Zivame.com Associates with Breast and Cervical Cancer Awareness Initiative with #Share2Care

Zivame.com India’s leading online lingerie store is organising screening for breast and cervical cancer for 1000 women from rural areas in association with Bangalore based NGO Milaap. Milaap is setting several medical camps across Trichy working with Gramalaya Microfin Foundation and Harshamitra Women Screening Wing. Zivame.com is also raising awareness among general public using their social media channels.

Objective

Breast cancer is a big health threat that women across the globe face. While women in urban centers are generally more aware of it, it is imperative to raise awareness about it amongst rural women. October being the breast cancer awareness month, Zivame wanted to go beyond just creating awareness to actual on ground action to ensure that women from rural areas benefit from our initiative. Therefore, the brand decided to put screening camps in Trichy and get a 1000 screened for breast and cervical cancer.

Execution

Zivame is already making the most of the month of October by creating awareness on breast cancer through its social media channels using he initiative #Share2Care.  Zivame is encouraging its followers to be part of this campaign by sharing a message on the microsite dedicated to the cause. They are also encouraging people to tweet to @Zivame using #Share2Care and share their Facebook posts. For every message, tweet and post shared, Zivame will sponsor a free screening for breast cancer and cervical cancer for a rural woman in Trichy. The campaign will be online till the end of October.

Positives

Marrying the offline initiative with an online awareness campaign is a great idea especially when there is good brand association with the cause. Sponsoring 1000 women to be screened for breast cancer and cervical cancer is a noble cause nonetheless but the execution to create awareness of the activity supported by shares and tweets to Zivame allows the brand a lot more visibility and that too in a positive light. The literature put out by the brand on their Facebook page is quite enlightening and worth a share. There are also a good amount of retweets and tweets of the statuses on twitter for @Zivame and #Share2Care with respect to this campaign.

Areas for improvement

The brand could have taken this campaign to other visual media like Instagram, Pinterest and Youtube sharing real stories of the women in Trichy and using those media to create awareness on breast and cervical cancer as well. While Zivame has understood that pictures are good shareable material, video is far more convincing when it comes to social and medical issues that they were trying to support.

Many more conversations could have been started on groups on Facebook, on quora, linkedin and discussions could be initiated using the brand’s twitter presence. The subject of breast and cervical cancer has serious and far reaching impact, and therefore lots of questions could have been answered bringing experts on board. The way the brand used their presence on social media was only as announcement boards – photos on Facebook and Twitter talking about the campaign and not really starting any real conversations.

The brand should also consciously stick to one communication through the month of October if the focus is entirely on breast and cervical cancer awareness. Peppering the Facebook page with photographs and new product launches might not be ideal to do when you are creating awareness of a serious issue. The same can be said about their twitter feed.

Conclusion

A good cause supported by a simple social media campaign. However what was lacking was the conversation backing such a noble cause – what is really required to create real awareness about the issue. Maybe if they picked up this cause on a larger scale they would have had more reason to invest in bringing on board experts to actually talk about the subject in depth and not just benefit the 1000 women in Trichy but have far reaching benefits to the women who are actually reading and participating in discussions.

By all means use social responsibility as brand recall campaigns online, however it might pay in the long run if the brand delves a little deeper in such cases.