Rethinking Social Media

“We can do things differently.” -Alison Gordon

Alison Gordon, Rethink Breast Cancer

We are on our second week of the 5on5 Expert Blog series speaking with Nonprofits about their social media. Today’s interview is with VP Strategy, Marketing & Communications Alison Gordon of Rethink Breast Cancer.

Tell me about Rethink Breast Cancer?

Our mission is to help young women who are concerned about and affected by breast cancer. When we started the organization ten years ago there was really nothing in the world of breast cancer that was geared towards young people. Everything was much more about pink ribbons, pink teddy bears, walks and runs.

We started Rethink Breast Cancer with the idea that we wanted to engage young people in this cause and provide them with the education they needed to be ‘breast aware’ in a way that was bold, positive and upbeat. We re-envisioned the entire cause, across the board and globally. We were one of the first to say, “We can do things differently.”

We were getting a lot of media attention for our innovative events and partners e.g. GAP, Schick, TELUS, etc. We started to capture the attention of a lot of young women who knew about breast cancer or had breast cancer. They were coming to us and saying you know we see what you guys are doing and it really speaks to us and we really feel like we don’t fit in anywhere in the medical world or anywhere in the world. They felt like ‘Rethink’ understood and they could fit in.

What do you find to be the biggest challenge in reaching your audience?

The biggest challenge in reaching a younger audience is that it’s everybody’s audience so how do you catch their attention when you don’t have the marketing budgets of large corporations. We just get as creative as possible and find new ways to reach our audience. It requires getting super creative without any dollars.

How do you approach a video viral campaign?

We work with ad agencies, creative people who work with nonprofits. We work with the best people and have been successful in viral because what are the odds that another will be successful at creating an incredible viral video that has never done it before? Secondly, we look for an idea that really resonates. I think you can go out and do things to get a lot of attention, but ultimately what is your call to action. Is it to get people to your website, donate money or bring more awareness to your cause? Strictly speaking going after a viral video is not our approach. We look for what we are trying to achieve. Since we know our goal and who are audience is we work with creative people to help us come up with the concept of the video. It’s not just about creating a video for us. It’s about the idea.

What particular social media tools do you use?

We’ve been on Twitter less than a year. We have a Facebook fan page. I think we know what we want to do and what we’d like to do but need to find the way and time to do it. We have one staff member assigned to tweeting and our Facebook page. MJ (MJ DeCoteau) and I write the blogs. We try to blog 2 to 3 days a week. Our goal is to take some time over the next few months and talk about our social media strategy. We’re not looking just to do it or pay someone just to do it. That’s not how we operate.

How does ‘Rethink’ use social media to engage donors, volunteers and those that wish to help your organization?

I don’t profess to be doing a great job in the area of Twitter for reaching new donors. We haven’t given it a great go. I think we’ve done a great job in this area with campaigns like “Save the Boob” or “Booby Wall” or with our latest campaign featuring Kim Cattrall as the face of this year’s “Fashion Targets Breast Cancer” campaign.

I want to thank Alison Gordon from Rethink Breast Cancer for sharing how they use social media. Next week we interview Michael Hoffman CEO of See3. Please subscribe to blogs and whitepapers for more interviews and to receive FREE white papers on various topics. The “5on5 Life Coach” white paper is available now for download.

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