Why sharing is important to Macmillan
Last week Team Up's Rebecca gave a presentation at Crowd Shed about the importance of sharing at Macmillan.
Currently there are two million people living with cancer in the UK. We think we’re reaching the vast majority of them. In 2013 we reached 1.82 million people as well as almost three million of their friends and families.
Nearly half of the UK population in 2030 will get cancer in their lifetime. Thanks to better treatments and earlier detection, 38% of them will not die from it. Because of this improvement and an ageing population, the number of people living with cancer in the UK will have doubled to four million in just over 15 years.
This rise means that cancer services are going to have a lot more pressure put on them. To make sure no one with cancer has unmet needs, it’s vital we rethink the way we deliver our services in order to meet our organisation aim, which is to reach and improve the lives of everyone living with cancer. We can’t afford all that’s needed now – let alone in future.
So what are Macmillan going to do about it? What’s our strategy to meet the need?
We need to inspire millions of people to help us.
Once we’ve inspired them, we need to create simple, innovative ways for them to help us and each other. Digital technologies offer us almost limitless opportunity to reach and inspire our audiences as well as deliver our services through digital channels.
Loneliness is a key issue amongst the cancer population. People with cancer who feel lonely are 8x more likely to eat a poor diet and 5x more likely not to leave the house for days.
Our research shows that 1 in 4 people newly diagnosed with cancer in the UK will lack support from family or friends during their treatment and recovery — that represents more than 70,000 newly diagnosed people each year.
Team Up aims to solve the isolation problem for people living with cancer, and to do it through sharing.
The idea behind Team Up isn’t a new one. Giving your neighbours a hand when they need it used to be relatively commonplace. My nanny, as the most sprightly pensioner in her sheltered accommodation used to pick up shopping for four or five of her neighbours when she was out at the shops herself. Sometimes she did it every week, sometimes she just did it when they needed an extra pair of hands if they were feeling a bit under the weather.
That’s what Team Up is about. It’s built very much in the model of the sharing economy. As a community some of us have too much and some of us don’t have enough. We need to redistribute those resources to make sure everyone has enough.
With Team Up, it’s time and energy that we want to share, redistributing the time and energy that we have as a community.
If we can make it easy, effortless and quick, then even people who say they don't have time might get involved.
As a charity, sharing is at the centre of everything we do at Macmillan. And as a digital team we recognise that digital technologies are one of the most effective ways of inspiring millions, and we are constantly innovating to make sure that we can deliver our services through digital channels to as many people as possible.
One of these services is the online community where thousands of active users share their experiences with each other in a peer-to-peer support forum. We have an amazing telephone support line that’s staffed by nurses and benefits advisers and last year they answered almost 150,000 calls, but they’re only available weekdays 9am – 8pm. We just can’t afford to man the support line 24/7. So thousands of people must be going without support every day?
No, because outside of these hours, people can go to our online community which is open 24/7 and find someone to listen to them, offer advice or search old posts for the answers to their questions.
Because these people share their experiences with each other, Macmillan can continue to provide high quality, varied services to cancer patients and their friends and families instead of channelling all our money into one, constant service.
This year our online community became available on mobile and tablet, meaning we can reach even more people when they need us.
Another innovative digital service has been developed in partnership with Skype is Macmillan Connected which virtually connects volunteers with a cancer experience to people going through it right now who need some emotional support. They can chat via Skype, Facetime or video calling. People have told us that it helps to have someone to talk to who really understands them, especially in rural or remote communities where we might not be able to deliver this service in any way other than digitally. By sharing resources with a digital partner like Skype we are able to deliver this specialised, one-on-one support to people in their own homes.
By sharing our brand, our expertise and our content with other sites, organisations and individuals we can vastly expand our reach and get closer to our aim of supporting everyone living with cancer, now and in the future. By making it easy for people to share themselves, we don’t need to deliver all of our services ourselves, people can achieve some of our aims for us. That’s where we need to be, and sharing is the way to get there.
Read Macmillan's Annual Report for more information about the facts and figures in this blog post.
