Lessons from Cancer: Harnessing the Collective Power of Small Acts
By: Andy Smith
Tags: Nonprofit, Take Action, Storytelling, Case Studies, 100kcheeks

The following is adapted from a speech given by Vineet Singal, leader and advocate for 100KCheeks, at the 2011 INK Conference.

[caption id=”attachment_2981" align=”alignright” width=”300" caption=”The 100KCheeks Team”]

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Many of you know the story of Amit Gupta, a 32 year old entrepreneur that was recently diagnosed with Leukemia. Under the guidance of Stanford Professor Jennifer Aaker (co-author of The Dragonfly Effect), I have had the privilege of heading an organization aimed at helping people like Amit; people in need of a bone marrow transplantation. We are a team of 12 inexperienced but infectiously enthusiastic and passionate college students at Stanford. Our goal: bank 100,000 people into the bone marrow registry in one year. We call ourselves One Hundred Thousand Cheeks (100KCheeks).

About two months ago,100K Cheeks began helping Amit to register more South Asians in the United States and India. This was not only a call to arms to uncover a match for Amit, but also to help increase the odds of other South Asians in need of a bone marrow transplant. The current odds for people of South Asian descent of finding a compatible bone marrow donor are 1 in 20,000.

Through almost a year of trying to make headway on increasing these odds, we discovered something really critical: the immense power of a personal story. We realized that people were not as motivated by the need of thousands, but rather the story of one. Our logic was simple. In focusing on helping to amplify the efforts of individual patients looking for a match, we would in turn be helping others.

As a group, 100KCheeks was able to help add tens of thousands of new donors to the US national registry by working with individual patients and their families. Retrospectively, we questioned: what separated campaigns that were successful? What truly distinguished them? What made people look and what made them take action? From our work, we learned three important lessons.

ONE: Cultivate Optimism

Cancer is a word that elicits so many emotions and thoughts; most of them negative. Yet we know it is hope that truly motivates people to act. This is a problem that many campaigns face: how to move people into action when the issue at hand can be so depressing? We decided to build a campaign that revolved around fun, hopefulness, and humor. For Amit’s campaign, that wasn’t hard because those attributes are a part of who Amit is (here is a picture to prove it). Emphasizing humor over tragedy, empathy over pity, hope over guilt was extremely important in creating a successful campaign.

TWO: Design to Enable Action

As a group, we realized that it was important to spell out to people how they can help, while also making it easy for them to do so. While signing up to be a donor was simple, running a drive was a little more complicated. We got so many requests from people who wanted to run a bone marrow drive but simply didn’t know how or where to start. Nicole and Siddhanth, two members of the 100KCheeks team, created a website called Drive in a Box. This platform was essentially a simple instructional manual for running an Amit-specific bone marrow drive, involving 6 easy steps: Step 1 Find a place; Step 2 Recruit some volunteers; Step 3 Advertise and so on. For each step it provided resources, cut and paste letters to send out to potential donors, and tips on how to run an effective drive. We wanted to make it is as easy as possible for people to run a drive, to make a difference. We launched the site in a week, and within a day over 30 people around the country were using it to run bone marrow drives. Simplicity was key in moving people to act.

THREE: Harness Networks

After implementing the first two steps, we focused on harnessing social networks and media outlets to spread the word. By pushing Amit’s story through the Social Media stratosphere, hashtags #ISwabbedforAmit and #4Amit achieved 100,000,000 impressions on Twitter, and a video describing Amit’s story had over 200,000 views on YouTube.

Through perseverance and the power of the individual story, we were also able to connect with Traditional Media outlets; Amit’s story was covered by Sanjay Gupta, NBC, The Huffington Post, just to name a few.

Through persistent optimism, designing for others, and harnessing networks, over 1200 people signed up to conduct drives. Be the Match, the largest bone marrow registry in the US, told us “they had never seen anything like it”, and had to hire extra staff in order to accommodate the flux of incoming registrants. Online registrations for marrow donors in the US tripled; over 20,000 people requested a cheek swab kit for Amit, and over 40,000 people worldwide were registered. Through this effort, we completed our goal of swabbing 100,000 cheeks…it was incredible.

And what is Amit’s status? The truth is that as of today Amit is still searching for a match. But, those 40,000+ people who registered for him are already helping others. Furthermore, Amit still has a chance, and he needs your help. I ask you to be a part of his search and register as a donor by visiting the Be the Match website.

There are patients who need a match that contact 100KCheeks every week. As a group, we have therefore asked ourselves how could we revolutionize the process of finding a bone marrow donor? We wanted to make everything we did for Amit possible for any patient. Using the three design principles mentioned earlier, we are on our way to achieving this goal in the form of a website, The Marrow Tree, that will launch on New Years Day 2012. We also invite you to visit the site and sign up on our mailing list.

This year, our goal for 100KCheeks is to register a million people, and we need your help to accomplish this. Help us recruit them. Let Amit’s story be our guiding light. Let his story be our call to action. Let his story be a strong affirmation of our belief that we, on our own, can truly save lives and change the world.

All it takes is a simple cheek swab.