The world has diabetes, but nobody’s talking about it. It’s time to reignite the international dialogue. We realized there were enough people with type 2 diabetes—343,000,000—to form the world’s third-largest country. So that’s what we did. We created that country: The State of Diabetes. Through a multinational, multimedia campaign, we challenged the world to recognize The State of Diabetes. All of our creative assets drove to a petition for sovereignty at thestateofdiabetes.org, which received signatures from 55 countries on all 7 continents. By uniting more than a dozen advocacy groups, we gained the international attention we demanded. Consider the conversation started.

It’s time to reignite international conversation about type 2 diabetes. We needed to provide a platform for organizations and advocates to rally behind, along with easily distributable creative resources. It was key that these resources be able to bridge across countries and continents while still sparking meaningful conversations that could unite the ever-growing diabetes community. Our primary target audience was diabetes advocates and organizations from around the world, with a secondary target of international government representatives.

We used one simple idea to get people talking: the population with type 2 diabetes worldwide could form the third-largest country. By facilitating the conversation and rallying diabetes advocates around it, we made The State of Diabetes a pervasive agent in the fight for diabetes awareness. On World Diabetes Day, our public service announcement video began to raise awareness of the scope of the problem. We armed our coalition of advocacy groups with messaging and creative assets customized for more than 50 different countries. Together, we engaged with even more advocacy groups and diabetes community members around the world. All creative assets and efforts drove to our website, thestateofdiabetes.org. Here we highlighted the crisis, explained our steps to statehood, and gathered signatures for our online petition, galvanizing the diabetes community with a common goal.

Within a week of launch, 14 individual diabetes organizations on four continents joined our coalition, offering visible partnership and support. Our PSA video was featured on Upworthy.com and ultimately viewed in 128 countries. Meanwhile, thestateofdiabetes.org received visitors from 76 countries and petition signatures from 45 countries across all 7 continents (thanks, Antarctica). Most important, we gave the diabetes community something to talk about that lasted far beyond the 24-hour life span of World Diabetes Day. More than 5 months later the conversation continues, country by country, as we continue to attract the attention and support of even more diabetes advocacy groups around the world.

To unite the global diabetes community, we centered our efforts around a simple and striking idea: creating the new third-largest country, The State of Diabetes, and petitioning the United Nations for sovereignty. By setting our sights on the United Nations, we provided a unified rallying point for diabetes advocates around the world. Through an online partnership with the diaTribe Foundation, we enlisted 14 diabetes organizations on four continents to add their visible support to our coalition and join us in a global social media advance. Leveraging the immediacy of Twitter, we quickly connected beyond national borders and fostered a sense of citizenship within the diabetes community. By providing our coalition of diabetes organizations with messaging and digital creative assets that drove the conversation to our website and petition, we equipped them to push for improved prevention and care at a local level.

The United Nations officially recognized World Diabetes Day in 2005, saying that this “chronic, debilitating, and costly disease poses severe risks for families, Member States, and the entire world.” Less than a decade later, the word diabetes is not mentioned once in the 600+ pages of the United Nations’ agenda. Efforts to change this were fractured and spread across thousands of advocacy groups, each with its own objectives.