Celebrating the Incredible Results of The Motherhood’s Five-Year Partnership with the United Nations Foundation, Shot@Life and Blogust

All of us at The Motherhood are so proud of our work with the UN Foundation and its key initiative Shot@Life over the last five years to help get vaccines to kids in need around the world. 

We care so much about Shot@Life’s mission because of this terrible statistic: In developing countries, one child — often before age five — dies every 20 seconds from a vaccine-preventable disease. 

To help save these kids, every August for the last five years, we’ve teamed up with Shot@Life to run Blogust, a month-long “blog relay” during which stellar social media voices post to their social channels about Shot@Life and the importance of vaccines — and for every comment, like, share, tweet or re-tweet of their social posts, a life-saving vaccine is donated to a child in need. MAM sponsored Blogust 2016, with an initial goal of generating 30,000 vaccine donations.

Working closely with Shot@Life, The Motherhood invited 10 influential bloggers to become UN Foundation Social Fellows and join the Blogust 2016 Team.  To kick off the month and spread awareness of the initiative in real time, Shot@Life and The Motherhood hosted a #Blogust Twitter chat, resulting in more than 1,700 tweets and re-tweets — a great start to the month-long campaign. 

Each of the 10 bloggers, plus five participating United Nations Foundation blogger council members, published a blog or social media post on an assigned day during the month.

In their posts, bloggers shared milestones that they or their children experienced between birth and age five through #ThrowbackThursday or #TBT photos, raising awareness of the fact that millions of children in developing countries contract vaccine-preventable diseases and die before their fifth birthdays.

Nearly 40 alumni from prior Blogust campaigns joined in, posting to their blogs and Instagram and rallying their loyal followers throughout the month.

Incredibly, by mid-month, the full team of Blogust influencers generated 30,000 social media comments, likes and shares.  Thanks to the generosity of MAM, Shot@Life was able to set a new goal of 60,000 social actions.

By month’s end, the final Blogust tally was 65,223 social actions, triggering a total donation of 60,000 vaccines, doubling the original goal and spreading awareness of the global need for life-saving vaccines.

Congratulations to the UN Foundation, to Shot@Life and to the incredible #Blogust team! We are honored to get to work with you on this important and groundbreaking campaign for the last five years, and are thrilled with the tremendous results.

Featured image courtesy of Silvia, Mama Latina Tips.