A pioneer in social networking, the American Cancer Society realizes that Web 2.0 tools are just high-tech ways to continue what it's been doing for a hundred years — building and interacting with a community of constituents united against cancer.

By Abny Santicola

Since the campaign launched on April 20, more than 37,000 people have declared the American Cancer Society the official sponsor of their birthdays at morebirthdays.com. And in the first week following the campaign launch, more than 6,100 people on Facebook did the same.

“Our goal is to have 50,000 by the end of [May],” Music says. “I think that it’s been a great success so far. We’ve gotten extremely good feedback from the people who have signed up and have seen the campaign. We’ve not seen a huge uptick in dollars from the campaign yet, but it’s not like we’ve made a big ask on this. We really wanted to get people engaged with us.”