Supporting Challenging MND’s founder as he completed a 24-hour rowing challenge
The Challenge
Challenging MND approached The Ripple Effect in 2025 looking to
spread awareness for their founder’s 10th challenge – a 24 hour row.
The main challenge facing us was how to cut through the noise and make this challenge stand out from previous ones Alex has undertaken.
The Approach
Alex Gibson, the charity founder, was diagnosed with MND in 2018 and his condition has slowly progressed since then. Despite this, he continuously pushes himself to do new challenges and raise awareness and funds for Challenging MND.
Realising this is his 10th challenge, we decided to highlight all of his good work since founding the charity, with a big focus on the power of community. Considering that there were 61 volunteers rowing alongside him, we framed the story as ‘community comes together to support an incredible man with a mission to raise funds for MND’.
Focusing on regional publications, we reached out to various broadcast and press contacts across East, inviting them to come down to the centre and watch Alex row.
As his speech has massively deteriorated, we offered members of his community for interviews, including the CEO Liane Iles and Patron Andy Long.
The Outcome
Our work with Challenging MND is ongoing, and we continue to engage audiences to help spread awareness for MND.
His challenge featured a 5 minute segment on ITV East Anglia, as well as mentions on BBC 1 Look East, and 7 different segments on BBC Radio Essex, as well as syndications across BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, BBC Three Counties , BBC Radio Norfolk, BBC Radio Suffolk, and BBC Radio Northampton. A further online BBC piece and various regional newspapers published pieces as well. BBC Essex also put out a social media post about his story, which received a further 2.16k views.
Alex’s initial fundraising target of £500 was met, and him and his team managed to raise £7000. We secured a speaking opportunity for the CEO Liane Iles, and patron of the charity Andy Long.
