The #Itdoesnthavetohurt campaign was an innovative year long partnership between Ehm & Co, YMC.ca, and the Center for Pediatric Pain Research. Developed by highly respected pain researcher Dr. Christine Chambers in partnership with Erica Ehm and her Ehm & Co team, this award-winning collaboration was funded by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) grant. YMC.ca and the Center for Pediatric Pain broke new ground in knowledge translation with this initiative. The objective was to find new ways to educate parents on managing children’s pain, and to disseminate important findings about children’s pain directly to Canadian moms and dads quicker and more creatively.
We did this by weaving compelling personal stories with evidence based research. We leveraged our influence in the online mom community with the medical community. There was both a national and grassroots omni-channel approach amplified by a passionate team of mom influencers. Word of mouth amongst Canadian moms changed behavior.
Posts on the YMC site had over 42,000 page views. Our videos were popular with moms, earning 150,000 plus plays on YouTube and Facebook, and winning several awards. Our It Doesn’t Have To Hurt Twitter party trended nationwide and drove so much traffic, we crashed the Sickkids website. Our social media campaign generated over 3 million impressions in earned media.
Because of the success of this program, information about pain has reached millions of parents, empowering them to advocate for their children’s health. Scores of national, international and local press coverage for this partnership has earned highest accolades from the health and pain research community, plus a nomination for the General Governers Innovation Award.
The results? Meaningful dialogue between parents and pain researchers, generating over 100 million impressions to date for this grassroots campaign.
The Centre for Pediatric Pain continues to work with Ehm & Co on knowledge translation projects.