Raising awareness for mental health through a multi-faceted social media campaign

Calm was looking to find a way to celebrate their 10 year anniversary that was less about driving new user growth and was more about giving back to their community. They partnered with the National Alliance on Mental Illness to donate $25,000 towards furthering their plan to build better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness. However, they still needed a larger digital initiative that would bring awareness to mental health in general by normalizing common mental health challenges that people often suffer from every day.

We designed a three-pronged campaign approach that sought to simultaneously raise awareness about mental health issues (and what causes them), and also encourage people to share how they are feeling with others. This approach indexed on the three motivators that usually guide user behavior across social platforms — Authenticity, Relevancy, and Validation.

To kick things off, we partnered with Jay Shetty, Calm’s Chief Purpose Officer, to create an authentic video announcing Calm’s 10 year anniversary and encouraging people to share how they are really feeling in order to create a deeper emotional connection with their community.

We also worked internally to think about how Calm could help the broader community, expanding beyond those who are already customers. This resulted in The Essentials, a free collection of content and tools designed to help people take care of their mental health. We connected this back to content that felt like people could have a 1:1 interaction with Jay, recommending The Essentials as a hyper-relevant solution to deal with how they are feeling.

In order to help validate the campaign, we grounded our efforts in science by partnering with Dr. Julie Smith, a best selling author and Clinical Psychologist, who helped us create engaging video content that addressed helpful tools and tricks that people could use to deal with anxiety.