The Movember Foundation is an Australian based, not for profit, charitable organisation that implements the Movember event each year across the globe. The foundation was originally founded in Melbourne, Australia over 8 years ago, since then the charity has grown to become a truly global movement inspiring more than 1.1 million supporters to participate in its campaigns. Supporters of the campaign or Mo Bros and Mo Sistas as they are often referred as range from across the entire world and continues to grow with formal campaigns in Australia, the US, Canada, the UK and many more.
The event which takes place over the course of the month of November sees men of all ages register at the Movember website; here they are then challenged with the prospect of sprouting moustaches for the duration of the month and raising money for their efforts. Movember is responsible for the thousands of men’s moustaches that are on display throughout the month. As stated on the website these men are then considered as walking, talking billboards for the 30 days of November. The foundation explains how through the actions of Mo Bros that they raise awareness of the ignored issue of men’s health.
The aim of the foundation is to raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, the campaign represents the long term global initiative to raise awareness of the health problems men can face specifically that of prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men globally. The foundation explains how they have the vision on an everlasting impact on men’s health and that they aim to accelerate global research in the risks towards men’s health focusing mainly on prostate cancer. As one of the charity’s main aims is to fund the research in to the prevention of prostate cancer, the organisation set up its Movember GAP (Global Action Plan) Programme. The programme uses the funds created from its campaign to gather the best researchers from around the world to work together on key challenges that will enable the breakthroughs into the research that will benefit men with prostate cancer.
As results of 2011 campaign are still being calculated and evaluated I must refer back to the previous campaign of 2010 where its objective was very much to answer critical and clinical questions. The answers of these questions would enable the research that would allow clinicians to better predict aggressive prostate cancer, treatment resistance and characterise metastatic disease. Ultimately the charity saw that this would lead to the enhancement of patient treatment decisions.
The campaigns strategic goal for Movember is to get men to grow moustaches by creating an innovative, fun and engaging annual Movember campaign that raises funds and awareness globally. The organisation also listed its main strategic goals from the money raised from its annual campaign.
The goals include:
Survivorship
We will fund survivorship initiatives that provide information and support for men and their families affected by prostate cancer that helps them make informed decisions and improves their quality of life.
Awareness and education
Through our annual campaign and funded programs we will significantly increase the understanding of the health risks that men face and encourage men to act on that knowledge.
Prostate and testicular cancer research
We will fund catalytic research and clinical trials infrastructure that leads to significantly improved diagnostic and prognostic tests and treatments to reduce the burden of prostate and testicular cancer.
Influencing change in men’s health
We will fund research that helps to inform health policy and knowledge translation that accelerates improved health outcomes for men.
As part of the charity’s Movember campaign it was evident that the strategy towards the campaign must be targeted at its audience in a fun and innovative manner. This would help towards its main objective of raising awareness of men’s health.
Demographically the campaign was set out for a target audience of young men aged 18-30 and in its humbling beginnings the campaign was geographically targeted at its founding country Australia. However following its huge growth in the past few years the charity changed its target geographic audience to a global scale. The campaign focused on young men as they believed that this target audience would be more willing to participate in the humorous stunt of Movember and that their desire to make a difference in the world would encourage others to also participate. Other target audiences for the campaign included in their strategy was friends and families of cancer victims/survivors. The charity’s strategy also focused on its two main communications of in house public relations and media relations. Here the charity explains how it hands over the brand to its target audience and provides all the collateral so individuals can create their own Movember experience with the Movember logos and posters easily downloadable from its main website. By allowing its target publics access to its brand, the charity also encouraged its publics to create their very own webpage or Mospace as they are often referred as. The webpage functions as an online social network where users can view their progress and set up target donations. The webpage is primarily used as a fundraising tool for the participants of the Movember event; this is one of the most popular direct routes for many members to generate more money for the chosen charity. Alongside the creation of Mospace, the charity also set up multiple platforms of social media where it would be easier to provide opportunities for various members to connect with each other and share their progress. The charity used social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to attract more members and generate more coverage of the charity. Using these tactics enabled more people to share tweets and post about their Movember story and current status.
The charity also appeared to use influencers or opinion leaders to broadcast the annual event of Movember and the charity. They used public figures in Scotland such as Graeme Souness to grow back his iconic moustache whilst also convincing the cast of BBC’s Match of the Day to participate in the event. This created great coverage for the charity as it was targeting some of its main audience on one of the most watched TV programmes of the week.
As already stated the campaign outlined its tactics based on two of its main communication strategies. The campaign needed to communicate to its media relations, the charity pitched stories directly to the media and created strong relationships with numerous journalists around the UK. The coverage the charity received grew immensely and eventually reached nationwide publication. Newspapers including The Times, The Sun and The Independent just to mention a few shared its support of the campaign with The Independent printing new material throughout the month of November focusing on the charity. It was important for the campaign to publicise the work of not only the charity but of its participants across the country. Mobros and Mosistas were all encouraged to share their own stories. This worked out to be one of the campaigns best tactics as research carried out by nfpSynergy revealed that the public are more likely to read about charities and real life stories over the activities of sport, fashion and celebrities.
Strengths and Weaknesses of the campaign Movember:
To first fully understand the success of the campaign it is important to identify firstly what the charity is and understand the definition of a charity based campaign. It is calculated that there are more than 208,000 charities registered in the UK alone. Alongside that number there are other not for profit organisations such as social enterprises and community interest companies all of which combined create what is called the third sector.
As the charity Movember falls under the third sector there is much that needs to be discussed when evaluating the success of the campaign.
“As with any organisation, identifying and delivering key messages is essential for a third sector organisation. The message itself can mean the difference between the survival and failure. Clarity of message is vital” ( Theaker, 2012: 390)
The message that Movember wishes to send is simple enough and that is to raise awareness of men’s health through the sprouting of moustaches of men worldwide. This works very much in the favour of the campaign as Movember is seen as a humorous campaign. The campaign doesn’t seem to take itself seriously despite being all about a very serious matter. This is possibly what makes the charity so unique in that it uses humour to express its message of the often-overlooked issue of mens health. The campaign is very reliant on the involvement of its target audience and due to the aspect of humour this encourages more people to get involved with the cause. It then becomes a catalyst for conversation around the subject and helps towards its message of raising awareness of the campaign.
“A charity is likely to have a broad range of publics in terms of communication, the primary publics are the individuals or groups represented by the charity and they are needed for its survival whether financial or resource based, such as volunteers, donors or advocates of the organisation. An understanding of these publics and their relationship to the organisation is again vital.” (Theaker, 2012: 391)
The target demographic audience for the Movember campaign is in marketing and PR terms brilliant. Moustache growing males are a perfect target demographic for potential partners of the charity. The charity’s ability to attract this target audience of adult males makes it a great way to bring in potential investment from major sponsors. This was evident when the likes of Fosters, Wilkinson Sword and Snickers all decided to sponsor the campaign. The money generated from the partnerships really does help push the awareness of the charity beyond what they could normally get as a non profit organisation.
Perloff (2003) explains that there are three different effects of persuasion. He argues that persuasion can help shape the attitudes of people or reinforce a position one may already have. Perloff also states how persuasion can be used to change a public’s attitude. If we are to relate what Perloff argues to the Movember campaign then it must be considered that the charity uses some form of persuasion to change the attitudes or behaviour of its target audience. The behavioural change that the Movember campaign wishes to echo is that of often ignored issue of men’s health. However the campaign seems to connect itself more with what we call the symmetric model as the charity mainly works more to achieve cooperation from its publics rather than persuasion.
Puska (2003) also indicated how there are three different routes that behavioural change approaches. The one that I believe is most fitting with the Movember campaign is that they use a communication behaviour approach. This requires a change in what publics know through gaining their attention, changing their attitudes and then their behaviour. The campaign gains the attention through its participants of moustache growers that leads to conversation about the issue of men’s health and the how the issue needs to be raised and that attitude and behaviour changes must be made.
“ Strategy is the general approach or theme that directs the course of activity for each objective.” (Gordon, 2011: 182)
The strategy of the Movember campaign indicates to its objectives and follows through with its tactics. The overall objective for the Movember campaign is to raise awareness of men’s health. It uses its strategy of gaining awareness by introducing key media such as journalists to the charity and informs its target audience through its successful tactics of a humorous campaign.
When evaluating the success of this campaign it is important that we fully understand the on going process of the campaign.
“Evaluation is an on going process if you are talking about long-term programmes. There you will regularly evaluate the media relations element of your programme by making a critical analysis of your media coverage. As a result of this you may focus more effort on particular messages of journalists”.” ( Gregory, 2004: 163)
No PR strategy is complete without a plan to monitor effectiveness. This can be done by relating search engines to your charity’s press release, incoming requests from the media and by carefully tracking media clips. Results of the Movember campaign saw the campaign raise £48.5 million globally during their 2010 campaign, which was an increase of £20.9 million the previous year and it is believed that the charity has further extended that record this year. The fund were raised by the 1.1 million Mobros and Mosistas and in the UK alone attracted 17,150 twitter followers to its account and 43,056 Facebook users to its social networking websites. The UK also was responsible for £10.3 million that it raised during the campaign that went directly to the Prostate Cancer Charity.
In conclusion I believe that the campaign was exceptional using credible PR tactics and strategies to raise awareness of its charity. Movember fills a niche, it positions itself as manly cause, it gives men something unique and meaningful to celebrate. Men don’t have a breast cancer awareness week so the growing of moustaches is their equivalent of pink ribbons. The campaign is also universally funny and effortlessly viral.
practicalnonsense 