COVID-19 is exposing the travesty of racial health disparities. Healthcare associations have a unique opportunity to lead reform with energized advocacy, impactful initiatives, and multilateral partnerships. But the scale of health inequity calls for more. Healthcare associations, in particular, have a unique opportunity to apply new solutions to reduce health disparities in the pandemic era.

Start your health equity social entrepreneurship journey with these five steps:

1. Elevate health equity as a core strategy for social good. 

2. Focus on a specific social determinant of health that most closely relates to your membership and stakeholders. 

3. Recruit a lead community partner and a lead corporate partner as the first step in developing a multi-sector collaborative innovation team. 

4. Select two or three solutions that align with some of your existing core strengthens and capacities. 

5. Co-design an operational prototype that your collaboration team ranks as most likely to be both impactful to the problem and sustainable with recurrent revenue. 

Go to the Association Ventures Playbook for more details on digital health innovation and your association’s path to serve the public good and generate new nondues revenue.

I’ve been with Brainsy almost from inception and we see all kinds of responses on the various private label social media networks powered by Brainsy. There are a few guidelines on how to write a good response.  

First, be on topic. A good answer will address the “knowledge gap” or the reason the question is being answered. 

Second, explain why you are an authority on the subject. People will have a higher degree of confidence in your response if you are credible. 

Third, reference other sources when needed. Depending on the configuration of the site in which you are participating, you may be able to hyperlink to other sources that you reference. With the correct linking strategy, there could also be benefits to search engine optimization (SEO) if you’re familiar with that growing area of digital marketing.  

Fourth, use the appropriate tone. Is your site a professional site, a site for comedians, or one that is for serious scholarly peers? Be sure to match the tone with the participants on the site.   

Fifth, make sure your response is well organized and grammatically correct.  

Six, don’t reply with one-word or two-word responses. Provide some substance in your response. Pass on a question if you don’t have the time or inclination to answer it. The platform amplifies your response and there’s already enough content clutter in the universe. So be respectful of the person asking the question and others that may take time to read your response. 

Hopefully, these tips will help you write a good response to any questions submitted to you on a Brainsy powered social media site.  

Thank you for the question. Three things to consider:

1. The COVID-19 pandemic is not a wholly unexpected or "black swan" event. In the work of foresight, what is happening now is considered a "wildcard," i.e., something we knew could happen, but we didn't know when. Indeed, there has been considerable discussion of the possibility of a devastating global pandemic over many years, including in a prescient Bill Gates TED talk from 2015.

2. Now that we're in the middle of a crisis, the best option is for chief staff executives and their teams to monitor and manage their associations' day-to-day actions, with the benefit of board perspective and support. Consistent with the duty of foresight, boards (with staff assistance) must focus their attention on learning with the future to understand, anticipate, and prepare for the "next normal" worlds that could plausibly occur in the ensuing 12-18-24-36 months. I use the term "next normal" here because I don't believe the environment that emerges in the immediate aftermath of the current crisis will last. We're going to be feeling this turbulence for some time as we move through different stages.

3. We are all feeling vulnerable right now. Vulnerability is a natural human reaction to risk and uncertainty. Association staff and voluntary decision-makers are not exempt, and it will be highly detrimental to meaningful collaboration if they choose to hide their vulnerability because they want to be "business-like" or "professional." Each of us needs to share what we're feeling so we can support one another, move beyond coping with the current situation, and concentrate on building our associations, stakeholders, and fields to thrive for the remainder of this decade.

Thank you again for your question. I hope you find my response helpful. You're welcome to reach out with any follow-up you may have.

Yes, you can add your private social media network (powered by Brainsy) to the subdomain of your website if it runs on Wordpress or any other Content Management System (CMS). In addition to having your network reside on a sub-domain of your company's site (e.g.  www.KEYWORD.mycompany.com or https://eco.brainsy.com for a live example), another option is to have your social network reside at a domain not directly associated with your company's main domain (e.g. www.KEYWORDorPHRASE.com). In either case, all the heavy lifting is done by Brainsy and the technology is hosted by Brainsy so that you don't have any incremental technical costs associated with the launch or operation of your network.