Boehringer Ingelheim has extended the Making More Health initiative it launched last year into the realm of social media.
The pharma company is midway through a three-year partnership with ‘social entrepreneur’ association Ashoka and to further its work in this area it recently set up a new blog, called More Health.
Pharma has taken increasing interest in blogging over the course of 2012, with new initiatives launched from Sanofi, Lilly, AstraZeneca, Bayer and Shire.
Taking the lead on the Boehringer’s new blog is Lilly Ackley, whose responsibilities at the company include serving as president of the philanthropic Boehringer Ingelheim Cares Foundation.
She said the blog was a way to help Boehringer connect and network with social entrepreneurs – people and groups that focus on finding innovative solutions to societal problems.
“Over the last couple of years we’ve been working more closely with these types of entrepreneurs in this innovative space and what we wanted to do with our blog is basically bring that forward,” she told PMLiVE.
The company is looking to take an inclusive stance with the blog, she said, pointing to early guest posts from Ashoka’s Amy Clark and Michelle Cote from social enterprise trust reSET.
“We wanted to not just talk about us, which is quite easy to do, but we wanted to give an opportunity to our partners, whether they were a traditional non-profit or a social enterprise, to have a dialogue,” Ackley said.
Acknowledging that it’s still early days for the blog, which Boehringer quietly launched in November, Ackley said it also aligns with the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals.
The More Health blog also achieves the distinction of being the first time the company, often at the forefront of pharma social media, has set up a blog, though it has plans for one called The Future Just Happened.
