It's Movember at protocol 80

protocol 80

Movember. Mustache season. More importantly, time to raise funds and awareness for men's health.

A couple of us at protocol 80 have joined a Movember team and hope to use social media to help our teams success.

The Background

Movember participants will start on 11/1 completely clean shaven. For me, this was odd. I have had a beard for more than 6 years. Now through the end of the month, we have committed to keeping, growing, and grooming only a mustache. In hopes to get my first donation, I will not post a photo of my clean shaven face until that first donation comes through. Throughout the month, the more donations I get the more pictures I will post. We will even take recommendations as to how to style our mos...but the donations have to come in. Official Movember rules can be found here.

Our Story

I wanted to start a team because there is certainly not enough attention given to men's health in my opinion. This is a fun way to help and we hope that we can be successful raising awareness in our local community and as far as our social media reach can go.

The Use of Social

We know that social is a great way to build awareness for any subject. All of us on the team already have personal Facebook and Twitter accounts. We started recruiting for our Movember team through these outlets. So far we are a little short on the volume of team members we would like, but we will continue recruiting.

Secondly, I took 10 minutes to create a team Facebook page so that we can communicate with the community as a team, share progress, answer questions, etc. I don't expect to create a specific Twitter account for the team, as I believe we will have better success promoting through our own personal accounts. We hope to have fun with it on the social outlets while creating conversations and ultimately bringing in the donations. Our goal for donations will be $200 per team member. We currently have 3 team members, so the team goal will be $600.

Additionally, I have created this blog post. Given the success or failure of our efforts, I would like to keep you updated with our thoughts on social media and it's effectiveness. Hopefully non-profit organizations will be able to gather ideas from our experiences to use with their own causes.