to tell all their clients about HIV Testing Day
• Blogging, "tweeting" (Twitter) and posting messages on facebook. Several sites are also adding badges and widgets from AIDS.gov to their web properties
  
• In May, we presented with AIDS.gov at a "mixed reality" panel at NetSquared's N2Y4 Conference in San Jose and in Second Life. (In the coming weeks, look for more about HIV Testing Day in CVM's Second Life presence - SLurl)
  

It's great to be able to communicate with so many people who are often hard to reach, and who can benefit greatly from this kind of information. The partnership with AIDS.gov has been great, and we look forward to working with them again on other information campaigns. Most importantly, we hope that a lot of people who might not otherwise think about it call the hotline, find a testing location, and get tested.

Call 1-800-232-4636 (CDC-INFO), or go to www.hivtest.org to find an HIV testing site near you.

Planning to Tweet about this post? Please use the hashtag for HIV Testing Day (#NHTD09) and the Twitter handle for the CVM National Office (@cvmnational)