Corporate Social Responsibility

Infertility: Parole Fertili is now on Instagram

Parole Fertili (“Fertile Words”) is now on Instagram!

The project in which people openly share their experiences of infertility has been online since 2016 on the storytelling platform www.parolefertili.it. Since then, it’s grown into a large community of 24,000 people on Facebook discussing the journey in search of a child.

Stories voluntarily donated to the community are told every day, not only on Facebook, but also on Twitter. The project, which has IBSA Farmaceutici’s unconditional support, has evolved over time, becoming first a video mini-series, then a book published by Mondadori Electa and, finally, the play ‘Quasi Genitori’ (“Almost Parents”).

"We’re delighted to see Parole Fertili enter a new phase of growth, as it’s an important social responsibility project for us’, explains Patrizia Puppi, Corporate Communication & CSR Manager of IBSA Farmaceutici. ‘We’d like to see people talking more and more about new parenthood, declining birth rates and infertility. The social platform Instagram, the second most used in Italy after Facebook, with 28 million users, opens up the possibility of communicating these themes to a young, dynamic audience".

The decision to go on Instagram, where more than half of the users are under 35 years old and 13.9% of them are women aged between 18 and 24, stems from a desire to talk about prevention and fertility protection to a new potential audience, with a narrative made up of images and videos.

"We felt it was important to leverage the potential of a modern, innovative channel," continues Puppi, "to convey a hugely important social message. We’re living in a very difficult historical period from the point of view of birth rates, and it’s important to raise awareness among those age groups who are not yet planning to have a family but who, in order to build their future, need to think about their fertility from the outset".

Parole Fertili’s Instagram account photos, videos and story content focuses on people. It’s an open, interactive profile where community input and participation are welcome.

The editorial line comprises three narrative strands: "Emote", with content centred on people and experiences, on poetic and engaging extracts for empathy and recognition; "Inform", with a more formal and easy-to-read nature to convey key topics, research, studies on topics of interest, and to act as a point of reference and information, as well as a place for dialogue; "Go Beyond", with content that is open to reflection on many key issues revolving around fertility, taboo topics, new perspectives and new stimuli in line with constantly evolving socio-cultural trends and feelings.

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Five posts are published each week: three in Italian and two in English.

Images, videos, cards, fragments of poems, quotes, but also data, information and prevention on the subject of infertility: these are all elements of the Instagram editorial strategy developed for Parole Fertili. Instagram is a visual platform par excellence that allows us to experiment with innovative languages and registers, even on the delicate and personal subject of infertility.

Experimenting with multiple visual and artistic languages is essential to getting even closer to couples who are facing the painful experience of infertility.