What a year 2024 was for CoppaFeel!. It was one of brilliant highs and real lows. We embraced the future through launching our new brand, at the same time as looking back and celebrating our history and founder Kris, who sadly died after 15 years of living with secondary breast cancer.
We built on past successes, embedded inclusion deeper into our culture, and took meaningful steps to ensure that our work reaches and represents the communities who need us most.
It was an award winning year of collaboration, co-creation and growth. But equally provided us with the ultimate reminder of why diagnosing breast cancer early and accurately in young people is crucial.
How we make a difference
We know young people aren’t routinely educated about breast cancer or screened, leading to low levels of awareness and chest checking. This means they are less equipped to find breast cancer early and are therefore at risk of being diagnosed late. We want to change this.
Our theory of change
Our Impact: Broken Down
Our impact can be broken down into 4 key areas: educate, encourage, empower and influence.
Educate – Increase awareness and understanding
Raising awareness of breast cancer amongst young people and providing education on the signs to be aware of and how to check, remain at the core of what we do. In 2024, we wanted to work more closely with young people to shape our brand, improve our resources and develop campaigns that spoke to them.
We expanded the CoppaFeel! Challenge to recruit 20 schools from 3 regions into a peer to peer initiative where students created campaigns to raise awareness and understanding of breast cancer with their networks during one week. Chest checking nearly tripled from 1 in 14 pre-challenge, to 1 in 5 students after the campaign week. There was an 85% increase in breast cancer awareness among students who participated in the Challenge, with the highest increase reported amongst South Asian young people at 94.6%.
Our national campaign, Changing the Face of Breast Cancer launched, featuring the stories of Anisa, Brodie and Shanon who had all had breast cancer at a young age. The aim of the campaign was to challenge perceptions that breast cancer is a disease that only affects older women, reinforcing our message that you’re never too young to check your chest. Through the campaign we had over 31 million impressions across our months’ worth of activity. The campaign delivered strong ‘claimed call to actions’ with nearly 1 in 2 saying they have checked their chest because of the assets, with 3 in 5 planning to visit the website afterwards.
We successfully collaborated with some amazing creators and partners to spread our message further. We focused specific initiatives on reaching Black and South Asian young people, who we know face greater health inequities and report lower levels of awareness and chest checking according to our research. We continued our work with Amaliah (a media company amplifying the voices of Muslim women), launching a powerful campaign to highlight the relevance of breast cancer for 18-24 year old Muslim women during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The aim was to equip the Amaliah audience with essential knowledge about the signs and symptoms of breast cancer. Whilst also ensuring our messaging reflected the racial and social barriers Muslim women and women of colour can face when accessing healthcare. Some campaign results go beyond the numbers. This year, we had the privilege of speaking to Ahsen, a member of Amaliah’s audience who saw our 2023 campaign and was inspired to check her chest. That simple action led to the discovery that she had breast cancer. She is now in remission. This story is a powerful reminder of the real-life impact our partnership with Amaliah has had, and will continue to have.
Encourage – Increase motivation and support to check
We are in the business of changing behaviours, something we know isn’t quick or easy. When it comes to chest checking, we know there are many factors that contribute to people feeling comfortable and willing to regularly check. That is why we have established digital and in person interactions to support young people along the way. Our 3 main volunteer programmes saw our community of supporters carry out 701 events throughout the year, signing up over 1000 people to our SMS reminder service. We know the impact of their volunteering extends way beyond the numbers, with us receiving countless messages from people who engaged with them. Our Boobette volunteers, many of whom have a lived experience of breast cancer, carry out free breast awareness sessions in the communities. The power of sharing their stories can’t be demonstrated through numbers, but instead feedback like this:
“I feel a lot more confident in knowing how to check myself now, I had always been quite nervous and scared to check, but the talk has opened my eyes to how important it actually is to make sure you’re checking yourself regularly, and with CoppaFeel!’s guidance on their leaflets/coasters etc, I know I can check myself properly.”
Our Health Information Manager conducted a full review of all our health information to ensure it remains accurate, relevant and impactful. We worked on new areas of information such as breast pain and created resources, which will be launched in 2025. We maintained our Patient Information Forum Tick accreditation, demonstrating our continued commitment to producing accurate, evidence-based, impactful information.
Empower – Increase confidence and action to check
Our Self-Checkout (an online web app designed to guide people through how to check) saw 70,000 visitors in 2024, supporting them to become more knowledgeable and confident to start checking their chests. 63% of people who completed our confidence tracker, reported feeling confident to check after using the tool. Despite an increase in people feeling confident to check after using the tool in 2024, we still know there is more work to be done to continue to see that improve. We invested in some consultancy support to understand how the tool can be developed further to positively impact young people and meet their needs. The research completed in 2024, will allow us to refresh the Self-Checkout in 2025 to make it even more impactful.
We also saw the number of people subscribed to our free SMS service continue to grow by 10,000. In total we sent out over 1.5 million reminders across 2024 and now remind over 139,000 people to check every month. Our unsubscription rate remains lower than 1%, which is below industry average.
“I discovered you last year and started following you. Towards the end of the year I remembered your text so gave myself a check a short while later… I found a lump and was diagnosed with breast cancer. I’ve had 6 months of chemo and surgery and I’m now cancer free! Thank-you for all you do ❤️🙌👏 xx”
Influence – Improve healthcare
In 2024, over 1,200 HCPs enrolled on our breast awareness module, with a 36% completion rate. We continued to increase our engagement through specific marketing campaigns and attendance at key conferences, to encourage important conversations about breast cancer in young people.
We were the official charity of The Women’s Health Professional Care conference. The event brought key learnings and insights on a wide range of challenges which affect women throughout their lives, as well as addressed gender disparities in healthcare that have traditionally been overlooked. Our Medical Advisory Group Members Dr Beth Lynch and Sandra Smith also presented a session on “Breast cancer awareness and engaging young people in positive health behaviour.”. These activities saw us grow the number of healthcare professionals on our mailing list to over 4,000.
In addition we continued to work with the University of Nottingham on important research to explore and understand breast referral behaviours in primary care in women under the age of 35 years. The research project will conclude in 2025, allowing us to publish the findings and use the learnings to better develop our healthcare engagement activity. We will also be using the results to understand where we can influence the Government and NHS to make changes to improve experiences and outcomes for young people.
“It is a real privilege to get this opportunity to make a difference. We hope the findings from this project, which is exploring the experiences of women going to see their GP with breast related health concerns , will provide us with insights that can help improve the quality of referrals to secondary care for young women with suspected breast cancer.”
-Beth Richmond, PhD student at University of Nottingham, working on CoppaFeel! funded research.
