Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Have you seen me? Mailings help find missing kids.

This poster hangs in Post Office lobbies across the U.S.
Every week, millions of images of children arrive in mailboxes. “Have you seen me?” the sad pictures ask?

For the last 25 years, media and marketing services provider Valassis has partnered with the US Postal Service and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children on the program. The mailings, which feature the names and faces of missing children, reach more than 100 million households through weekly newspaper distribution and 90% of U.S. homes via mail.

Thanks to the program, there have been 149 missing children who have been safely recovered,

What do you think about these mailings? Do most people look at them? Should something different be done to help make them more effective? Comment here.
 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If we have been mailing millions of these to homes accross the US...one must question the success if only 149 children were found over the 25 year period. Not to say those 149 didn't deserve every possible action to find!! Call me wierd, but I am for ID implants at birth. Then when children register in school...the ID tag is scanned and you know exactly who this child is and who the parents are. This would cut down on missing children and human trafficing.

Merk said...

It seems like 149 is a small number but anything helps. I think the missing child "ads" are too small, people don't really look at them. We used to hang the NALC missing child posters from the Postal Bulletin in lobbies but now we're not allowed to. The ID tag idea makes sense to me but I know there will be people that object - probably the same people that have chips installed in their pets.

EliMoon said...

I like the chip implant idea. I'd get one then if I ever get lost people can come find me. ^_^
And by doing this we could probably adapt a weird way of tracking geneology too.