Raising Awareness for Mental Health - Partnership with the Canadian Mental Health Association

BACKGROUND - ABOUT THE CMHA

The Canadian Mental Health Association, founded in 1952 is a non-profit, charitable organization with a passion for making mental health achievable for all (CMHA). Committed to being leaders in the field of mental health, the CMHA contributes its knowledge and resources to various provincial policies and provides equitable access to all mental health services (CMHA). 

The CMHA has various partner associations, including the CMHA Ontario, a dedicated partner of the foundation that works closely with its 30 local branches across the province (CMHA). 

To help raise awareness to the topic of mental health, I will be collaborating with the CMHA Ontario to design a multi-pronged social media strategy that will one day develop into compelling content. 

MY VISION

Mental health hits home for me. Through collaborating with the CMHA of Ontario, I hope to reach other young adults who are also struggling with their own mental health and are unsure of where to turn next. Growing up is scary, but it is important that you choose a pathway in life that makes you happy regardless of what other people think, as scary as that might sound. 

This social media campaign, although designed with young adults in mind, welcomes everyone and will in fact encourage involvement from people of all ages, no matter their mental health status.

CHANNELING STRATEGIES 

An important part of raising awareness for any topic, no matter the subject, is choosing the appropriate channels that you will use to spread your content. Channels nowadays are often referred to more commonly as social media platforms. 

Given that mental health is a rather serious topic, and might not be taken lightly for some, I will want to keep that in mind while using social media to raise awareness. 

For that reason, I have chosen three main platforms that I will be using to gather my audience's attention. 

Facebook

Facebook is a great place to start when looking to raise awareness on a topic, and many people are actually reaching out to their communities to seek help, especially as we adapt further to virtuality as we continue to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook actually encourages its users to use their platforms to make positive impacts, start conversations, support communities, and inspire change (Meta). 

Knowing this information, I think that Facebook is an ideal starting point for the campaign to start gaining traction and to find communities that are in need of the most help. It might also serve as a good tool for finding people who also want to help and become involved in the campaign too. 

Facebook also has a really unique tool to help organizers post and users keep track of upcoming events. This will become extremely useful in event planning and will be used in addition to traditional methods (i.e., posts including dates, schedules on websites) to raise awareness for the events that we will be putting together. 

Facebook also tends to be a more formal social media platform, and I would like to use this to my advantage. Oftentimes, people get very invested in the content that they find on Facebook, especially in the Watch section of the app. For this reason, I believe that it is crucial to have inspirational videos on our Facebook feeds that will target similar algorithms and thus show up on the correct audience's Watch page. 

I think that the inspiration portion is key here. Oftentimes the videos on the Watch page are not short (they aren't 30 minutes long by any means, but they're around the 5-10 minute mark), and people get invested, myself included! If we can reach our target audience with a meaningful video, we'll have them hooked. 

Twitter

The Twitter platform is another great place to turn when looking to raise awareness, just in a different entity! It is a great platform for conversation, nonetheless and will be advantageous in our campaign. 

The primary use of this social media platform will be for information distribution. The Twitter community consists of a lot of people who are into reading and learning, it isn't about the visuals as much as it's about the actual content. 

Any articles that are written throughout the campaign (for example from mental health survivors) should be distributed primarily on Twitter in order to target the right people. 

TikTok

Finally, TikTok! Whether we realize it or not, this platform has deep roots in raising awareness for various topics. In fact, the company itself states that it wants to inspire and encourage this new generation to make a positive impact on those around them and highlights how other organizations have done just that.

TikTok is a fun platform that can also be used to our advantage. Things do not, by any means, have to be serious all the time! In fact, it would probably be good for our mental health to have some fun!

The primary use of this platform will be visuals...alllll the visuals! This could include fun montages from events, or even the preparation before events, or....wait for it....even the countdown before an event! It could also be used to showcase snippets of clips from longer campaign videos. 

It is important to have some fun with the work that we will be doing. 

MEASURING SUCCESS

A final key part in designing a social media campaign is coming up with a plan on how you will measure success. 

In this particular campaign, given that it is primarily social media-oriented, measuring success will lie heavily on the engagement on our platforms. Are people engaging with the posts themselves? Are they liking, sharing, or commenting on it? Is it striking up a conversation? Are our articles trending on Twitter? Have our videos gone viral on TikTok?

Measuring success could also be determined by how many people are tagging our platforms in their own posts when attending our events. This might not be achievable right away, but when this happens, it will be a great indicator of success. 

WORKS CITED

CMHA. “About CMHA Ontario.” CMHA Ontario, 2022, https://ontario.cmha.ca/about-cmha/.

Meta. “Inspire Your Audience to Take Action.” Meta for Business, 2022, https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/lessons/use-facebook-to-raise-awareness-for-a-cause.

TikTok. “Our Idea Is Simple...use Tiktok to Do Good.” TikTok for Good, 2022, https://www.tiktok.com/forgood?lang=en.

 *Please note that this is a hypothetical situation - I will not be partnering with the CMHA. All content in this blog post are for educational purposes only.*