The Power of A

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association represents 135,000 members and affiliates who are speech-language pathologists, audiologists, and speech, language, and hearing scientists in the United States and internationally.  ASAE is pleased to present this guest post by Joseph Cerquone, CAE, Director of Public Relations

A powerful collaboration is at the core of a major effort of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). I am talking about ASHA’s Listen To Your Buds public education campaign www.listentoyourbuds.org which features alliances with leading parties in the world of health and science (the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders); the consumer electronics industry (the Consumer Electronics Association) and children’s media (Parents’ Choice Foundation), not to mention a committed coalition of leading children’s musicians, plus ASHA grassroots members, the very pulse of ASHA’s national network.

These parties have joined together to save the public the pain and trouble of having noise-induced hearing loss, and to spare society the costs that come with caring for those who develop the condition. Moreover, they all see the value of getting a head start on a potential health problem. The Listen To Your Buds campaign aims at teaching very young children about their hearing and about good listening habits to keep them from ever joining the ranks of those whose misuse of personal audio technology such as MP 3 players puts them potentially at risk of developing hearing loss.

The prevention focus could not be timelier given where the nation is with budgetary and health care matters. What’s more, the joint effort of these collaborators is producing very effective message delivery. Grounded in hearing expertise, encouraged by industry support, and equipped with connections to quality children’s entertainment, ASHA’s campaign has wrapped its messaging in an attractive invitation, one that offers schools free educational field trips to Buds Safe Listening concerts featuring coalition musicians and their very engaging ways of communicating with the young. The response has been enthusiastic, the impact considerable. Children are not just getting the message of ASHA’s Buds campaign-survey results show that they are embracing it.

Meanwhile, if there was a contest for best at growing important health messages at the grassroots, a title contender might be ASHA’s “Early Warning Signs” public education campaign. The very name of this outreach suggests its value, for it, too, is aimed at prevention, focused on helping parents monitor their children’s speech and language development, and encouraging them to seek professional help if they suspect that something is awry.

It is tempting to hold up the strong media response to this campaign as the primary evidence of its power, for in some of the biggest broadcast markets nationally, parents are getting the campaign’s valuable tips, commonly via prominent spots on local news broadcasts and morning talk shows.

Yet, right behind the coverage lies a story which underscores the inherent power of associations and collaboration. Its main characters are ASHA’s own grassroots members who have volunteered in droves to be the media subject experts for the Early Warning Signs campaign. Easy for them to do?  Not exactly. Live television can be nerve-wracking and inconvenient. Some volunteers have media experience, but others do not. Sometimes, too, at the very last minute, our members have to adjust their busy schedules in order to participate.

However, working together with ASHA’s national office, ASHA’s grassroots members have come through, proving themselves again and again to be very good in their campaign role. In addition, this particular collaboration promises to reap results exponentially, for members are making themselves known as helpful information resources in their own communities, establishing themselves to be contacted by the media for other stories in the future. Today, speech and language development is the topic-tomorrow, it could be another area of human communication that profoundly affects millions of Americans.

The point is that through the “Early Warning Signs” campaign, a coast-to-coast health messaging delivery system is being  built that can stave off a lot of public pain and expense, with the grassroots members of an association cast as the lead story tellers.  Any way one looks at it, that’s promising-and that’s power.