Eli's Rehab Report

Rockville, Md. -- Promoting your professional services means more than sprucing up your local PR -- it means raising awareness of what you can do for the national public.

The American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA) is doing just that. The association announced April 23 that beginning the week of April 29 and for several weeks in May, millions of NPR listeners who tune in to Morning Edition and Talk of the Nation will hear sponsorship spots promoting ASHA, May's Better Hearing and Speech Month, and ASHA's Web site (www.asha.org).

The goal: "ASHA plans to be more active using Better Hearing and Speech Month to educate the public about our professions and communication disorders," said ASHA 2007 President Noma Anderson. ASHA has become a corporate sponsor of NPR programming and will use 10-second spots to promote the May observance, the association said in a press release. In addition, for five weeks beginning at the end of April, ASHA will also have a sponsorship presence on NPR's Web site, www.npr.org.

ASHA is also creating a "landing page" on its own Web site with consumer information about speech-language pathologists, audiologists and topics related to communication science.

The reach: Morning Edition plays on nearly 650 public radio stations across the United States and has more than 13.5 million weekly listeners, making it the No. 1 morning radio show in the country and the No. 2 radio show nationally overall, according to ASHA.

Talk of the Nation, NPR's midday news talk program, reaches 3 million weekly listeners through nearly 290 stations.