The Brief
Hitch was commissioned by Kent County Council to develop a National Lottery funded mental health campaign with HeadStart Kent targeting young people aged 10-16 within the region. The campaign aimed to increase awareness of resilience, understanding of how to build resilience and increase knowledge of where young people could seek additional help. To support the primary audience, the campaign would also identify ways in which parents of young people aged 10-16 as well as schools and communities could be targeted and support.
The Approach
To ensure maximum reach and engagement, the strategy centred around the promotion of young people’s personal stories of getting through hard times and building resilience. Those stories would be developed into animated illustrations and GIFs that would be advertised through different channels.
Our media plan included radio and DAX advertising as well as engagement with school communities. We also made sure that any social media advertising applied geographical and behavioural targeting, which could be refined as the campaign evolved and second and third phases were launched.
Implementation
We delivered a resilience campaign among young people aged 10-16 as part of the Council’s wider violence reduction strategy. This two-year contract and campaign was co-created with young people, designed and delivered with Kent, with input from key stakeholders such as parents, community groups and schools.
The campaign promoted young people’s real life stories of how they built resilience and when this had helped them get through a hard time in their life. The stories were promoted on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, out of home advertising, encouraging young people to visit the campaign website to find out more information and take an action to increase their levels of resilience.
We also created a number of resources to allow parents to support their child’s resilience and to help them in building resilience as well. This included a number of bite-sized videos focusing on specific topics hosted on the campaign website. All campaign resources were distributed via stakeholder and school supporter packs. Finally, we also hosted an online parents resilience webinar and engaged with relevant organisations including ones that provide support to LGBTQI+ young people.
The campaign was aligned and readjusted considering time-sensitive periods such as the back-to-school period or notably the covid-19 lockdowns where we ensured we could continue to support young people through this time.
The Results
- Evaluation showed the campaign increased awareness and understanding of resilience by 13% between baseline and endpoint.
- Campaign metrics showed over 10,000 unique visitors to the parents’ webinars and a 200% increase in traffic to the young people’s section of the campaign website.
- The last burst of activity, which was also co-designed and reflected life changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, saw our parent and child resilient training webinar downloaded by the target audience 24,500 times in total, up to 2,500 times in one day.
- There were 1,362,801 impressions (number of times the ads were displayed) on digital channels. The overall CTR was 0.9%, exceeding the 0.7% target by 0.2%
If you would like to find out more about this or any other campaign, please get in touch.