Rediscover motherhood

Fueled by her own experience of searching for clarity on information, Tamanna Dhamija, founder and chiefexecutive officer of ‘Baby Destination’, took it upon herself to build the biggest digital community ofmothers in India, as she was starting to discover motherhood. 

This very concept started off in a simple way withjust a Facebook page where she started posting content for mothers and a handful of mothers across aWhatsApp group that started with offline interactions. Today,‘Baby Destination’ has beautifully turned intoIndia’s largest organic community of mothers online. 

“Our conversational insights and data science backbone has led to us extracting key insights to define the new age millennial Indian mother,” shares Tamanna. 

Excerpts from an interview 

What is Baby Destination all about?
Baby Destination is a trusted community for pregnant and new moms who come to learn and share their parenting experiences and recommendations with other moms. The vision of the platform is to connect moms around the country to draw upon their collective wisdom and help others in their journey of motherhood. 
The platform stretches across the web destinations, Facebook and WhatsApp group. 

The brand has already created an organically grown, credible community that reaches more than 12 million mothers every month. The community has already reached a milestone of 500k conversations amongst mothers across its platforms. These conversations are used to extract insights and data analytics to build further engagement for the community.

What is the reason behindstarting ‘Baby Destination’?
When I was first pregnant with my son and we started thinking about the things to buy for him, I was overwhelmed with the whole process! Researching online and conflicting reviews only added to the confusion. 

In the end what came to my rescue was valuable advice from my friends who had children and experts (pediatrician/lactation expert etc). 

That was what got me thinking- in this time and age where technology is present in every part of our life from hailing a cab to finding someone to date, why is it that there is no platform that connects moms to create a community that can recommend and discover the best products for their children. That’s when the idea of ‘Baby Destination’ was born.

Challenges you faced to build a community?
We understood the biggest challenge in building this community would be with the factor of trust and credibility. We overcame this by creating relevant content to accelerate the community by word of mouth and grow it organically. We also understood that the community needs to be across mediums, and therefore, we extended our community by creating WhatsApp and Facebook groups segregated by issues/topics. 

The WhatsApp community of mothers has, itself, grown to more than 50,000 mothers.We want to expand our regional footprint by creating more local and multilingual communities and do content in various different languages. Right now we have content in five languages.

You got selected for Facebook Community Leadership Program; tell us about that?
‘Baby Destination’ has been recognised as one of the fastest growing communities and Facebook has nominated it to be one out of three communities in India for Facebook Community Leadership Programme. In terms of learnings, we are excited to work closely with the Facebook product team and look at community moderation while creating meaningful content and building our community.

The FCLP Programme will essentially fund ‘Baby Destination’ to help it further in growing the community through effective relationship building and with evolving technology. 

As believed by Facebook, it will explore the options of leveraging leaders of revolutionary communities on their platform, enabling them to identify deeply rooted needs of the society and address them effectively. 

We will be able to work with the Facebook product teams to automate community moderation to ensure you know growth happens, engagement stays intact, and the communities are spam free. 

We also have a pretty good tech and analytics framework in-house which we want to further strengthen to enable this growth.