World Cancer Day 2017
Awareness days – there are a lot of them. Some of them are just silly (World Emoji Day?) but there are a few awareness days that do a great job of uniting organisations and people, raising awareness of serious issues.
Saturday 4 February 2017 was World Cancer Day – a global awareness-raising event created by the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC). Its aim is to encourage fundraising by raising awareness of cancer and the issues people face in fighting it.
Having a huge health and social care provision, we wanted to be part of the conversation, so we turned to our excellent radiotherapy and oncology teaching team. Students from our radiotherapy and oncology courses do their placements in treatment units, and they have lots of face-to-face contact with cancer patients throughout their placements, so we knew they’d have some good stories to tell.
I worked with senior PR officer Sarah Duce on planning our #WorldCancerDay campaign. Sarah manages the faculty’s PR account, and has excellent links in faculty. Jo McNamara, senior lecturer in radiotherapy put us in touch with some brilliant students, and Sarah and I filmed a series of talking heads with Jo and her students.
We didn’t ask them to talk about the course, the facilities, or life as a Hallam student. Instead, we asked them about the impact they’d had on patients’ lives, the challenges they faced, and the reason they’d chosen a career helping people with cancer.
In their responses, the students were incredibly generous with their honesty and warmth. The resulting videos were a great way for us to show our our support on World Cancer Day.
It's #WorldCancerDay. We're asking our #radiotherapy students why they want to make a difference to the lives of cancer patients. pic.twitter.com/xnH2DQmGmp
— Sheffield Hallam Uni (@sheffhallamuni) February 4, 2017
#Radiotherapy students like Nicola are making a difference to the lives of cancer patients every day. #WorldCancerDay #TreatmentForAll pic.twitter.com/kXLdchMJqF
— Sheffield Hallam Uni (@sheffhallamuni) February 4, 2017
#Radiotherapy lecturer Jo: "Having an impact on patients' lives is the most rewarding thing you could have from a career." #WorldCancerDay pic.twitter.com/Um1TLNdXVO
— Sheffield Hallam Uni (@sheffhallamuni) February 4, 2017
We had some great engagement with the videos (over 700 individual engagements – clicks, likes, shares and replies – on Twitter, and 2,500 engagements on Facebook). They had 32,000 organic impressions – deliveries to a Twitter timeline – on Twitter, and generated an organic reach of 38,000 on Facebook. There were also some really nice comments.
Comments like Judy’s are gold-dust for a university’s social media presence. We can talk about league tables, cutting-edge facilities and outstanding teaching and learning, but Judy’s comment is about the real-world impact that our students have. They work with real people, making a difference wherever they can. And they care.
Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield