Beyond Incontinence: How NAFC is helping you to live a life without leaks.

As a visitor to this blog and website, you probably know that NAFC exists to help those with incontinence and give you Resources for a Better Quality of Life. In fact, our mission is pretty clear:  The National Association For Continence is a national non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life of people with incontinence, voiding dysfunction, and related pelvic floor disorders. Our purpose is to be the leading source for public education and advocacy about the causes, prevention, diagnosis, treatments, and management alternatives for incontinence.

Simply put, we don’t think anyone should have to live with bladder leaks. NAFC strives to de-stigmatize incontinence, promote preventative measures, and motivate individuals to seek treatment.

But have you ever wondered how we do all this? Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the ways we’re working every day to support our mission and give you the better Resources for a Better Quality of Life:

We’re providing high-quality information that you can trust.

NAFC creates and publishes (with the help of qualified healthcare professionals) information about all types of bladder and bowel health conditions and makes it all available through our website, NAFC.org, for everyone to learn from.

We offer free brochures, tools to help you manage your condition, regularly updated stories and blogs from patients living with incontinence and experts on the condition, and even a way to find a doctor near you. NAFC also hosts a podcast, “Life Without Leaks“, where we feature monthly stories from patients, expert tips, and discussions with urology health professionals to help you better learn how to manage your condition.

We offer Healthcare Professionals tools for their office, free courses they can use in their community to educate patients, and up to date information about incontinence and the incontinence market.

Above all else, we want people to be educated about their condition and to know the options available to them.

We’re raising awareness.

Our high-quality content means nothing if we’re not able to get it to the people who need it. We are a small organization, with even smaller budgets. But despite that, we’ve managed to reach quite a large number of people with our message. In the past 12 months, we’ve had over 3 million people visit our website. Our efforts in social media and online advertising have had over 20 million impressions.  On a monthly basis we send our newsletter, filled with tips, management tools, and news on incontinence to over 10,000 people. We are fighting everyday for the discussion about incontinence to be heard.

We’re providing community.

NAFC’s message boards are filled with nearly 2,000 active users and were visited 30,000 times in the past year.  Our message boards have become a safe haven for those looking for advice from others going through similar things, or for those who just need to talk to someone who understands. Our goal when creating the message boards was to build an open, safe place where people can speak freely about their condition with no judgment. And judging by the number of people participating, we think we’ve done that. NAFC also maintains an active social media presence on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to help foster community and interact with those looking for information on incontinence.

We’re advocates for quality standards.

Did you know that not all absorbent products are created equally? NAFC has long been an advocate for quality standards across adult absorbent products to ensure products are made with safe materials, are created with multiple sizing options and absorbency levels in mind, and are effective in keeping moisture away from the skin to prevent irritation.  We’ve published standards for disposable absorbent products and have created a Task Force that had been working to make it easier for states to adopt these standards. Learn more about our efforts here.