The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Getting the Facts to Teens and Beyond

Photo by Catherine P. Lewis, courtesy of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy addresses two of the most important of choices young people must make – when to have sex, and how to be safe. Too often a taboo topic for conversation, sex and its consequences can be seen in the hundreds of thousands of unplanned babies who are born each year. They are statistically more likely to suffer a cascade of life-altering challenges: developmental delays, lower grades, higher high school drop-out rates, lower college attendance rates, lower paying jobs, and higher rates of divorce.

The Hewlett Foundation has supported the National Campaign’s work with an $18 million, three-year grant to expand its goals to include women in their twenties, who account for the largest portion of each year’s 1.3 million abortions.

The newly broadened campaign has already begun communicate with teens and twenty-somethings about how to prevent unplanned pregnancies. Through its Media Advisory Group, the National Campaign has developed partnerships with more than 100 major media leaders and works with every major television broadcast network and with many of the top cable networks to weave prevention messages into the content of their work.

For more information, please visit:
http://www.thenationalcampaign.org/.

Marketing Good Health for All

Photo by Alyssa Banta

Population Services International (PSI), one of the world’s largest nonprofit social marketing organizations, uses the tools of the business world to help provide reproductive health services to the world’s poor.

Active in more than sixty developing countries, PSI uses such business techniques as market research, focus groups, and study of distribution systems to harness the laws of supply and demand to meet reproductive-health-care needs.

Their goal is to ensure that these offerings become self-sustaining, rather than dependent on charitable donations.

The key is in asking questions, listening well, and applying lessons from the business world. When PSI staffers took family planning products into Zambia, for instance, they talked to locals about the best brand name, price, and marketing tools. Their work makes sure those products will be reliably available through local businesses, so sales and distribution can go on long after the nonprofit that initially supplied them has left.

For more information, please visit:
http://www.psi.org/.