Content
strategy
plan
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the challenge
Bosom Buddies is a breast cancer support group local to upstate South Carolina, who provides emotional and other forms of support to newly diagnosed and survivors of breast cancer. However, the group lacked efficient methods for communicating with people both inside and outside of the group, and desired to expand their outreach to more women. The purpose of our project was to create branding and content strategy guidelines to assist our client, Bosom Buddies in its mission of sharing positivity, support, and resources to women affected by breast cancer in the upstate.
This project is the semester-long product of the course ENGL 8320, Content Strategy. With the three other graduate students in the course, we worked as a content strategy group, Upstate Content Solutions.
As a team, we researched, developed, and made recommendations for Bosom Buddies, a breast cancer support group local to upstate South Carolina. Some of our initial research included interviews with the members, surveys with medical professionals, email analysis, and the creation of a persona and journey map to keep the plan user-centered. Our recommendations ranged from branding and marketing guidelines, to social media management, and a mock-up of a website.
at a glance
Client: Bosom Buddies
My role: Content Strategist
Duration: 5 months
Tools:
Research questions
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What were Bosom Buddies expectations of Upstate Content Solutions?
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How does the group currently communicate, and what are the positive or pain points in their communication?
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What are the content topics the group communicates about? Are there content topics not currently being communicated?
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Who is the average member of Bosom Buddies and what does their journey in the group look like?
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What deliverables need to be created for the group, and in what form/media?
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With a lack of social media or online presence beyond email, and a lack of leadership structure or roles existing in the group, what platforms for maintaining communication are appropriate and sustainable for the group as they plan to grow?
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Should the group consider applying to become a non-profit 503C?
the approach
First, we collected six types of data:
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Ethnographic Observation
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The meeting observation provided a sense of what topics Bosom Buddies members discuss and what tone and voice they use to discuss those topics.
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I attended this luncheon, taking notes, and relayed my observations back to the group.
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1-1 User Interviews
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I conducted 5 of the 8 interviews with Bosom Buddies members.
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The 1-1 interviews with Bosom Buddies members provided information on their wants, needs, and problems, as well as the wants, needs, and problems faced by Bosom Buddies as a group. These interviews also aided us in understanding and defining the role Bosom Buddies plays in the members’ lives and recovery from breast cancer.
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Surveys with Bosom Buddies Members
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The surveys aimed to reach more members than the interviews, and uncover the group’s preferences on communication, social media platforms, and content.
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We reached 15 members total through this survey.
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Interviews/Surveys with Medical Professionals
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The medical professional surveys and interviews gave our team a better idea of what content Bosom Buddies members and newly diagnosed cancer patients may want and need.
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We reached 5 medical professionals; 2 in-person, and 3 in an online survey. I designed these surveys, and conducted the 2 in-person interviews.
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Competitive Analysis of Breast Cancer Support Groups
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As a team, we searched for and examined 20+ comparable websites or social media platforms to see how breast cancer groups functioned online and what form they took.
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Email Content Analysis
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One team member coded and analyzed over 106 emails from Bosom Buddies to analyze tone, size, frequency, and participation.
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From this data, we analyzed the internal and external impact factors on the group's content, focusing on identifying Bosom Buddies' target audience, messaging, channels, workflow, and governance.
We developed a persona representative of a typical Bosom Buddies member, and named her Sharon. Personas serve as a visual return point throughout the design process to center the design on the user, and typically appear as a one-page length summary of a person’s behaviors, goals, and life situation. We built this persona using Xtensio, a persona-building tool.
Sharon’s characteristics exemplify the goals of what a Bosom Buddies member hopes to gain from the support group, her story, what other organizations she is a part of, and other demographic information.
We took the persona of Sharon to map out the typical path of someone with breast cancer to show what kind of support would be useful for her in the process and how Bosom Buddies could help. This method is a journey map, which visually maps the experience of a person/customer in order to pinpoint possible points of interaction between the person and the organization (also known as touchpoints). In addition to these touchpoints, it documents the thoughts, feelings, and needs of the person throughout their journey.
We first entered and organized the information into a Google spreadsheet. Then we designed the journey map in Adobe Illustrator, focusing on visualizing the data with icons, tracking the emotional level of Sharon throughout her journey, and condensing the information as needed to fit into the map.
From our interviews, we gleaned that a Bosom Buddies member falls into one of two categories during their journey with breast cancer: 1) a short term-member, or 2) a long-term member. This transition is noted in our journey map, which was designed in Adobe Illustrator.
Bosom Buddies lacked branding materials beyond a name. Based off of the information gathered in the research stage, we developed the following materials to compose their first branding guidelines.
Typography
Typefaces can convey personality, and we wanted to find a balance between a practical typeface, but also unique typeface to represent the positive and fun personality of Bosom Buddies. I designed the wordmark, and decided on the typeface as well. The main font for the word mark, titles, and subheadings is Mandevilla. Mandevilla is a semi-serif font available on Adobe Typekit.
Mandevilla's physical attributes are round, slightly swirly, and clean. Typefaces that look more like print writing come across as more casual and friendly, and typefaces that are easy to read (though typically a serif font) are more professional. The Mandevilla font has a thin weight, and while it's a semi-serif font it, I would argue it borders on decorative, lending itself more to a personal, handwritten, and feminine feel. Within the context of Bosom Buddies, the typeface mends well with the fun, interpersonal nature of the group.
The typeface for body copy is Mr Eaves Mod OT. Mr Eaves Mod OT is a sans-serif typeface that is clean and readable. We recommended using Book or Bold font variations. The use of the Mr Eaves Mod OT with the font options of Book and Bold offer enough constrast to the thinness of the Mandevilla font, while maintaining the overall feel and personality of the typefaces working together.
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Wordmark
As everyone in the class was required to design potential wordmarks, I brought a variety of options to the table. I've included those iterations to the left which you can view by clicking View Wordmark Iterations. One of my original wordmark designs was actually chosen.
I designed the word mark using the Mandevilla font, as it the typeface has an ethos of femininity, and is a clean, contemporary, and minimal font while maintaining an ethos of fun. This ethos of fun is carried out through the swirly font, and the design to make the uppercase “B” appear as a breast, which I wanted to also be minimal and tasteful. I used the colors I chose for the color palette (discussed below) in the wordmark.
Based on the feedback we received after the presentation to Bosom Buddies members, the uppercase “B” was very popular, but the rest of the font was deemed too thin for readability. The group liked the font, and asked for the text to be bolded. Unfortunately, a limitation of the Mandevilla font is that it doesn’t come in bold, but I was able to add an outline in the same color of purple to the font in Adobe Illustrator.
Logo
As with the “B” in the wordmark, we wanted any imagery breast-related to be respectful and tasteful, but also communicate the focus on breast cancer. This logo was designed to represent the group’s mission of breast cancer outreach and demonstrate the ethos of being friendly, welcoming, and loving.
If I were to redesign the logo now, I would have changed the pink heart to one of the pink shades from the brand color palette. I perhaps would have also redrawn the logo to have more precise lines, similar to the font Mandevilla. This would have created a stronger brand consistency across the wordmark and the logo.
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Mission Statement
The first mission statement we created and presented to Bosom Buddies was:
“Bosom Buddies inspires hope through laughter. Our mission is to provide love, support, and encouragement to breast cancer survivors in the Upstate.”
During our presentation, Bosom Buddies members offered feedback on mentioning health and resources within the mission statement. The edited and final version is as follows:
“Bosom Buddies inspires hope through laughter. Our mission is to provide love, support, and health resources to breast cancer survivors in the Upstate.”
Color Palette
The color palette selected for the Bosom Buddies was selected in order to help this support group gain its own identity. We have chosen to utilize two separate tones of pink due to it being a nationally recognized symbol of Breast Cancer awareness. The grey of the color palette gives a neutral color in order to help outline and other purposes for the palette. And finally, the utilization of purple and orange plays off of the Clemson University colors while still being unique to the Bosom Buddies group.
Voice
To further solidify the personality of Bosom Buddies, we developed a collection of words and phrases that make the voice of Bosom Buddies. Drawing from the interviews, these were the words and phrases that occurred most often in the interviews.
To put the voice into context, we wrote the following paragraph describing the group in their branded tone:
Bosom Buddies members are friendly, loving, and positive. They encourage and support one another throughout the entire journey of breast cancer. Bosom Buddies members aim to be informative resources for one another, as well as resources for those they try to reach in the community. They believe that empathy is necessary to fight breast cancer, but also that survivors need friends who will aim to uplift them. The group is active, health-driven, and welcoming.
This branding guide is included in the Content Strategy Plan report in the deliverables.
After the branding guidelines were in place, the group decided on the best platforms and mediums to recommend to Bosom Buddies. Based on the branding guidelines, the group mocked up a flyer, a Facebook page, and a website, alongside maintenance recommendations. For full explanations behind the design of the flyer, the recommended settings for the public and private Facebook group, the architecture of the website, or the defined roles of these groups, as well as a full discussion on the data and findings, see the Final Content Strategy Plan.
View Final Content Strategy Plan
constraints & solutions
One constraint we faced was that Bosom Buddies lacked a non-profit status, meaning the budget was limited to contributions from members, but historically there were no membership fees and any group outing was paid for by each member. The group also did not want to begin to charge membership fees, as they wanted to remain as accessible as possible. This accessibility was very important to them, and we had to consider this as we aimed to develop a sustainable strategy and marketing materials for the group.
Bosom Buddies also had an informal leadership structure. Part of our recommendation included a management plan that didn’t necessarily enforce any elected positions or positions of “power,” but rather positions that members could contribute to upkeep the materials, platforms, and overall content.
Recruitment for the group had relied entirely on word-of-mouth successfully for over 20 years, without any creation of social media groups or alternative outreach strategies. This may have been considered a constraint to our group upon first hearing it, however, we did not write off digital literacy in our consideration of implementing alternatives to word-of-mouth. The Bosom Buddies women (both working and retired) we found during our interviews were more than fluent and confident with social media and website maintenance.
Bosom Buddies, from the first client meeting, expressed their desire to reach anyone with breast cancer, but mentioned that they had at some points welcomed members who had other forms of cancer, including ovarian/cervical cancer, as well as a man who had testicular cancer. This led to a resistance of branding themselves as solely a breast cancer group, as they would never turn anyone away who needed support in the local area.
After this first meeting with Bosom Buddies, and as our group began to analyze the data collected, the data showed that with the main focus of the group was on breast cancer support, and the overwhelming majority of the group contained women and content topics focused on women’s topics and breast-cancer specific topics. We presented this data and recommended that their brand would be accurate and stronger if they clearly stated the initial mission of the group, which was to specifically serve women experiencing or who survived breast cancer in the upstate of South Carolina.
the outcome
The main challenge of this was to not only have the Bosom Buddies members interested in content, but to enable and persuade them to participate in the content strategy work. We accomplished this by including the members throughout the process and explaining why they should care about the benefits of a content strategy plan. From individual user interviews assessing what the individual members and the overall group wanted, needed, and prioritized, we were able to build the case around their worst pain points or biggest opportunities. This ability to tell a good story to ensure the success of the content strategy plan was best communicated with our persona and journey map, which truly laid the foundation for our recommendations to the group.
After implementing our content strategy plan, as of August 2018, Bosom Buddies became certified as a 503C non-profit, and subsequently, earned a $5000 grant from the Dabo Swinney's "All-In" Foundation to fund a website, print brochures and flyers, and to buy and prepare care packages for new members.