Wearing pink, Twitter and personalised content…
Howard Lake | 7 November 2017 | Blogs
Every October at Breast Cancer Now, we hold our annual wear it pink day – encouraging supporters to wear pink, raise money and help fund the charity’s vital work. As a fundraising event, wear it pink has been going since 2002 and our supporters have raised over £30 million for our life-saving research.
At Breast Cancer Now, we believe that if we all act now, by 2050, everyone who develops breast cancer will live – and something as simple as raising money by wearing pink one day a year goes a long way towards helping us reach that goal.
Wear it pink is a hugely exciting event and this year we’ve been concentrating on bringing a relationship fundraising approach to a mass participation product and building long term relationships with our supporters through personalised communications, multi-channel stewardship journeys and innovative social media content, amongst other things…
Social media plays a huge part in the recruitment of and engagement with those taking part, and this year we wanted to go one step further in recognising people’s efforts and making sure that everyone feels valued, thanked and appreciated.
Personalised content for supporters
I’ve long played around with personalised content for supporters. It can increase income, strengthen relationships and it’s generally nice to know you’re appreciated. We wanted to apply that same thinking to wear it pink day this year.
Thousands of people take part in the event each year though, and #wearitpink trends on Twitter for pretty much the whole day – so how could we serve up personalised content to users on that sort of scale?
This year, we worked with a company called EchoMany to help us solve that problem. Together, we created personalised video assets that we could share with supporters and send to them via EchoMany’s dedicated dashboard.
Using the dashboard
The dashboard works much like Tweetdeck – it has columns that pull through tweets containing pre-determined content (in our case, those using #wearitpink and/or @breastcancernow). We created content that pulled in a user’s name, profile picture and any photo they tweeted, that we could then tweet to them in reply.
In the dashboard you can also filter tweets by the number of followers someone has. This is helpful if you’re all about reach – as you’ll see form the results, like and retweet rates for this content is high so you want it to be seen by as many people as possible. That said, our approach was to try and treat everyone like a “social influencer” where we could, because it’s important that people get recognition regardless of how popular they are on the internet…
This is what the content looked like – here’s an awkward picture of me:
https://twitter.com/JosephFreeman/status/921274039057944576
And here’s the reply with one of our personalised videos:
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This is amazing. We're so grateful that you've done #wearitpink. As our way of saying thanks, watch… pic.twitter.com/DHZCzMudyX
— Breast Cancer Now (@BCCare) October 20, 2017
We sent 267 of these videos out across the day, monitoring content and drafting appropriate replies.
Nearly 50% of people retweeted their videos and almost 80% liked the content we sent back to them. Overall, these videos reached more than 77,000 users – which considering they are essentially just replies to users, is huge.
We’re hoping that by sending these videos back to people, we’re not only going above and beyond in showing how grateful we are for their support, but that it also ensures they know that we’ll be spending their incredible fundraising efforts on critical breast cancer research.
We all know that good digital engagement strengthens someone’s relationship with a brand, and we’re hoping that we’ve delivered a delightful experience for some of our brilliant supporters who took part in wear it pink.
Joe Freeman is Assistant Director, Digital Engagement, at Breast Cancer Now.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.