In case you hadn’t heard, March is colorectal cancer awareness month. Even though C3 doesn’t focus on general public “tell your friends to get a colonoscopy” awareness, it’s still a ridiculously busy time for us.

A few days ago, Representative Kay Granger of Texas and Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island introduced HR 1189, Colorectal Cancer Prevention, Early Detection, and Treatment Act of 2009 and we’re doing everything we can through our Cover Your Butt campaign to get this legislation off the ground.

If passed, this bill would provide coverage of colorectal cancer screening, and treatment if necessary, for Americans between the ages of 50-64 who can’t afford insurance but are still too young for Medicare.

This is an actual email we received last week. One of many similar to this, and it exemplifies exactly why we need this bill to become law:

hi,my name is [xxxx].i am 53 y/o and i would like to visit doctor to get “colon test”.i do not have health insurance.i have read some web sites which said there is coverage from government.i live in [xxxx].is there some place i can go?thank you

We have to have more cosponsors on this bill. It’s not going to move out of committee without grassroots support. That means that as many everyday constituents as we can get have to contact their Representatives and ask them to sign on.

Last year, we organized a one-day Congressional Butt-in phone blitz that generated nearly 2,000 calls to Congress, many of which resulted in additional co-sponsors to last year’s version of the bill. The Butt-in is a toll free number we set up which prompts the caller for their zip code and then connects them to their Senators and Representative one after the other. It’s just one call, and we get stats on exactly which offices were called.

I’m excited that we’re working with Mobile Commons for this year’s butt-in scheduled for March 31. This is addition to all the promotion we’re already doing through our blogs, email, our print newsletter, postcards, and Twitter. Folks can now text BUTT or BUTTIN to the short code 30644 and go through the simple conversation below (the configuration is incredibly intuitive):

We’re sending a blast text on March 31 to the phone numbers we collect. On that day, if folks reply to the message with the word CALL their phone will ring and they’ll be connected to the Butt-in.

We’re not designing a campaign around text messaging. We’re using every single thing we can possibly afford to make it easy for anyone to make that call on March 31.

I’ll let you know on April 1 how it turns out.