Mediaboss Marketing

One city. One focus. One hundred women.

That was the message presented Wednesday when the Milwaukee Health Department, in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Zilber School of Public Health, launched a social marketing campaign to reduce Milwaukee's infant mortality rate and increase healthier birth outcomes.

The online campaign, called the Women 2 Women for Healthy Babies Project, is a series of videos that will be posted over the coming year. The videos draw on 17 hours of interviews during which 100 women of diverse races, cultures and ethnicities describe their common experiences as mothers, aunts, grandmothers and neighbors.

"This video project represents a chance to celebrate mothers and to learn from their experience," Milwaukee Health Commissioner Bevan Baker said.

"With this project, we hope to reach the community with parenting wisdom from credible, culturally relevant sources," he said.

In other words, said Bonnie Halvorsen, assistant dean of the School of Public Health, rather than listening to lectures by people in lab coats, those who watch the videos will become engaged with "the real-world stories and experiences of people like themselves."

A montage displaying the diversity and emotional range of the videos was shown to about 400 business and community leaders gathered for the United Way of Greater Milwaukee's annual Women's Leadership Luncheon.

"The women who participated in this project discuss everything from prenatal care and breast-feeding to the importance of involving fathers and avoiding tobacco exposure," said Magda Peck, founding dean of the School of Public Health. "These are issues important for all parents to be mindful of."

The infant mortality rate in some Milwaukee neighborhoods is worse than many Third World nations. Last year, 100 babies did not live to see their first birthdays. While the city's overall infant mortality rate is declining, the racial disparities increased in 2011, when African-American babies died at three times the rate of white babies.

The project's Web page is expected to be launched June 1. Links to the videos, which will be updated weekly, also will be found at the School of Public Health's website, www4.uwm.edu/publichealth.

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Social marketing, video seek to cut Milwaukee's infant mortality rate