By Kiran Rana
OTTAWA — Carleton University student Dan Shalinsky proudly sported a bushy moustache for the first time this November.
“Not because I didn’t want to in the past, but because I’ve never been able to successfully grow one,” the third-year political science student jokes. He started to fundraise for the cause in 2011.
Shalinsky is one of the many men who ditched the razor last month to mark Movember, a campaign dedicated to raising awareness and money for men’s health issues. At the start of November, men vow to abstain from shaving their upper lip for one month and while growing their moustache they encourage others to do the same and donate through their online Mo Page.
According to Dan’s Mo Page, he’s raised $260 for Movember. His fraternity raised over $2,434.
Movember started in 2003 after a couple of Australian friends challenged each other to grow moustaches for men’s health. Over the last 10 years, the campaign has since spread worldwide, changing fundraising in the process.
It began with a focus on prostate cancer and later spread to include testicular cancer. Today, Movember encompasses numerous health issues including mental illness and physical wellness. The campaign raised $131.8 million globally last year. According to the charitable initiative’s website, 90.5 per cent of these funds were put towards various men’s health programs in 2013.
Last May, the Movember Foundation announced the Canadian Men’s Health and Wellbeing Innovation Challenge. In November, more than $1.5 million in awards were announced for grassroots projects across the country.
Movember is one of the most successful charity campaigns to date, and much of this is credited to the use of social media.
According to the social media data website Topsy, there were 1.5 million Movember tweets worldwide in 2013. A simple scroll through Facebook feeds during November shows photos of men donning upper lip insulators along with links to donation pages.
“The whole Movember campaign has been one of the strongest online campaigns in history. And I think it’s because they started so organically.”- Shalinsky.
“It’s not fake. It’s people who care about the issue,” Shalinsky says.
Queen’s University marketing professor Kenneth Wong says social media has not only offered new fundraising opportunities, but it has changed the face of charity donations. Charities need to have an online presence, he says, especially because of the low cost.
Wong says that an ad campaign would also take much more time to produce and have the benefit of user-generated content.
“Put it in the context that every charity is a brand and, in this particular instance, the brand isn’t tied to claims of superiority,” he says.
“You’re selling a concept or an idea,” says Wong.
To do this, charities need to create an emotional connection and establish a bond, something Wong thinks that few media can do the way a social media campaign can.
For Shalinsky, the sense of an established bond is crucial.
“Everyone likes to share what they’re doing online,” he says. “If you look at the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge you got called on by your friends. It wasn’t an ad or a sad video asking you for something.”
But Gina Grosenick, aCarleton University communications professor, says social media doesn’t always spell success for a campaign.
“For every Movember, there’s probably a thousand others that have tried something and failed,” says Grosenick, who specializes in social media.
While social media has been argued to advance charity goals, others are critical of the intentions of people online, saying that campaigns like Movember encourage slactivism.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, slactivism refers to actions performed via the Internet in support of a political or social cause but regarded as requiring little time or involvement. A combination of the words slacker and activism, it encompasses the feel good measures that individuals partake in to support an issue but have little to no practical effect.
“With our online personalities and online activities, there’s a fine line between engaging in something and narcissism,” says Grosenick about slactivism. “People get critical when they see pure narcissism without charitable contribution.”
This is the argument against many of the charities sprouting up online. A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that individuals who support a cause anonymously are more likely to engage in meaningful, long-term support than those who support it publicly.
A study by Kevin Lewis, a professor of sociology at the University of California, aimed to prove this view. Along with two others, he conducted a study to further examine slactivism. The researchers wanted to see if there was a correlation between the number of Facebook fans on a charity page and how much money the organization raised.
Lewis and his team analyzed the donation activity of the Save Darfur page, a Facebook charity page with more than one million members. Lewis also looked at the online activity of the members from the time the page was created in May 2007, to January 2010. According to the Structure of Online Activism, a total of $90,776 was donated during the two and a half year period. Yet 99.7 per cent of the page fans never donated at all.
Some have been critical of the Movember campaign for this, claiming many men grow facial hair to be funny or fit in without raising funds. For many involved in the Movember campaign, this doesn’t matter.
“By virtue of getting men to change their appearance, they become walking, talking billboards for men’s health, and they become knowledgeable about risks that they face. Because if you try to approach men directly about their health they will switch off,” Adam Garone, CEO of Movember, said in an interview with the Toronto Star.
Shalinsky agrees, saying while donations are one aspect of the charity, equally important is getting men thinking about men’s health.
“There’s this old-school mindset and perception of [men] needing to be seen as tough and showing no feelings or emotions, so it’s great to challenge that,” he says. “Even fifty years ago people didn’t talk about men’s health or mental health and there’s still people today who don’t think it’s okay to.”
“It’s okay to not be strong a hundred per cent of the time.”
In an attempt to assess how past participants of Movember view and act on mens’ health issues, the Movember Foundation conducted an annual survey as part of its Awareness and Education Program. The results of the 2013 survey revealed that 99 per cent of participants now talk to someone about their health, 75 per cent have become more aware of the health issues they face and 50 per cent have told another person that they should take actions to improve their health.
Others argue that with campaigns like Movember they’re not actively engaging in raising awareness. With the ALS bucket challenge, critics questioned what dumping a bucket of ice water on your head had to do with the degenerative disease.
“As much as we don’t want to think of it this way, all charities compete with one another for money,” Wong says. “What I give to ALS I can’t give to heart and stroke or diabetes.”
“Many of them are being very effective with fundraising, even if somebody is just jumping on the bandwagon because they think its cool or they want their friends to see that they’re doing it,” Grosenick says. “In many cases they’re still contributing the money and that was the major intention of the campaign.”
So what makes a campaign successful? Grosenick says it’s a degree of professionalism in the campaign. Getting the timing right between the initiative and the audience is also important, says Wong.
As for Shalinsky, he isn’t too sure what makes a viral campaign catch on with the public.
“You can’t determine what catches hold. You just have to hope.”