1 year ago, June 3rd 2008, we wanted to learn about blogs and posts. However, we didn’t wish to write about insignificant things or just posting photos.Talking with the project coordinator of the Nippon Foundation Scholar Association (NFSA), Akira Uchimura, we could think about an interesting kind of blog, one with a purpose. That was how “MAGIC – Mates Against Gastrointestinal Cancer” started. Our aim is to
After one week, we found a suitable platform and design to run it, very friendly for our visitors. Little by little we learnt how to improve our posts, to add images, and later on to post videos. But, no still couldn’t feel the impact of the information in the virtual community. Obviously, at that time the page was very young and was quite slow to spread the site among the friends.
Then, we figure out that social networks may be quite useful to become well-known. So we learnt about facebook and did open the MAGIC Facebook Group and finally MAGIC facebook fan site. In few weeks the number of visits accelerated and gave an interesting feedback, especially using google analytics:
Since our opening, we have got 4245 visits with 8481 pageviewes, resulting in a 2 pages/visit average. Gradually, we are reducing the bounce rate (a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors), now at 69.19%.
Our visitors share with us approximately 2min 28sec, what is something to be grateful for and challenge us to keep going.
Below we present the top 10 countries from where we are share with our visitors:
|
Country |
No. Visits |
|
Total |
4245 |
|
730 |
|
589 |
|
434 |
|
408 |
|
389 |
|
233 |
|
197 |
|
179 |
|
134 |
|
119 |
|
Others (Canada, Ecuador, Belgium, South Korea, Brazil, UK, Germany, Bolivia, Algeria, El Salvador, Italia, Morocco, Tunisia, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Switzerland, Guatemala, Uruguay, China, India, Poland, Panama, Paraguay, etc.) |
833 |
Since August 2008, we established a partnership with La Yûai Association, who kindly does the French translations. La Yai Asociación is a non-profit community-based organization supported by active volunteers. Its members are interesting to learn about Japanese and French culture and language. It is a truly voluntary organization dedicated to help Japanese living in Paris and French people living in Tokyo.
During this first year we had post not so popular and other that produce more than one comment. Such is the case of the special interview gave by a young and brave fighter against her gastric cancer. Sorrowfully, she left us, but her life testimony remains as a hope message and an example courage. Here is part of her words:
|
“I think that we shouldn’t wait its strike. We should eat properly. We should be aware of this disease. I think that cancer patients should never feel as a victim. That is the worst thing ever, because that depression helps cancer to spread. We should continue our daily life with our family and friends. We shouldn’t let the cancer “fill us up” with dark and gloomy thoughts. We are much stronger than that. We can defeat it, and depends only on each of us rather than many newly developed treatments”. [Read more...] |
While our facebook group MAGIC was growing, we started to receive many comments, suggestions and critics. Month by month we felt that posting wasn’t a bad idea; in fact, we actually felt that with a real friendship we could give much support to many other mates and help them to overcome their fears, or even their illness. Today we have 343 members and keep going.
For this next year, we wish to attend all your doubts and questions, in order to learn together to raise, fight and vanquish our problems.
Thanks for all your support with this first year. We hope we could all stay in contact one more year.
Together, we can do MAGIC…!!!
