Government Agency Uses Blog for Critical Public Health Initiative

In May of 2007, the US Department of Health & Human Services launched an unprecedented public health initiative focused on helping citizens prepare for a possible influenza pandemic. Notoriously complicated and prone to strong political and public reactions, the government agency enlisted the help of Ogilvy Public Relations to develop a strategy to raise awareness and encourage a dialog over this critical public health issue.

Spearheaded by Ogilvy strategists Alison Byrne Fields and Rohit Bhargava, the public health initiative took advantage of "live blogging" as a way to increase the transparency of health policy discussions between public, private and government sector leaders, and invite citizen participation in the dialog.

I believe this is a first of its kind for a large-scale government communications program, but it will inevitably serve as a model for public participation in important government policy initiatives that span a number of issues from public health to national security to environmental regulation. You can visit the archived content from the Health & Human Services initiative at the Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog.

Ogilvy's use of blogging for the public health initiative obviously reflects the broader trend over the past few years towards increased transparency and dialog in marketing communications. But, blogging in the government sector raises a number of interesting considerations and tactical questions. 

For a relatively niche community interested in the subject matter, how do you mobilize public participation? And, what should the goals of a blog like this be with regard to participation?  Finally, why "live blogging" - which implies blogging around a particular event, rather than setting up a blog for an ongoing dialog which isn't time bound? 

I put these questions to Ogilvy's Alison Byrne Fields and here are some of her responses:

"The ultimate goal is for the broader public to prepare for pandemic flu. At this stage in the program, HHS is engaging leaders from health care, community and faith-based groups and employers to communicate to their patients, communities, congregants and employees about the importance of individual and family preparedness.  It is worth noting that the work we are doing within social media is just a part of a much larger initiative.  One of the most interesting things about this project has been the discovery of a very large and vibrant (and knowledgeable) online community of people who are building a grassroots movement to encourage pandemic flu preparedness.  (It’s call flublogia and they refer to themselves as flubies)."

"We did market the blog and, inevitably (and thankfully), there was some organic word of mouth that occurred.  Our outreach was targeted at online “influencers” within the four sectors that I identified above: the blogs and sites that those people read regularly and whom they trust."

"[T]he purpose of the live blogging was to let people who were not in attendance to know what happened.  As far as the life of the blog, it will be closed to comments on the 27^th and archived on http://pandemicflu.gov, the government’s web site for all things pandemic flu.  There is talk about future blogs (or a different version of this blog), but there are no definitive plans at this point."

Overall, this is a very exciting development in government and advocacy communications. However, it's a shame that this blogging initiative is constrained to a particular "PR campaign," and not the launch of an ongoing and supported communications platform for dialog and policy innovation.

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