Talking HealthTech: 308 – Changing the face of men’s health through technology. Sam Gledhill, Movember

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This episode is being released in November 2022, and many across the world know that November is the month to raise awareness for men’s health through the Movember movement.

And Movember is much more than just a good excuse for men to grow seedy moustaches to raise awareness and funds and start a conversation about men’s health – Movember has significant experience in programmes for men’s health and developed digital health products that deliver impactful outcomes.

With Pete today is Sam Gledhill from Movember, and in this episode, they’re talking about Movember, changing the face of men’s health, what Movember’s vision is for digital health and what it all has to do with health tech.  

Meet Sam Gledhill

Sam Gledhill is the Global Director of Product Transformation at Movember. He has a background in medical imaging and is a veteran mo with more than a decade of experience at Movember, and he has worn different hats in the organisation across that time ranging from Project Management in Biomedical Research to Testicular Cancer Program Manager. 

He and the team have produced some outstanding products that seek to address the critical gaps in support for men that face a prostate or testicular cancer diagnosis, as well as those who might be facing a mental health challenge. 

He’s a father of two young boys and is fully committed to creating a future world that not only meets their physical and emotional needs but also normalises the process of seeking help when something doesn’t feel right.

Nearly eleven years ago, Sam started working with Movember on a prostate cancer research project. Over time, his involvement in the organisation evolved to running a portfolio and into a role that led digital health teams across both prostate and testicular cancer and then, in more recent times, into the mental health and suicide prevention space as well. 

In the last couple of months, Sam has shifted his attention to thinking about how the company can take product thinking as it does in the digital space and start to think about that in more non-digital ways of working throughout the organisation. 

More about Movember

There is a lot happening within Movember, and the organisation has grown the business side to facilitate a year-round effort to raise awareness. Though the moustache growing season is the pinnacle of Movember’s year, in order to expand its business prospects, it meant raising awareness throughout the year. 

For example, in April, the organisation runs a testicular cancer awareness campaign and in September – World Suicide Prevention Day. As the programme’s team has grown over the course of the last ten years, that’s a year-round effort. As such, those programmes that Movember invests in are ongoing, long-term investments in men’s health that need to be managed, curated and navigated towards the targeted outcomes.

November is a leader, as its journey started way back in 2003 as a conversation between two mates in a pub in Melbourne. So, the challenge was issued to one of Movember’s founders and thirty of his mates to grow a moustache throughout November. In doing so, they noticed that throughout November, it started to spark a whole range of questions that they were really quite surprised to hear. People were saying, “why would you grow a moustache? What is that all about?” 

Simultaneously they noticed that around the world, everything was being painted pink for breast cancer awareness. After doing a bit of research, they found out that as many men died of prostate cancer as women died of breast cancer, yet awareness was quite low for prostate cancer. There were no campaigns to show men that they needed to think more about what was going on with prostate cancer. 

Therefore, in 2004, they decided to repeat the process by encouraging people to grow a moustache, but that year, they monetised the moustaches by collecting donations. Over fifty thousand dollars was raised and handed over to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia, giving birth to the organisation. Now, Movember has a presence in over twenty countries, with its headquarters here in Melbourne, Australia.

Movember has grown into quite a medium size organisation now and has taken on the creation of and investment in programmes. 

Fundraising through Individual and Corporate Initiatives

The bulk of Movember’s funding comes through guys and girls growing moustaches, undertaking challenges in November and asking their friends and family for money. The organisation also has corporate and commercial partnerships that have helped along the way in both fundraising and programme delivery. For example, the Spud’s game initiative held in Melbourne, which the AFL and the St Kilda Footy Club helped to make a reality. 

Also, companies like Telstra partner with Movember to get their workforce to participate and engage with some of the programmes while raising awareness through their staff.

The Movember Programmes 

Movember has organisational goals that focus its attention on three big cause areas.

1. Prostate cancer– there are initiatives geared at biomedical research and survivorship programmes focusing on how they can better help men through a diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer.

2. Testicular cancer– the programmes for testicular cancer include support focused on the survivorship side of testicular cancer and biomedical research to understand more about the disease and how they can find new treatments and new technologies to help diagnose.

3. Mental health– these programmes are aimed at preventative measures. As such, they focus on ways to foster social innovation and social connections between guys.

Movember relies heavily on having global advisories like the thought leaders of the world that it brings together to help guide and shape the things that are essential in those three areas. These include the world’s best prostate cancer and testicular cancer researchers and clinicians, as well as the world’s greatest minds in mental health. 

Movember.com

Movember has been a native digital platform since it started, and the power of peer-to-peer fundraising was accelerated through digital tools. The november.com platform became the thing that the organisation did all of its fundraisings on, and very rapidly, it turned out to generate a hundred million dollars a year. They can then use this digital space to deliver health content to those in need. 

Relationships with Different Stakeholders

One of the really exciting things about what Movember’s doing is its direct-to-consumer products, such as True North. True North is a prostate cancer digital health platform designed to give men and their partners the tools, resources and information to help them through that early survivorship journey. 

The True North tool is designed to be consumed by individuals who are facing a prostate cancer diagnosis. But in parallel to that, Movember has also invested a significant amount of money into building global and national registries of men with prostate cancer that take quality-of-life surveys.

These registries give Movember the privilege of having relationships that produce patient-reported quality-of-life measures as part of those registries. These surveys provide Movember with a unique opportunity to think about how it can not only report to clinicians how their practice is performing and how they can benchmark against others and what good looks like, but it also gives the organisation the opportunity to tailor some of the resources that it is providing to those individuals based on how they answer the survey questions. 

Movember’s Digital Health Solutions 

The organisation has a number of digital health solutions. On the prostate cancer scene, it has True North, and for testicular cancer, it has Nuts and Bolts, which is an online platform designed to give men the tools, information and resources they need as they’re facing a testicular cancer journey. 

In the mental health space, Movember looks at individual settings. In the sports setting, they have a product called Ahead of the Game, which is about raising mental health literacy and resilience in young men in sports, and that’s focused around using sports as a hook to engage with that audience. There is also Family Man, which may be the world’s only parenting resource directed specifically at dads. Lastly, there is MO Conversations, a tool that helps you as someone who might be supporting a guy who’s going through a rough period to help have those really rich health conversations. 

The Importance of Strong Academic Evidence

That evidence base is critical to ensuring that the monies raised are properly invested. Movember takes academically rigorous, validated programmes of work and delivers them in ways that the academic world is not well-positioned to do in terms of branding, marketing and bringing it to the people in ways that are uniquely engaging and interesting and really optimise the user experience. Whereas the actual underlying academic principles of whether it’s effective or not can still hold true.

One way Movember does this is by using a framework called REAL-reach, engagement, action and long-term impact. This ensures the organisation’s theory of change goes from someone coming onto a product, engaging with that product for some time and eventually reaching a point where they got a good dosage of the product that will trigger behaviour change and a long-term impact over time. Movember’s KPIs are set to meet these goals. 

The reach involves targeting the right audience and engaging them with the products in a way that’s actually going to deliver the best health value or outcomes value for them.

The Clinician’s Role

If you look at the cancer space, you will see that clinicians have a significant role to play, particularly with testicular cancer, which is quite rare.  With a rare disease, being front of mind in the clinical community is going to be great if they rely on digital marketing for testicular cancer tools. It will be challenging and really expensive to target men at exactly the time they’re hitting a testicular cancer diagnosis because there are not many of them in the big pool of a very competitive market space.

That’s where good partnerships with clinicians are quite critical. So, if Movember can be front of mind in the eyes of a GP or a urologist who’s seeing these patients, they can then point these patients in the direction of the available digital tools. 

What’s Coming up for Movember?

If you haven’t started growing a moustache, it’s still not too late to head over to Movember.com and make a donation or just sign up to learn more about what Movember is doing. There is also an app, which is available in the app stores. 

The next five to ten years will be really interesting for what Movember has coming up. The organisation spent the last ten years building a very solid baseline of understanding what men need and understanding what the needs of these communities are. Consequently, they will look at innovating around some of these traditional structural problems around how patients get access to these tools and resources. 

The most exciting thing Movember has happening right now in the prostate cancer space is the new tool it is about to release called Under the Hood. It is focused on digging into the real problems of the sexual well-being of men after prostate cancer treatment. There is much currently happening in the mental health space. The last couple of years have taught us that social connection is important. Movember will focus on more programmes that address how it can start to be an advocate for change towards how men approach their masculinities and the way they interact with the world. 

Connecting with Movember 

If you want to learn more, make a donation or connect with Movember, head over to their website. For clinicians and patients wanting to use their digital health resources and tools, all of these products are available for free and available through the website.

_{Source talkinghealthtech.com}