What Makes A Great Partnership

At Keep A Breast, we prioritize authenticity and align with brands that share our values—those committed to non-toxic, cruelty-free products and meaningful impact. While many organizations focus on pink ribbon awareness, we champion prevention. That’s why we call October “Breast Cancer Prevention Month” instead of “Breast Cancer Awareness Month.”

We seek long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships that educate and empower young people with tools for cancer prevention. We want to add value to your brand just as you would to ours. Below are key ways we collaborate to create meaningful change together.

How We Work 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, as well as co-survivors. We have found the most success when our partners share our blogs and content. We have also created a social media toolkit 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 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 who have been affected? Is there someone in your community who 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 your staff and 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 organization. We’ll be in close communication throughout our partnership and provide educational materials to share with your staff.

Educational materials with your own unique KAB app QR code will help us measure the success of engagement around the partnership. We look forward to exploring ways we can support and educate your team and community! We encourage partners to distribute our educational materials inside online product orders, especially during October. This is agreat way to directly engage your community with breast health information! In 2024, our partners assisted us in distributing 17.5k Check Yourself cards and Keep A Breast App download cards nationally, bringing breast health education to young people all across the country.

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 use our platform to scare people and we never use imagery of very sick people or make inflammatory statements that cause further pain or anxiety.
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.

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. We handle KAB PR in-house, and will work with you to provide content you may need for successful promotional campaigns.

PARTNER SHOP

Our Partner Shop on the KAB website showcases partnership details or offers with lifestyle images to drive direct traffic to partner websites.

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 great 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 advocacy 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 the 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. In the past years, it has 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?

Several breast cancer watchdog groups constantly update their public pinkwashing lists to keep the public informed.

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 stipulating 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, so we’re mentioning here to start on the right foot!

Donation Language

To maintain transparency and avoid pinkwashing, we recommend the following donation language guidelines:

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.

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!