Influencing the Influencers: World Pneumonia Day
by Bettina Forbes, CLC | November 14, 2011 8:01 pm
Behind the scenes at Best for Babes, one of the most important things we do is reach out through our network to connect with influencers who can help us put the “breastfeeding message” on the radar of highly visible and powerful individuals and organizations. These individuals & organizations in turn reach millions of other individuals, thereby exponentially raising awareness of breastfeeding’s role as a cornerstone of the foundation of human health, and helping to put pressure on the Booby Traps—the barriers that keep babes from achieving their personal goals and reaping the lifetime health benefits. Influencers are like the first domino, tipping an important message or idea into the hands of the masses.
One influential organization that we are proud to be working with this year is World Pneumonia Day. Thanks to a board member, we were introduced to World Pneumonia Day and were able to have a great conversation with the organization’s staff. We asked them to include breastfeeding in their key facts about pneumonia — you can see it in Fact #4 in the column on the right hand side — and they were happy to do so! We were also overjoyed to see that they included breastfeeding in their fantastically well-produced video. World Pneumonia Day is doing extremely important work to raise awareness of the deadly disease of pneumonia, world’s leading killer of children under five, claiming one young life every 20 seconds. That’s more than AIDS, Malaria and Measles combined.
As we work to strengthen the 360 degree world that surrounds moms and babies, it is extremely important that breastfeeding advocates and organizations look “outside the box”, i.e. beyond the traditional breastfeeding community and attachment parenting organizations, to identify powerful non-profit partners that can help us broaden our reach and maximize our impact exponentially. At Best for Babes, we’ve been very fortunate to reach a few of these high impact organizations and engage in a dialogue about breastfeeding. We look for partners that 1) value breastfeeding’s vital role in protecting against disease, infection and chronic illness, 2) are willing to include it in their messaging to the public, their network, and their own set of key influencers, 3) are willing to learn more about the barriers to breastfeeding, and 4) want to work with us in coming years to find new opportunities to collaborate and advance the breastfeeding cause. It is also a huge opportunity for us to learn from and be mentored by these organizations. We start out simply with small, positive steps to build trust and momentum, knowing that it will lead to big, positive changes for moms and babies!
We applaud World Pneumonia Day for including breastfeeding in the protective measures and are proud to be the first breastfeeding organization to join their coalition. Please help us recognize and thank them!
Source URL: http://www.bestforbabes.org/influencing-the-influencers-world-pneumonia-day
