MAMA: Motherhood Around the Globe

CAPTION: A screenshot of the launch homepage of the MAMA: Motherhood Around the Globe exhibition. The homepage banner image and color templates change monthly, when new galleries launch online.

On January 24, 2012, the International Museum of Women launched its brand new flagship exhibition, MAMA: Motherhood Around the Globe. MAMA explores emerging issues, unique challenges, and changing perspectives of motherhood throughout the world.  The exhibition showcases original creative works, including art, film, music, photography, essays and interviews, reflecting the stories, visions and voices of motherhood from more than 60 countries—with more than 200 works to be rolled out by September 2012.

The exhibition aims to inspire a global conversation about mothers’ lives and rights in the 21st century and to boost awareness on issues such as improving maternal health worldwide. According to the United Nations (2010), a woman dies every 90 seconds from preventable causes during pregnancy and birth.

CAPTION: A screenshot of the “Mama to Be?” gallery landing page, one of 8 topic galleries.

In order to provoke conversation around the critical global issue of maternal health and mortality, we developed a series of eight Topic Galleries. A new gallery launches every month for the life of the exhibition, and each gallery presents museum-produced original content to present a range of contemporary global perspectives on motherhood. For example, we created a series of video interviews with 11 mothers from countries around the world (including Afghanistan, Kenya, China, and more), asking questions related to the 8 topic galleries. We’ve also interviewed women from around the world for our “Heroes” column, which profiles activists, doctors, and leaders from around the globe who are making improvements in maternal health. We’ve commissioned “Big Ideas” essays, from thought leaders including Kavita Ramdas, former CEO of the Global Fund for Women, and Christy Turlington Burns, supermodel and founder of the maternal health organization Every Mother Counts, and created “In Context” essays that include facts and figures about the issues grounding each Topic Gallery, with accompanying infographics. We also feature selected, juried community work in our Your Voices section of the exhibition, including photography, video, creative writing, and more.

Finally, we have included an “Art Gallery” of more than 100 individual works of art from artists from over 30 countries globally. We also curated a selection of short stories from celebrated women authors, and offer the short stories (as well as additional stories not available on the site) in the form of an e-book for purchase (or free with museum membership).[CAPTION: A screenshot of one of the featured stories in MAMA: Motherhood Around the Globe. The online exhibition features a variety of media, all beautifully presented, including photography, Q&A interviews, film, essays, artwork, and more.]

All of the content included in MAMA was included with the aim of enhancing IMOW’s mission to inspire creativity, awareness, and action on vital global issues for women. We built in several opportunities for audience action, including prominent and easy commenting functionality with Disqus, a “Community Choice Award” contest in which everyone is invited to vote, and an opportunity to sign a pledge created by IMOW and Every Mother Counts for maternal health rights. With a goal of 10,000 signatures, the pledge will be delivered to governments and policy makers, culminating with a special presentation in conjunction with the UN General Assembly in September 2012. The pledge page is simple to use and easy to share with friends, and includes a “ticker” at the top of the page that automatically calculates how near IMOW is to our goal of 10,000 signatures.

An important goal for IMOW in creating this exhibition was to improve upon any existing social media sharing functionality on IMOW’s sites. For MAMA, we made sure to add Facebook, Twitter, and email share buttons at the bottom of each individual content piece. We also created a floating “Share” toolbar that follows the user up and down the screen, on the right hand side of the page. This ease of use encourages visitors to share content and spread the word about the exhibition virally.

 Caption: The interactive 'Take the Pledge' page

Since launching the exhibition on January 24, we have had more than 23,000 unique visitors, which is more than double our past average exhibition traffic. We’ve also received prominent media coverage from well-respected outlets including the Huffington Post, Babble.com, CafeMom, Pregnancy and Newborns magazine, Daily Candy, and many more.

In creating the MAMA: Motherhood Around the Globe exhibition, IMOW aimed to focus national and international attention on global motherhood and maternal health issues, represent a vast diversity of women from all parts of the globe and in all walks of life, and galvanize audiences to activism through introducing action opportunities that are easy to complete and share via social networking. The online-only museum model not only ensures that we reach the widest possible audience, but allows audiences to connect with IMOW and the important topics included in the exhibition free of charge and on their own terms.