Opinions: Alcohol Awareness Month: Spreading the Message
Posted on Our Thinking about Drinking The Issues Forum
Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success. –Henry Ford
Brown Forman has a longstanding history of responsibility and is a founding member of The Century Council, a not-for-profit dedicated to fighting drunk driving and underage drinking. April is Alcohol Awareness Month in the United States, a time for The Century Council, our funders, our partners, and other stakeholders to work together to remind Americans to make responsible decisions about alcohol.
It is well known that parents wield the greatest influence over their kid’s decision to drink – or not to drink – alcohol. Hearing a responsibility message from a trusted source has a greater impact. This year, The Century Council aimed to start one million conversations about alcohol throughout April - among parents and kids, teachers and students, colleagues, friends, and even elected officials and the public. We provided a “30 Days of Social Media” guide and an infographic, and we asked our partners to distribute responsibility messages via social media.
Throughout Alcohol Awareness Month, we learned that we had to think more broadly about the nature of these conversations, to not only think about who was having the conversations, but also to think about how they were conversing. In the end it mattered less about the specific nature of the conversation (there’s more than one way to talk about it) and more about how many conversations got someone thinking about their own consumption or that of others.
