Digital Becca

Category: Charity

  • Creating a digital breast cancer support course

    Breast Cancer Now offers physical support courses to people living with primary and secondary breast cancer. One of these courses is Moving Forward, supporting people once they’ve finished treatment to cope with issues such as body confidence, returning to work and managing fear of recurrence. As a charity, we can’t provide this free service to…

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  • Designing out of a microsite culture

    When I first started as a product manager at Breast Cancer Care, I was aware that I had a limited window of impartiality, so I decided to use it to conduct a front-end audit of the site. I wanted to see what some of the main challenges of the role would be before I knew…

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  • Initial thoughts on Facebook’s suicide prevention tool

    Over a year ago now, I blogged about Samaritans Radar, a tool created by the charity that caused a lot of controversy amongst the strong mental health community on Twitter and elsewhere. I agreed with a lot of the issues people raised, though for me privacy wasn’t top of the agenda, my worry was more…

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  • Charity spending is right and necessary

    Every now and then, wherever I work, I have to brace myself for “could you advertise these jobs?” or “could you share this blog from the CEO?” These are both pretty routine things and shouldn’t involve setting aside half a day to argue with people on social media, but invariably they do. Charity spending, lobbying,…

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  • Samaritans Radar is about more than privacy

    Today the Samaritans launched a Twitter app designed, essentially, to help stop people in mental health crisis from slipping through the digital net. As the charity relies almost entirely on volunteers, and as suicide remains one of the UK’s biggest killers, I can certainly see why they might commission a project which monitors people’s tweets…

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  • Three problems with the no makeup selfies for cancer

    A month on and there’s no denying the success, in fundraising terms, of the no makeup selfies for cancer. They raised millions for Cancer Research UK, the first to spot their potential and channel participants to a text giving account. The campaign ticked all the boxes for creating sharable content – it was image based,…

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  • 1 million conversations about mental health

    Today is 6th Feb, Time to Talk Day, which aims to spark an ambitious 1 million conversations across England and Wales about mental health. It doesn’t have to be anything profound, different, or life changing, just a simple conversation with someone you know, or even someone you don’t, about what this topic might mean to…

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  • Why we need advocacy

    As a first blog post, advocacy seems like an appropriate choice as it’s something I’ve strongly believed in for many years. Here’s why: Through no fault of its own, advocacy is one of those words which can’t help but sound a bit jargony. “Advocacy? Ah, so that’s like… What, exactly?” Advocacy means supporting someone to…

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