Leading UK mental health charity Mind have a mission to ensure everyone experiencing a mental health problem gets both support and respect. Despite increasing levels of awareness, many people feel disconnected from the mental health system, meaning they don’t get the support they need.  

Mind needed to reduce the gap between awareness and action, help people recognise when they may have a problem, and encourage them to seek support. We needed to make connections with communities that are underrepresented or with whom communications don’t resonate.

Recognising that we may not be best placed to write authentically for all audiences, we developed a co-creation platform that allowed us to develop a campaign which spoke the mental health language of our audience.  

The campaign was rolled out in locations appropriate to the audience, to interrupt their daily commute, at reflective/introspective mindset moments and at trigger moments when mental health is likely to be front of mind.

At the end of the campaign, we found that all target groups had an increased understanding of Mind as a charity that offer support for mental health. And, importantly, enquiries to Mind’s services had a significant increase.  

Challenge

Mind wanted to address the fact that many communities don’t feel represented by mental health communications. They don’t recognise themselves in communications or relate to the voices speaking to them. This disconnection is particularly pronounced with people from some groups in most need of support: racialised communities, those living in poverty, young people with experience of trauma, and in some regions of the UK. Supported by audience-specific insights such as: Black men being 4x more likely to be involuntarily hospitalised and people with adverse childhood experiences being 14x more likely to attempt suicide.

The mental health system is predominantly WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic), and has a technical way of communicating that can be alienating. We had to escape any sense of professionals – advertising or healthcare – talking at people. Instead, we needed to make genuine connections between our audiences and support services by making a campaign that worked, not just through representation, but inclusive co-creation.

Solution

Conscious that the communications industry is also WEIRD we realised we may not be the people to represent or talk to our target audiences in a relatable way.  

So, we developed a robust creative platform for co-creation. This allowed us to produce a campaign that stood out by speaking in ways that resonated with various disenfranchised audiences through inclusive involvement in the creation process. Partnering with Universal Music, we selected and paired real people who had experience of mental health problems with upcoming artists with the same cultural background. In this collaboration of volunteers, the artists wrote and performed powerful spoken word pieces representing the advisors’ mental health stories.  

From shared Afro-Caribbean heritage to Welsh language speakers, real bonds between volunteers enhanced the content’s credibility. By allowing the artists to communicate in ways that were natural to them, we co-created a campaign that was beyond surface-level relatable, giving Mind’s communications a sense of not simply “this is for you”, but “this is you”.  

The call-to-action tagline ‘If this speaks to you, speak to us’ tied the campaign together and encouraged the audience to reach out to Mind.

Performances of the pieces were launched in locations appropriate to the cultural background of each pair of volunteers and the corresponding audience. Social media channels hosted multiple cuts of the films to reach young people where they organically engage. Films ran in cinema, on Welsh-language and UK-wide broadcast TV and BVOD, and Spotify; while OOH across the London transport network featured impactful passages from the pieces.

Results

We saw the awareness to action gap shrink, with enquiries to Mind’s services increasing by over 40% as more people took action by seeking the information and help they need. Standing out against the other Mental Health Week and World Mental Health Day campaigns, the campaign gained 4.2 million engagements with 28.3 million impressions and UK-wide organic media coverage including Channel 4 News, BBC, even the NME (New Musical Express). The campaign ignited conversation across social media, with 23,224 posts using #SpeakToMind and engagement from high profile users such as McLaren F1, Zoe Ball and Stephen Fry.

Originally published in PMLiVE on 1 February 2024.