Movember
Movember is a charity with great awareness and a decade of fundraising success for men’s mental health and cancer charities. This is largely thanks to its brilliantly simple mechanic: grow a moustache in November to raise money.
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By 2016 participation rates and donations in Movember were decreasing YOY as the novelty wore off. People didn’t understand what they were raising money for, or what Movember actually did. It was in danger of losing relevance.
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Data gathered from Keller Fay (WOM research), Deidre Sanders, and other sources confirmed that men too often stay silent when depressed or suicidal, afraid to speak out.
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We demonstrated that the fear of speaking out is less painful than the fear of missing out – on seeing loved ones, on finding happiness, and on living a long and fulfilling life.
Movember faced a decline in donations and participants. To understand the root cause of this, and work out how to make Movember relevant again, meant starting from the central organising principle behind human behaviour: we needed to change how people felt about Movember and about men’s mental health – not just educate them.
The Movember Foundation has a noble cause: its chief mission is to stop men dying too young. In most cases this means suicide – the biggest cause of death for men under 45 than any other factor.
Why are men killing themselves?
To take on this challenge we needed to understand it. We delved deep into the data – both from existing source material and by conducting additional research – to understand what common factors stop men from seeking help when suicidal or depressed.
And the answer was simple. Men don’t talk about anything meaningful. That’s why in many heartbreaking interviews with families that have lost a young man to suicide, the common refrain was: ‘we had no idea anything was wrong… if only he had talked to us.’
Our strategy was simple, then: show men that speaking up, while painful and difficult, was far less damaging than the fear of missing out on life.
And so #FOMOvember was born.
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Mo money
As a result of the 2017 campaign more than 50,000 Mo Bros signed up – the highest number to date. Of these 67% were new to Movember.
This meant that we raised an additional 16% increase in funds for the charity.
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Mo understanding
A key challenge we faced was making sure people understood Movember’s purpose. Our post-campaign analysis showed a 48% improvement in respondents knowing that Movember: “funded important education programs to reduce preventable deaths among men”.
We also saw a 50% improvement in: “Movember is encouraging men to take better care of their health”.
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Mo time
Our Movember videos drove more than 11.3m social video views with a 45.53% completion rate and over 40 million views via Sky’s platforms.
We also drove the highest number of organic video views that News UK had ever seen on its platform.
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Even mo
The following year (2018) we raised even more. Brand awareness? Up 10% year on year (reversing the decline of previous years). Donations? Up 25% YOY. Overall funds raised? Up 20% YOY. And a 72% uplift in positive Word-Of-Mouth.
