Last December, Susan Reynolds, an artist and social media maven, was diagnosed with Breast cancer. She announced on her blog, "I use Twitter to fight Cancer" and without any formal blogger relations campaign, well-known and
influential bloggers blogged about her situation and changed their avatars to include peas. Through Connie Reece's visionary leadership, the community rallied and the "Frozen Pea Fund" was started. Susan continues to share her experience at her blog and through twitter.
The pioneering efforts of the Frozen Pea Fund continue to inspire other women to fight against breast cancer. While breast cancer doesn’t run in her family, Leah Jones has just launched her training for her 3 Day Breast Cancer Walk. She wanted to participate in the challenge to honor her friends, that she is close
to.
Every October, all of the blogs in my blogosphere go pink and my
friends sign up for different types of Breast Cancer fundraiser. I go
from blog to blog to blog, making $18 donations to support each of them
in the greater fight to find a cure and raise awareness. Even at 31, I
have waited outside of hospital doors for peers who were getting the
news (so far, all clear).
As she writes on her blog, in a post titled "If you need me, I'll be walking .." she's now taking her activism offline.
I was selected to be one of the Edelman team members for the Susan G.
Komen 3-Day in Atlanta. I have a pretty intense training schedule over
the next ten weeks, so if you need me, I'll be walking.
Her other motivation is an opportunity to experiment with Twitter and blogging to see just how much her community can raise for this cause. I hope she will blog some of her lessons learned too. Just today, I got a Twitter question from DeafMom asking for advice. (I pointed her to my personal fundraising case study)
The next thing now is to add the new AdWords-Style Widget from the Social Actions folks. The widget automatically identifies the keywords on any page and lists social change campaigns related to the stuff you're writing about. Here's a widget I created for Breast Cancer social change campaigns.
Beth Kanter, BlogHer CE for Nonprofits and Social Change, writes Beth's Blog.
Comments
Kudos to Leah for walking!
I was fortunate to be able to witness the Chicago Breast Cancer 3-Day walk a few weeks ago as the social media representative of its PR team. It's clearly an amazing experience for the participants and raises a significant amount of much-needed funds. It inspired me to want to walk next year and I'm trying to decide which city I'd like to travel to for the walk.
If anyone's interested in following the Breast Cancer 3-Day on various social media sites, here are the links:
Facebook
MySpace
Flickr
YouTube