M4ID

M4ID is proud to have worked with:

• United Nations Population Fund
• MacArthur Foundation
  
• World Health Organization, HQ, Health Action in Crises
  
• World Health Organization, European Region, Immunization and Vaccines
  
• World Health Organization, South-East Asia Region, Immunization and Vaccines
• World Health Organization, South-East Asia Region, Emergency Health Action
• World Health Organization, South-East Asia Region, HIV/AIDS
  
• The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health
• The Resource Alliance – IFC Online
  
• Allianssi
• The Family Federation of Finland
• The Finnish Confederation of Professionals
  
• Maternity Worldwide
  
• One by One
• The Finnish Police Federation
  
• Service Centre for Development Cooperation (KEPA)
• Aalto University

Current and Recent M4ID initiatives:

Ongoing work

M4ID is in the process of developing five new international initiatives.   We’ll post about them here as they are launched..

Training

M4ID’s Mari Tikkanen was one of the speakers of this years (as well as last years) IFC Online webinar event, alongside Obama’s social media strategist Scott Goodstein, Kiva’s President, Premal Shah, and YouTube’s non-for-profit manager, Ramya Raghavan.    M4ID spoke to listeners from 140 countries about strategies for re-energizing government relations, using social media and viral marketing tools as well as on building an action oriented community.  M4ID has recently trained 50 youth organizations (members of Allianssi) in connecting with younger audiences through social media, as well as training 30 development NGOs (KEPA) in effective social media use.  We’ve also trained Finnish police in social media use.

European Immunization Week – Social Media Campaign

WHO’s fourth European Immunization Week (EIW) took place from 20-26 April, with 36 countries taking part in the initiative this year.  M4ID designed and managed WHO’s first ever viral campaign for EIW. This new approach was spearheaded by an animated YouTube video spreading the immunization message virally, “word-of-mouse”, as well as driving traffic to an interactive website.  Social networking sites Facebook, VKontakte and Studivz, as well as blogs and microblogging service Twitter have been used to reinforce the message.

The video was released on April 21, and was viewed more than 10,000 times in the first 2 weeks, many times more than WHO publications were downloaded in the whole of 2008.  Additionally, the EIW site received 7 times more visitors in 2009, compared to 2008.   The video and approach also resulted in positive responses from a number of donor governments, broad social media commenting and blogoshpere discussion (+2o blog posts), as well as active online dialogue in priority countries such as Romania and Germany.

Click a Brick for Safe Hospitals

M4ID has developed the first Asian, multi-country viral campaign for WHO’s South-East Asia Region.  The World Health Day campaign aims to gather 1 million supporters for the ‘Safe Hospitals in emergencies’ theme.  With the help of this mass, WHO will lobby and advocate for action and investment among political decisison makers in the region. The campaign was launched 7 April in New Delhi, India and will run till 10 April, 2010.

The ClickaBrick initiative invites supporters to join in virtually rebuilding a destroyed hospital and links together safe hospital stakeholders.  The first phase of the campaign focused on email sharing.  Phase 2, which centres around innovative social media applications and celebrity support, is currently in design.

Harnessing Social Media for Emergency Response

An innovative project, designing new social media prototypes for WHO’s global emergency response, ended May 2009.

The project was carried out by students from the Media Lab, University of Art and Design, Helsinki. The three MA groups, lead by Professor Teemu Leinonen and M4ID’s Mari Tikkanen, developed the following concepts for WHO:

- Tool 1: A field based SMS tool for people to help themselves in immediate aftermath of emergency
- Tool 2: A collaborative, interactive platform for manuals and training material
- Tool 3: An embeddable widget for data presentation and visualization

WHO has decided to implement all 3 concepts.  The development process and related information can be followed through the project blog:

New Media Concepts for WHO

Generating Support for Maternal Health

UNFPA’s Push for Change (PUSH) campaign, designed by M4ID to raise awareness and support for maternal health among the public and decision-makers in Finland, exceeded set targets.  PUSH harnessed the power of the Internet, and used an interactive website, a Facebook group, Facebook application, viral e-mail campaign and YouTube video to reach the target audience.  187,000 people visited the website, 10,000 signed the PUSH appeal and the campaign was covered in +40 traditional media articles.  Most importantly, political advocacy was very successful with both Minister Paavo Väyrynen and President Tarja Halonen voicing their support for PUSH and maternal health, including officially at the Progress on MDGs meeting held in NY in September 2008.  The campaign also resulted in the Government of Finland making a € 500,000 investment in UNFPA’s Maternal Health Trust Fund as well as providing an additional € 5 million un-earmarked funding to UNFPA.

Facebook Application Preggers

The PUSH campaign used novel approaches to enagage social media users, such as the Facebook application, Preggers, through which Facebook users were able to impregnate friends virtually while sharing information about realities of childbirth in developing countries.   By sharing the ap, users also elevated their own status from TBA, trained midwife, OBGYN etc, while being introduced to the role these play in improving maternal health in the field.<

Lobbying G8 Leaders

M4ID also designed an online global lobbying campaign for the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, an umbrella organization for over 260 international agencies working on maternal and child health. The campaign ‘The Missing Piece’, aimed to lobby G8 leaders, meeting in Japan in July, to commit to essential interventions that could avert the deaths of over 6 million mothers, newborn and children every year and to increase financial support to ensure women and children receive the health care they need.

The campaign resulted in maternal health being on the G8 agenda for the first time in history. Leaders also committed to renewed investment in this area.