Text4baby Campaign

Text4baby is a free mobile information service designed to promote maternal and child health. An educational program of the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition (HMHB), text4baby provides pregnant women and new moms with information to help them care for their health and give their babies the best possible start in life.

Women sign up for the service by texting BABY (or BEBE in Spanish) to 511411. For the first six days (starting the day after they sign up), they receive messages on a daily basis. The service then provides three free text messages each week, timed to the woman’s due date or her baby’s date of birth.

Text4baby is made possible through a broad, public-private partnership that includes government, corporations, academic institutions, professional associations, tribal agencies, and nonprofit organizations. Founding partners are HMHB, Voxiva, CTIA and The Wireless Foundation. Johnson & Johnson is the founding sponsor; premier sponsors include WellPoint, Pfizer, and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. U.S. government partners include the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Benefits for Project LAUNCH: Text4baby is proving to be a creative, cost-effective model for delivering health messages and resource information quickly and effectively to women who may be at risk due to a lack of health information and the services they need to have a healthy pregnancy and healthy baby. In the four weeks since the campaign began, almost 17,000 women have signed up for the service. The messages they receive focus on many topics critical to maternal and child health, including prevention of birth defects, immunization, nutrition, seasonal flu, mental health, oral health, and safe sleep. The messages also connect women to prenatal and infant care services and other resources.

Getting Started

The text4baby Web site (www.text4baby.org) has a partner portal, where your organization can download promotional materials and read updates about the program.

Becoming an Outreach Partner

Outreach Partners spread the word about text4baby by encouraging the women they reach to sign up for the service. There are a variety of ways to become involved as an Outreach Partner, for example:

- Adding text4baby information to your Web site

- Including text4baby information in your mailings, e-mail list postings, or newsletter

- Displaying text4baby posters in your facilities

- Promoting text4baby through public health or wellness campaigns

Outreach Partners will receive a toolkit to assist in outreach efforts, access to the online partner portal, technical assistance for outreach efforts, and a weekly e-mail alert with program updates.

If you are interested in becoming a partner and would like to find others involved within your state, contact partners@text4baby.org or visit http://text4baby.org