March of Dimes
The Challenge
Each year in the United States, more than 500,000 babies are born prematurely and 120,000 are born with birth defects. Roughly 28,000 premature babies—seven out of every 1,000 born—die each year before reaching their first birthday. Birth defects cause more than 5,600 of those babies to die; premature birth and low birthweight lead to the deaths of over 4,600 more.
And the affected babies who don’t die often suffer the rest of their lives. Birth defects such as spina bifida, cerebral palsy and Down syndrome are severely limiting afflictions, while premature birth can leave a child with a host of conditions such as mental retardation and learning disabilities, chronic lung disease, and vision and hearing impairments. In addition to the emotional toll on families, these problems have far-reaching consequences in society: Preterm birth alone cost the United States more than $26.2 billion in medical care in 2005, according to a recent report.
As part of its quest to prevent birth defects, premature birth and infant mortality, the March of Dimes seeks to teach women of child-bearing age what they can do before and during pregnancy to improve the health of their infants, such as consuming folic acid, stopping smoking, and seeking prenatal medical care.
However, outreach options are not as straightforward as they once were. As the March of Dimes' target audience began spending more of its entertainment and research time on the Internet, the organization began experimenting with awareness advertising on the websites of longtime partners such as American Baby, About.com, Lifetime, Parenting, and Disney.
March of Dimes was also one of the first Google Grant recipients. Google provided the March of Dimes with free listings in search results for terms such as "birth defects," so that its search-engine users could easily find a trusted source of pregnancy-health information.
The March of Dimes found that the Internet was one of the most powerful ways to create awareness among women of child-bearing age. But Internet audiences are highly fragmented, acquiring their information from thousands of different websites—not just Google and the March of Dimes' historical partners.
Widespread outreach would require Public Service Banner Ad placements on thousands of different websites, yet there was insufficient marketing staff at March of Dimes to develop all of these alliances. Besides, forming alliances with hundreds or thousands of smaller websites would be inefficient, if done individually.
