The More You Known: Movember’s Doug Waldrep — How Chopping Wood Can Start A Conversation
For the last four Novembers, Known’s Head of Product Aaron Nightingale has inspired Knowners to “grow a ‘mo’” (i.e., a mustache) throughout the month. Founded in 2003, Movember’s goal is to raise awareness of and money for a variety of men’s health issues, including prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and suicide prevention.
This year, we welcomed the nonprofit’s Corporate Partnerships Operations Manager Doug Waldrep to our NYC office for a The More You Known (or is it “The ‘Mo’ You Known?”) chat with Aaron. Here are some edited excerpts from the conversation on getting men to open up and the role women play in men’s health.
Movember’s origins
Doug Waldrep: The organization started in Melbourne [Australia] with just a couple of guys who were having drinks. They thought that mustaches were out of fashion, and it would be funny to grow a mustache. They had a really brilliant idea of, “Hey, let’s use this to start conversations about health and to start this fundraiser.” Since 2003, they’ve raised over a billion dollars globally. It funded over 1,250 projects for men’s health in over 20 countries. We now have over six million Mo Bros and Mo Sisters.
Moving the mental health conversation forward
DW: [Movember] did get started with prostate cancer, and that’s still a huge cause area. There was a shift from having mental health and suicide prevention tacked on at the end to becoming our leading cause area.
We did a lot of surveying during the pandemic that showed that men were struggling. The majority responded that they were losing connections with the people around them. People had higher levels of depression, and at any of those points our mental health was a lot lower. Four out of every five suicides is a man, and suicide is the second leading cause of death for men between ages 19 to 34 globally. We knew that was a space that we had to be in.
So we launched Movember Conversations, a digital tool to help people practice having tough conversations. It gives you prompts that are really prevalent in people’s lives right now — losing your job, having stress at home with children — all kinds of different things that have been exacerbated over the past couple years, and it helps you have conversations with the people in your life.
Putting words into action
DW: I grew up in southeast Texas in a town of 6,000 people in the woods. Nobody there is going to think about professional help regularly. So what I’ve found is if I go home and spend some time cutting up logs or working on fences with my dad, I can have some really great conversations with him. You can talk about stuff that you wouldn’t normally feel comfortable discussing around the dinner table.
A big part of [the Man of More Words] campaign is being able to open up yourself, meeting men where they are, and allowing them to open up in a comfortable spot. Another brilliant thing Movember did was partnering with barbershops because they found that a lot of men keep the same barber for many, many years. Having mental health professionals working with barbers to train them has been a really effective way to have these conversations.
Why men should be smart ALECs
DW: Movember didn’t develop the ALEC model, but we definitely promote it. It’s something to always keep in mind when you’re having conversations.
It stands for “Ask, Listen, Encourage action, Check in.”
So first the A, ask the question. Instead of beating around the bush, it’s jumping straight into asking someone what’s wrong. The biggest thing men often struggle with is the L. It’s not, “ask the question and then tell the person what they should be doing.” It’s asking and really listening to what they’re saying. Then to encourage action, you need to say, “Thank you for sharing this. I had no idea that you were going through this. Have you sought any sort of professional help with this?” And then the C is circling back to the conversation. You want to make sure that you’re following up with people and that you don’t just close the door and then leave. Make sure that this is something that you come back to.
Movember’s drive to be more inclusive
DW: When you look at our old materials, you saw a lot of cool guys with leather jackets. One of the big things that [has changed] around our branding was we stopped trying to go out and force this image.
We took a poll of our actual community members. What we found was a very diverse group of guys. Those are now the faces of Movember because we are an organization that is dealing with the issues that are going to be affecting those guys.
But larger than that, we recognize that oftentimes the one person that can get a guy to go to a doctor is usually his wife or his mom. The people who have been taking care of men’s health for centuries are the women in our lives. So we want to make sure that when we think of who are supporters of Movember, it’s our Mo Bros and our Mo Sisters. Everybody has fathers, brothers, sons, husbands. Fifty percent of the population is dying six years before the other half of the population, which is something that is going to affect everyone.
One in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer. There’s an increase when it comes to men of African or Caribbean descent: one in four men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer. So one of our big pushes over the past couple of years has been to diversify the pool of clinical studies so that we can actually find out how these diseases affect everyone, not just this small pool that we’re then going to apply to everybody.
