How Miracle Babies Foundation is growing up strong
Content warning: we touch on some sensitive topics in this episode that could be triggering for some listeners.
On this episode of The CMO Show we talk to Danielle Hodgson, Chief Operating Officer at the Miracle Babies Foundation: an organisation that supports premature newborns, their families, and the hospitals that care for them.
Danielle discusses how the team at Miracle Babies cuts through the noise in a crowded charity landscape, and how partnerships with parents and corporate organisations are key to rallying support.
Lately, it feels like everywhere you turn, there’s a new charity or not-for-profit committed to doing good. They all do incredible work, but with so many to choose from it can be difficult to decide which charities resonate the most.
It’s a big challenge for NFP leaders too – how can they drive their vision and purpose as far as possible, and how can they demonstrate the importance of their work above all the noise?
Danielle Hodgson is the COO at the Miracle Babies Foundation, an organisation that supports premature babies, their families, and the hospitals that care for them.
One of their key challenges is communicating the message that for these families, the hospital is often just the beginning.
‘There’s still very much a misunderstanding within the community around just what these families go through. It certainly does not end when baby goes home’, says Danielle.
For the team at Miracle Babies, authentic storytelling from parents with lived expertise is paramount for creating impact and cutting through the noise.
‘When a family is spending time in the hospital, we provide some journals to them,” says Danielle.
“Once they go home, we encourage these families to share those journals with us – this is the most powerful tool we can use to build awareness within the community. These stories have an incredibly powerful impact in helping these families heal.”
It’s a great episode and an even better organisation. We hope you find this chat as insightful and moving as we did.
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Credits
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The CMO Show production team
Producers – Rian Newman & Pamela Obeid
Audio Engineers – Ed Cheng & Daniel Marr
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Transcript:
Mark Jones
Hello, Mark Jones here – you're listening to The CMO Show, a marketing podcast made for and by marketing professionals here at ImpactInstitute.
Lately it feels like everywhere you turn, there’s a new charity or not for profit committed to doing good. They all do incredible work , but with so many to choose from it can be difficult to figure out which charities resonate the most and which ones you’ll support.
It’s a big challenge for NFP leaders too -- How can they drive their vision and their purpose as far as possible, and how can they demonstrate the importance of their work above all the noise?
In today’s episode of The CMO Show, we’re joined by Danielle Hodgson, Chief Operating Officer at the Miracle Babies Foundation.
The Miracle Babies Foundation supports not only premature and sick newborns, but their families, giving them the support they need during one of the toughest times of their lives.
Danielle and I spoke about her shift from corporate life to working for a charity, the importance of partnerships, and how storytelling is helping Miracle Babies Foundation get their message across.
Before we get into it, I do want to warn you that we touch on some sensitive topics in this episode that could be triggering for people with experience in this area.
It is, however, an important discussion and I loved sitting down with Danielle and learning all about her work with Miracle Babies, so let’s go to our conversation.
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Mark Jones
Thank you so much for joining me.
Danielle Hodgson
Thank you, Mark. It's great to be here today.
Mark Jones
I got to say, when we are talking about newborn babies, and particularly the premature and sick newborns, and this is the space in which you work, this episode probably should come with an emotional warning. Maybe a grab a tissues warning. Is that right? Is that a fair way to think about the emotional aspect of what you do?
Danielle Hodgson
Yes. Miracle Babies Foundation provides peer support to families who have been through a really traumatic experience of having a baby born premature or sick. And there's still very much a misunderstanding within the community around just what these families go through. It certainly does not end when baby goes home. And that time in hospital we are talking, it could be weeks or months that these parents are watching their baby fighting for life. It's truly an emotional rollercoaster. They have a good day, and then the next day might be very, very different. So it's endless surgeries, it's really serious medical conditions, and then there there's very much an unknown. So once they go home, there could be potentially lifelong challenges that they're facing. So you're absolutely right, Mark. It's very emotional and it's really overwhelming and it's not an experience that many truly understand what's involved in.
Mark Jones
Yeah. I've got to say I'm a father of four and my wife and I have three rainbow babies as well. And I think in my family, just watching some of the experiences of those close to me who have experienced this journey, it's actually very difficult to comprehend. Just to make it clear for the listener, getting their head around what you do, it sounds to me like the focus is on the support of the family, the carers. That seems to be the gap in the system. Is that right?
Danielle Hodgson
That's correct, yes. So the NICU teams, and when I say NICU, that's the neonatal intensive care units and special care nurseries. These units are providing the highest level of care to these vulnerable babies, and that's their job is to look after the health of these really critical newborns. At the same time though, there are these parents that are sitting by their humidicrib and they're at a loss. They don't know what to do. And sadly, we hear very often that many of these parents feel that they're not the parent of their own child because they're not the ones that are caring for their babies. And it's a really heartbreaking situation. They're not able to touch their baby. They're not able to do all of those things that they would otherwise be doing at home with their brand new baby.
So our role is to support these medical teams in providing care for the parents so that they are feeling more confident, they feel reassured, they know that they have support there to help them emotionally. And also it's important that their mental health is looked after so that they can be the best possible parents and advocates for their baby who may face lifelong challenges as they grow and get older. So we have teams that will sit inside the NICU and the special care nurseries, and all of our support team has been through the experience themselves. So that's really important that this support is coming from a parent who has walked their shoes.
And this is why it's such a powerful programme, because these parents, they are faced with an experience that many don't relate to and don't understand. And so they often feel that even their closest support network doesn't understand what they're going through and they find it difficult to relate to them and to find the support that they need. So our teams are there to provide that listening ear and provide that glimmer of hope because so many of these babies are going home. They're born just over halfway through the pregnancy, and they're going on to live happy and healthy lives. And they just need that glimmer of hope. They need to hear that there's light at the end of the tunnel and that these days in hospital will end sometime.
Mark Jones
I agree. And one more quick practical question, just as we sort of frame up the situation here. This is not a criticism of the hospital system, but quite clearly they need to be focused on the baby and always that patient-centric view. My experience of hospital has been, here's a plastic chair you can sit on for 12 hours and there's some old sandwiches down in the corridor if you go looking hard enough. The system doesn't really seem to factor in any kind of care for the carers or the parents, right?
Danielle Hodgson
Yeah. So sadly in Australia, there's still a long way to go around the hospital system and being able to provide this care for parents. And understandably, it won't always be possible. But one significant issue or challenge that these parents are facing is that these mothers have often given quite a traumatic birth. They've been through an emergency caesarean, and their baby will be taken to the NICU straight away. Often they don't even get a cuddle with their newborn baby. They're taken straight to the NICU, and then a few days later, mother will be discharged as normal in many, many cases.
So it's a really heartbreaking experience to have to walk out of those hospital doors without your baby. And the next few months would mean travelling back and forth to that hospital, which is often not close to home. There are only 23 NICUs in Australia. For those parents who have a baby in critical care and are having to travel an hour or more to and from the hospital whilst caring for other siblings at home and trying to maintain quite a normal life, it's a really traumatic and overwhelming experience.
Mark Jones
I think we've got a pretty good picture of the significance of the work that you're doing here. Let's just press pause on that. Tell me about yourself. How did you get here? Because you've got a great marketing background, Kimberly-Clark, consumer focus, other work that you've done. Tell me about what brought you to this point in time.
Danielle Hodgson
Yeah. So I was working with very big brands. Kimberly-Clark was a fantastic organisation to work with. And straight out of uni, I entered into the graduate programme. So I started my career in brand management and it just gave me such great experience. It was in that role I was working with cross-functional teams. It was beyond, I guess, a traditional marketing role and you're almost managing a mini business within a bigger organisation.
When I had my first baby, like every parent, your world changes. My baby was born at 37 weeks, so he was not prem, he just scraped through, but he was happy and healthy. And I was very fortunate to have been through a very different experience, but I had no idea what other families were going through. And when I had seen the role come up for Miracle Babies, it was something that I was drawn to. I was always drawn to the not-for-profit. And I felt like at that point in my life, I was feeling a little bit overwhelmed with returning to life as normal, but now with a newborn and in a very fast-paced, high-demand corporate industry. I needed to pursue a different passion and a different challenge.
I've been here for six years and my eyes have been open to a whole new world that I didn't know existed. And just hearing so many really heartbreaking stories just puts life into perspective. And I think I've truly found my passion. I'm not sure that I would return to the corporate space, but not-for-profit comes with its own challenges. And obviously, you don't have the marketing budgets that you have in corporate or other industries, and you do have to be really creative and it very much relies on the relationships that you build within the community.
Mark Jones
I must say we have been speaking with marketers and CMOs for many years now. It's probably one of my favourite moments of... I guess it's a privilege really to hear somebody tell a story where they had that lightbulb moment or perhaps a belief moment as I describe, but I need to be connected to my work in a way that is different. And quite often it's the corporate to charity or NFP sector journey. Associated with that is risk though.
Mark Jones
How does it feel now? Because there's a sense of I want to do this, I have to do it, but am I letting go of something? Am I going to miss an opportunity? Will it work out? Do I have stars in my eyes and maybe I should be a little bit more grounded? Can you just talk us through that experience and professionally how it's changed you?
Danielle Hodgson
Yeah. I think that coming to not-for-profit, you need to have an understanding that it's probably, it becomes who you are. You need to be very connected to your work and there are expectations that... Your heart needs to be in it. And I guess it's not a job where you can turn up and go home and forget about it. The community relies on you. There's not the money in the corporate sector that there is to outsource a lot of the work that we do. So we often do take on extra roles and it does mean extra hours. And I think that that's probably something that many people are aware of. When you do enter into not-for-profit, you do expect that.
I think there's always a bit of hesitation around it, what does this mean for my career. There are obviously so many opportunities in corporate, and then when you come to not-for-profit, it's smaller teams or you might not understand just how much opportunity there is to progress if you're in that head space. But in my experience, I've had some incredible exposure to training. I am very soon travelling to Rome to be part of a medical conference along with my CEO. And I'm being exposed to lots of opportunities within I guess that medical environment and I'm learning so many new things.
Mark Jones
I think there's some amazing wisdom there. You are also chief operating officer, it must be said. So quite clearly you've been able to develop your career, expand. What is that experience like for you?
Danielle Hodgson
Yeah. When I came to Miracle Babies, I went into a fundraising role. I felt that my marketing experience could easily lend itself to going into marketing, although I had no idea what a fundraising role meant and what those challenges would be. There's lots of legalities obviously involved in fundraising. So I had to learn a lot so that I understood. It's a completely new landscape.
But as I've progressed through my time at Miracle Babies, I've taken on a number of different roles, whether it was managing corporate partnerships, being involved in marketing activities and campaigns still. And now I lead the marketing and fundraising departments within Miracle Babies, but also work very closely with the CEO on the day-to-day operations of the organisation and supporting the staff.
So I guess my role has evolved because of my marketing experience, I believe. And that I think it goes back to my experience coming from the corporate sector is that overarching view of a business or a brand, in that case, has allowed me to take on a role like the chief operating officer at Miracle Babies because it is that broad perspective working with a number of different departments and building those relationships.
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Mark Jones
When you think about marketing from a strategy point of view, clearly it's about growth. It's about who do we bring with us on the journey. So it's a very natural progression. Give us a picture of the work that you're doing. Take us through the sorts of stories you tell. What are the tactics that work? There are plenty of people who listen, think about this from a fundraising perspective, but also that growth perspective. What's unique about the tactics that you are employing?
Danielle Hodgson
Yeah. Over time, Miracle Babies has built relationships with a number of associations, and I believe that that has helped us to stand out and cement our role within the NICU, but also gives us a point of difference within this space. So we have built very strong relationships with all of the hospitals that we work with, but also with a number of health professionals. We are involved in research and we have aligned with other organisations that support a similar cause. All of those alliances have helped us to establish a more credible reputation within the community and also have boosted our name within the community, I truly believe.
Mark Jones
What do professional associations, and I note your corporate partners as well, what do they get from partnering with you?
Danielle Hodgson
Many of our corporate partners are involved or have an interest in either baby health or in the medical area, I guess. So their vision is very closely aligned to ours. In delivering against their objectives and I guess their purpose, we can help them to increase credibility for their own organisation, we can increase consideration for their organisation. And there's a growing need, obviously, and an interest for all organisations to partner with a cause that is closely aligned to their vision. So it's developing that social impact and being part of what's happening in the community they need to be responsible for, changing the lives of those communities that they are also seeking to gain support from.
Mark Jones
That's awesome. You may be aware, we recently hosted the Social Impact Summit, our first annual event, a new initiative. And the theory of change behind that is that cross-sector collaboration is one of the biggest opportunities in Australia for people who are looking to make a difference, looking to make a social impact. And there's an incredible appetite in the corporate sector for partnerships with organisations like yours because they have resources and capacity, and most importantly, a desire to make a difference.
My experience has been the boots on the ground, real-world experience of partnerships. So vision and goodwill is one thing, but how do you actually make it work? What do you do? And what do you do that is meaningful and useful, not just getting in the way? This is probably one of the great dilemmas for the NFP and charity sector, which is lots of well-intentioned good people who want to turn up and make sandwiches, but who's going to organise them? Who's going to look after them? Now you've just given me a problem. So give us a quick window into your perspective on that dynamic.
Danielle Hodgson
Well, for us, we rely very much on volunteer support. So we deliver thousands of resource packs to hospitals across Australia. All of those packs are packed by volunteers here in our head office. So, whenever we have a corporate team that's willing to help us to do that, then that makes a big difference for us, and we're always welcoming that support. Particularly for our big corporate partners, we want to allow them to be immersed in the life of these families. So we would often invite them to our NurtureGroups, which are our play and support groups. We've done visits to the NICU before so that they can go into the NICU, they can see what these families are going through in their most critical time and in that critical phase.
And it's that immersion into the world of what we do that's really important, particularly for them. It brings them on the journey and it makes them more engaged. And we do find that a better relationship builds, and off the back of that, they're willing to do more for us, and it becomes much more of a two-way relationship. We are very fortunate that we have some of our corporate partners that donate lots of product for certain activities. Christmas, we deliver gifts to all of the families that are spending time in the NICU. And it's our corporate partners that have come through to help us do that quite often as well. And that's off the back of the engagement that we've been able to build.
Mark Jones
So Danielle, more broadly, tell us about media partnerships and how you scale your message out to different audiences.
Danielle Hodgson
So we have two key months of the year, May and November, that are our key focus months to highlight the work that we do within the community. For those two months, we have worked with a media agency to secure TV, radio, and print media. At those times, it's really important that we find the right angle and often it's advocating for something beyond our services. So in November, we're promoting our advocacy for change in the Paid Parental Leave scheme with the federal government. And so it's those really, I guess, newsworthy points and things that we might be doing beyond our average, our normal services, our day-to-day services that are really important to get national exposure for.
Throughout the year though, we will often go to radio stations and print publications to get, whether it's an in-kind advertorial where we can. Or 2GB recently did some support for us in May, and we were the chosen charity to support for that month. That was also a month that we were holding our biggest fundraising activity, our Quadruple Giving Day. So 2GB, working together with them on that message, they were able to share with their audience that campaign, and we were able to achieve our second highest result to date since running that for six years. So really coming up with the right message, I guess a hook that these partners would be really compelled to get behind, that's really important.
Our ambassadors are also very important in a reaching a broader audience beyond what we can do. So we've got a number of ambassadors, including Megan Schutt, who is an Australian cricketer. She's one of our newest ambassadors. We've also got Bryce and Melissa from Married at First Sight. So they've been great at being able to share their own stories. So we do find that providing that insight into what these families are going through is really important because it's not something that everybody can relate to. And there is still that misconception that once baby goes home, then everything goes back to normal and life just moves on, and that's simply not the case.
Mark Jones
Another big part of your work are these incredible testimonials, family stories, and they're very personal, human-centric, purpose driven, if you like, lots of the buzzwords we use in marketing. But honestly, they're extraordinarily powerful. Just give us an insight into how they come together and what impact they're having.
Danielle Hodgson
So, when a family is spending time in the hospital, we provide some journals to them. So our NICU Survival Pack is one of our key resources that are provided once baby's admitted to the NICU. And one thing that is really powerful in helping these families to cope and to process their own journey is to reflect on what's happening day to day and to write it all down.
Now, once they go home, we encourage these families to share that with us because this is the most powerful tool that we can use to build that awareness within the community. And then all of these stories are published to our website, which is miraclebabies.org.au. And that does two things. So we obviously will share these throughout campaigns through our social media channels throughout the year for fundraising purposes and to build awareness, but also it has an incredibly powerful impact in helping these families heal.
So we often hear that just that moment that this family feels confident and it feels comfortable in talking about this story after it's all happened, brings a sense of relief. It helps them to process what they've just been through, and it is part of their healing journey. So those stories are doing two things. And we're overwhelmed actually by just how open some of these families are about sharing everything that's happened in their experience, whether it's a radio interview or a TV interview. They're incredibly passionate about sharing what they've been through because it's a really insightful and important part of their life.
Mark Jones
Danielle, I notice on the wall behind you it looks like a poster with corporate values, and one of which I can see is empathy. I suspect hearing these stories, it's hard not to empathise, but at the same time, how do you cope? Do you have to develop some sort of professional filter to keep it together?
Danielle Hodgson
Yeah, there's lots of crying in our office.
Mark Jones
Okay. There we go.
Danielle Hodgson
And I think that that's natural. You hear definitely those heartbreaking stories of babies that haven't come home and it's hard not to get emotional. It's taking what we've heard and it gives you more passion and it inspires you even more. So when new team members start, it's important that we take them into the NICU so that they can see what these families are going through. It's that exposing our team to the hardest stories and those hardest moments because it really gives us meaning and it gives us purpose and it makes us better at our jobs. So we embrace the emotion of it.
Mark Jones
I'm going to ask a difficult question, and it's through a marketing lens. You raise the point that there are two essential outcomes, baby stays in hospital and baby comes home. When you are sharing these stories from the perspective of how does the organisation grow and get the greatest engagement with potential donors, supporters, and partners, is that the baby doesn't come home story that really resonates and gets the most attention or the baby comes home story? Have you thought about it in those... And forgive me for being a little bit brutal, but have you thought about it in those terms?
Danielle Hodgson
Yeah, you're right. Both of them, I guess, play different roles. When baby doesn't come home, we share those stories very often particularly with major supporters, with corporate partners as well. You need to share that it's not always a good outcome. We need to be real that this is a reality, and this very often happens, but it's that balancing because within our social channels and on our database, and all of our channels are reaching many families who are going through this now. Our role is to provide hope, is to provide reassurance. And we don't ever, I guess, paint the picture that everything will be okay, because in reality we don't know that. But it is providing that glimmer of hope. So it is a bit of a balance. But certainly when we're gaining support, those really heartbreaking stories often brings big supporters to us.
Mark Jones
Yeah. Thank you for sharing. Because I think what I'm taking away is that you need both. You need the light and shade. Again, forgive the simplification. But you need that hope. You also need to show that you were there in the hard time. And I ask because I recently had a chat with Doug Taylor who is the CEO at the Smith family and he was talking about how in The Smith Family's experience, sad children and happy children in their marketing performed equally well, which I thought was interesting, and the need for the difference. So when you think about that, if you were to package up your experiences in marketing and now the operations side, can you summarise the key lessons that anybody could take from this and apply in their role?
Danielle Hodgson
Yeah. I think that you need to be real and you... to Doug's point, that they both work equally well. We do find that although we try to focus on the happy stories just as much, we do always, in our imagery, we do show baby in their most critical phase first. So if we're sharing a family story, it's always baby in hospital first, because that's the experience. That's why we're here. And the good story will come after that. But that's what we often lead with. So I think the biggest lesson is that you need to paint the problem very clearly. So it's not about communicating what we do, as in what our services are all the time. It's you need to make people understand what the problem is and why we need the support that organisations like us provide.
But then building the trust and credibility I think is really important coming from a marketing background where it's very important to make sure that people trust your brand, the qualities there, that you've got, I guess, the testing and the research behind it. Equally, in not-for-profit, you need to demonstrate your trustworthiness even more, I think. So transparency is so important. And to that point, it's the on the ground, showing people what you're doing day to day. They need to see where their money is going, and donors are trusting that you are doing the right thing with their money.
So I think from a marketing perspective, trust is probably the number one thing that we focus on, and building that credibility. And we recently did some work with ImpactInstitute to measure the impact of our programmes. And I think that that independent study is really important because it's an external evaluation of what you are doing. So it's really important for me to build that credibility and trust.
Mark Jones
You anticipated my next question, which was going to be the social impact framework that we developed a couple of years ago, which did show there was an evidence base for the work that you're doing. And we know that in Australia that's culturally particularly important in any organisation. You need to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness, not just the immediacy of your work, so the outcomes in the day-to-day, but that long-term sustained impact that has a positive difference. So I think that's something that anybody, I think, can take on board. What's next for Miracle Babies? Where do you see you guys growing? What's the opportunities and what gives you hope?
Danielle Hodgson
It's actually a really exciting time for Miracle Babies at the moment. Since we launched, we have, I guess our vision, everything that we do has been very focused on that newborn stage, when they're in hospital and when they've just gone home until they just go to school. But what we have started evolving into is much more lifelong support. And that's a really exciting phase for the foundation. I guess it's almost feels like a bit of a reset phase where we need to go back and perhaps re-look at our vision because we're no longer just focused on the newborn phase. We're much more involved in education and the launch of our Nurture 'E' information hub in 2020. It's an online information hub that assists families throughout all life stages, even up until adulthood.
So that education side, which is empowering these families with much more knowledge so that they can be more confident, they can advocate for their child through those early development years as they're going to school and older. And also people who were born premature can advocate for themselves because they can find this evidence-based information in language that they can easily understand. And I guess that education piece and that lifelong support is opening us up to... Yeah, it's helping us grow up, I guess. Yeah, it's certainly an exciting phase.
Mark Jones
You're growing up with the Miracle Babies. I love that lifelong journey aspect that you're speaking to, and in particular, people who had this experience when they were a newborn, now being able to speak for themselves. What I love about that was a takeaway from Social Impact Summit where we discussed redefining the way that we think about beneficiaries of programs as not people with lived experience, but people with lived expertise. So they are the expert in their story, and they're the expert in being able to articulate the felt needs and to be able to speak to their context. And I just found that a really powerful way of considering how to build long-term programs that have a lasting impact. So perhaps that's something that speaks to where you're going.
Danielle Hodgson
It's really exciting to be able to give people that voice for themselves, and it's really a confusing time. So yeah, being through it themselves. You always trust your gut first is what I truly believe. And this is, I guess, empowering them with the confidence to act on those instincts.
Mark Jones
Well, Danielle, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the show. I didn't cry. I thought I was going to, so I don't know whether that's good or bad, but certainly made an impact on me. I'm really encouraged by the work you and the team are doing at Miracle Babies. And no doubt, if people want more information, they can get you on the web and the various social channels. And yeah, again, thanks for being with us on the program and all the best.
Danielle Hodgson
Well, thank you very much, Mark. It was great to chat to you.
Mark Jones
That was Danielle Hodgson from the Miracle Babies Foundations – these guys are changing the lives of families for good, one premature baby at a time and it’s a privilege to hear her story.
Miracle Babies Foundation stands up for the voiceless, and they support parents who might otherwise have nowhere to turn in such difficult times. It was so awesome to hear about this organisation, they’re being filled with good, like-minded people who are ready to lend a helping hand.
Of course, working at a not for profit isn’t for everyone – you’ve got to wear many hats and deal with heartbreak regularly. But for people like Danielle and the rest of the team at Miracle Babies Foundation, who go with purpose in everything they do, it’s got to be worth it, and we know that. What an amazing story.
So thank you for joining me on today’s episode to hear Danielle’s story – we'll see you next time, thanks for joining us, until then.