How Movember set a new record for fundraising
Tuesday, December 7, 2010 at 12:34PM Well Movember has come and gone, and although the fund raising is never really cut off (i.e., you can still donate money into Team Duffy) and team fundraising goes on until December 9, the unofficial end was on November 30.
Coincidentally, both the Boston office and Swedish office got together last week for the company's holiday party. Since we were all together, we had a little going away party for our 'staches at a small barber shop (actually called Barber Shop) in Malmö, Sweden. Our colleague Carlos Naude filmed it, and we thought you might like to take a look:
The unofficial total for this year's fundraising was an amazing $61,806,647.00. That is an almost 50% increase in donations over last year's $42M fund raising efforts. Registrations were also up from 255,755 last year to 447,486 worldwide in 2010.
It seems this year's Movember movement might owe a debt to social media as well for getting the word out. Just look at their social media assets, and you can see how they were able to increase their numbers as well as their fundraising.
- Facebook
14,571 people have "liked" the Movember Page - Twitter
Adding up all the Movember-related Twitter accounts, the movement has almost 20,000 followers - Flickr
Countless images have been uploaded which have resulted in countless views - YouTube
479 subscribers with over 200K views or so for all their videos - LinkedIn
Almost 300 members in different Movember groups (actually that is not that impressive, but they don't have an offical LinkedIn page, or at least they don't publicize it on the site)
Some more numbers to ponder:
- Although Movember started in Australia, this year the biggest fundraising country was Canada (another jewel in the crown of the nicest country). They raised over $20M. They also had some very high-profile people participating like members of the Calagary Flames.
- Canada also was the home of this year's biggest fundraiser, business man Rich McCreary. He raised almost $50K himself. You can see all the standings here.
- Even disparate groups of men from all over the world participated like Britain's Royal Air Force, California firefighters, and London teachers.
The fact is that Movember is growing steadily every year and the reason is clear. It uses social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and Flickr to make raising awareness and raising money fun, as well as making the entire experience truly social. They built a community and got people to participate as well as donate. And they made it all so easy - providing guidelines, a Web site, and everything you would need besides the determination and face follicles.
There is a lesson we should all learn about social media and authentic communication from Movember's success. As our sister blog pointed out last week, "Movember adheres to the basic tenants of inbound marketing: Talk about what people are interested in, not what you would like them to be interested in; Go where the people are, not where you would like them to be; Make it about them, not you."
So until we meet again, I will make one last plea to donate to our Team Duffy page and bid our luscious lip hair a fond adieu until next year. Sorry wives and significant others, it's true, we are planning on doing this again ; )
Btw, if you participated, we'd love to hear your stories about your experience as well. Tell us in our comments section how you celebrated Movember or what lessons (social media or otherwise) you have learned from this month-long endeavor.
Reader Comments (4)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmEo6xmaWDo
thx. marsh from way up north