The Buzz Bin

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy seeks to improve the lives and future prospects of children and families. The organization strives to ensure that these children are born into stable homes and raised by two-parent families. The National Campaign’s goal is to reduce the teen pregnancy rate and unplanned pregnancy among young adults.

Lawrence Swiader is the Director of Digital Media at The National Campaign and relays responsible values and messages to obtain their goal by using social media, games, mobile devices and the Web. Prior to The National Campaign, Lawrence worked at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for ten years where he established an award-winning Web presence for the Museum.

BB: What was your biggest achievement on the social media front in 2008?

LS: Having just joined The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy in October, 2008, my biggest achievements would have to be described as working on the small things. This included making sure that our blog, Pregnant Pause , was listed on all the right directories and that my colleagues felt ownership for writing into the blog.  In addition, a presence for The National Campaign was created in Twitter , Facebook , Delicious , YouTube and other important Web destinations.

BB: Tell us about your organization’s marketing/communications strategy for 2009.

LS: The National Campaign’s marketing strategy for 2009 emphasizes new outreach to young adults, 18 – 30, to prevent unplanned pregnancy.  Over half of all pregnancies in this age group are unplanned.  This is a big problem and a large, national group.  We believe that the way to reach our audience is to invest some time in a destination site, yes, but also to create small products (there are a lot of group producers out there) that can be marketed effectively via social networks.

BB: What big hairy audacious social media goals will help you achieve your objectives next year?

LS: Our biggest social media goals next year will be to leverage the tools to create an audience from scratch around some new audio and video series.  In addition, with a new administration, a big goal would be to affect new the health policy by including family planning issues.  Social networks can be used to bring some awareness to the issue.

Social media will also allow us to bring people together around sexual health and birth planning issues to allow the newly-formed community to learn from one another.

Bad reaction to a form of birth control?  Tell the community.  Someone has had that problem before.

You’re not alone.  What’s even better is that once people start sharing information, we can feed aggregate information back to the community to help it make better choices.

This kind of information sharing and data mining is why people like Facebook and how Google predicts when the flu might hit your area.  There is no telling what insights await us of we can just gain access to the information and think creatively about it.

BB: How do you plan to integrate your social media efforts with the rest of your marketing mix (e.g., direct mail, email marketing, mobile, media relations, etc.)?

LS: The little things help us to integrate our social media efforts with everything else we do.  For example, including a “follow me” link to our Twitter account on all correspondences,  inviting partners to guest blog, and doing stories in print and online publications about The National Campaign’s social media work are ways to “shuffle the deck.”  Instead of building a landing page where, in the past, we would have accepted comments via an invitation sent via an electronic newsletter, we will invite people to comment into a blog thereby raising awareness to that outlet and avoiding reinventing the wheel.

BB: What is one challenge you face when executing new, social and/or digital media strategy? How are you overcoming this hurdle?

LS: The main hurdle I see is that many people still don’t understand social technology though they believe we have to be involved in some way.  Social networking activities are not hard but they are complex and time consuming.  To post a good Tweet or blog entry, one has to be a decent writer, know the topic, and study what others say on the Internet.  Making the case for dedicated staff to “do social media” is not easy and needs to be done time and again.

BB: What will be the final measure of success for your digital plans?

LS: For The National Campaign, there will be various levels of success.  On one level, it will be measured in terms of eyeballs and ears as the first big challenge is to raise awareness.  A higher level will have us evaluating whether some information is imparted and kept via the various online initiatives.  Last, we aim to reduce the rate of unplanned pregnancies in young adults through better sex education, raising people’s ability to have good relationships, a commitment to personal responsibility, and good state and federal policies regarding family planning.

BB: Do you foresee any particularly enticing opportunities that can help nonprofits/causes reach their social media goals in 2009? Any advice for how to take advantage of related trends?

LS: For nonprofits, the opportunities abound.  Never before has it been so easy, without the help of a development team and/or the media gatekeepers, to get your message out and create a network of people that care about your issue.  A good example is Today’s Meet . Excellent for back channel conversations, it can be set up in seconds and serve as a space for conversations that two years ago just were not possible.