What Makes A Great Partnership

At Keep A Breast, we hold ourselves to a higher standard. Our partnerships are truly authentic. We align ourselves with people and brands who share our core values, who do not use carcinogens or toxins in their products and do not test on animals.

We do all we can to educate and empower young women about their lifetime breast cancer risk and give them tools for cancer prevention. While many other organizations and companies create banners and pink ribbon labels to promote awareness, we focus on prevention. That’s why we call October “Breast Cancer Prevention month”, not “Breast Cancer Awareness Month.”

We look to build long-term partnerships with brands that are mutually beneficial. Below are some of the ways we work to build a sound partnership, allowing us to achieve our respective goals together. We want to add value to your brand just as you would to ours.

Working Together

Working with KAB is a true collaboration. We will work together every step of the way to ensure a successful partnership. We prefer to be direct and transparent and ask the same from the brands we work with. We want this to be a fun, meaningful and impactful experience for all involved.

Content

The KAB team spends a lot of time creating and promoting our educational content. We want to collaborate on content ideas that include storytelling, healthy living, prevention tips and interviews with people who have been diagnosed with breast cancer. We have found the most success when our partners share our blogs and content. We have also created a social media toolkit for brands to make it easy to create posts and incorporate branded graphics.

Storytelling

Collaborating to tell a story can be immensely powerful. Partnerships are more authentic and more successful if there is a story behind it. Our audience and yours will want to know why you are partnering with Keep A Breast. What does it mean to you? Has your founder been personally affected by this disease? Do you have staff that have been affected? Is there someone in your community that would be willing to share their story? Stories inspire people to connect to and support the partnership.

Education

Education is why we are here. We want to work with our partners and create ways to enrich both your staff as well as your clientele. How can we educate your staff about Keep A Breast and cancer prevention? How can we help them be successful in having impactful conversations about breast cancer? One of the easiest actions you can take is to share The Keep A Breast App with your staff. We will be in close communication throughout our partnership and we’ll work closely to provide educational materials to your staff.

Additionally we will provide you with your own unique QR code cards to the KAB app. This can be shared and distributed as part of our engagement agreement. The data from the QR code scans will allow us to measure the success of engagement around the partnership.

We look forward to exploring ways we can support and educate your team and clientele!

We also ask that our partners help us distribute our educational materials inside your online product orders, especially in the month of October. This is a particularly great way to directly engage your clientele with breast health information! In 2023, our partners assisted us distributing 176k Check Yourself cards nationally, which we saw a 33% increase in KAB app downloads within a 12 month period.

LANGUAGE

Keep A Breast speaks to a younger audience than most breast cancer organizations as our work focuses on prevention and reaching people while they are young, to help them reduce their risk and understand the power of early detection. We choose to use language that comes from the heart and inspires people to be their own health advocates. We never try to scare people. We stay away from confrontational language like “fight cancer,” “kick cancer’s ass,” “against cancer,” “battle,” etc. and we ask that our partners do the same.

During October, we also choose to align ourselves with Breast Cancer Prevention Partners and promote the month as Breast Cancer Prevention Month as opposed to Breast Cancer Awareness Month to shift the focus to prevention.

In 2021 We dropped “Awareness” from our mantra. Read our statement here.

Promotions

We want to show the world how amazing and generous our partners are. We will work together to come up with the best strategy for promoting our partnership based on the guaranteed minimum donation. Promotions can include email blasts, social media, event inclusion, and more. While we do not have a dedicated PR/Marketing team, nor a PR company on retainer, we recommend that brands tap into their own internal marketing teams. We will help supply the content for your successful promotions.

PARTNER SHOP PAGE

Our Partner Shop Page on the KAB website is one way to show our appreciation to our partners. We promote them through email blasts and social media. We include lifestyle images and all the details of the partnership. You can view our partners page here.

Product Sales

Partnerships are often based on product sales. Keep A Breast will work with you to determine the most authentic way to promote our partnership. The majority of our promotions lead with education. That is why we’re here and it’s what our audience expects from us.

The only time we lead with sales messaging is when we promote our KAB Partner Shop page in October and sometimes around the holidays.

While we are happy to promote partnerships (and have fun doing so!) in the ways previously mentioned, please don’t rely on Keep A Breast and our audience to meet sales goals. Our audience is focused on education and authenticity - everyone likes seeing rad brands get together to do cool things - but it has to be genuine. Often, partnerships that solely promote through KAB, result in little to no donations.

Pink Ribbon

The beauty brand Estee Lauder - which continues to use cancer-causing ingredients including benzene in their products - created the pink ribbon in 1992, extrapolating on the activism efforts of Charlotte Haley, the granddaughter, sister, and mother of women who had battled breast cancer.

Since then, this ribbon has been used as a cause marketing tool to promote and sell products for breast cancer awareness. This symbol has been abused over the years and used on products that have no business in the world of breast cancer awareness like M&M’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and even a drill used for fracking. Keep A Breast strives for transparency and trust with our audience, therefore we never use the pink ribbon symbol and we ask the same of all our partners.

Pinkwashing

Breast Cancer Action coined the term pinkwashing as part of their Think Before You Pink® campaign.

Pinkwasher: (pink’-wah-sher) noun. A company or organization that claims to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink ribbon product, but at the same time produces, manufactures and/or sells products that are linked to the disease.

The conglomerate 3M has made its vast success through development, production and sale of PFOS and PFOA, and now PFAS compounds in its products–all of which can affect reproduction, thyroid function, the immune system and injure the liver among other health effects. It has in past years promoted its pink ribbon Post-its, a product that contains PFAS.

3M has stated it will cease PFAS manufacturing and “work to” discontinue use throughout its product portfolio by the end of 2025 in response to regulations and stakeholder demands.

Another pinkwashing “red flag” are labels that include: “A percentage of proceeds will be donated to xxx.” It’s impossible to understand what that means. Will they be donating .03 cents or $3?

There are several breast cancer watchdog groups that constantly put brands on their public pinkwashing lists to let people know not to buy from them.

Logo Use

Keep A Breast is a brand, just like you. It makes us cringe when brands pull an old random logo off the internet. We ask that you only use the logos we provide you and that you work with us on approval for the usage of our logo. You can download our logo and brand guide in our toolkit.

DonationS

Each partnership has a contract that stipulates the donation details and when the donations will be paid. Please make sure that your accounting team is in the loop on all details to ensure donations are received on time. You would not believe how much time we spend chasing down donations. It feels horrible on both sides and so we’re mentioning here to start off on the right foot!

Donation Language

PERCENTAGE EXAMPLE:

Normally it's best practice that if you do a percentage, commit to a minimum:

For the entire month (or day) of October, [your company name] will donate 50% of all sales with a minimum guarantee of $5,000 to the Keep A Breast Foundation's Check Yourself program.

DOLLAR AMOUNT EXAMPLE:

For the entire month of October [your company name] will donate $10 of every item purchased to the Keep A Breast Foundation's Check Yourself program.

The reason for this is to maintain transparency and avoid pinkwashing to the end consumer.

Thank you

for taking the time to carefully review our standards for a great partnership.

Partnerships are KAB’s largest donation revenue and program support. They also allow us to expand our audience reach, landing our breast cancer prevention and early detection education in front of more young people.

This work is life-saving and immensely important, and we are grateful for the opportunity each year to expand on this reach through our partnerships.

We are so grateful for each and every partnership, and look forward to creating many more meaningful relationships for years to come!