Title | BEYOND THE LABEL |
Brand | NATIONAL COUNCIL OF SOCIAL SERVICE |
Product / Service | MENTAL HEALTH PUBLIC EDUCATION |
Category | C01. Integrated Mobile Campaigns |
Entrant | McCANN SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE |
Idea Creation | McCANN SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE |
Media Placement | STARCOM Singapore, SINGAPORE |
PR | OGILVY SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE |
Production | AICHAT PTE LTD Singapore, SINGAPORE |
Name | Company | Position |
---|---|---|
Clarissa Choo | McCann Worldgroup Singapore | Senior Account Executive |
Fathrul Fazakir | McCann Worldgroup Singapore | General Manager |
Felicia Foo | AiChat | Account Manager |
Preet Kaur | McCann Worldgroup Singapore | Senior Copywriter |
Judd Labarthe | McCann Worldgroup Singapore | Strategy Director |
Adrian Loo | McCann Worldgroup Singapore | Senior Art Director |
Natalie Oh | McCann Worldgroup Singapore | Senior Account Manager |
Kester Poh | AiChat | Co-Founder/CEO |
Darren Soong | McCann Worldgroup Singapore | DI Artist |
Alfred Wee | McCann Worldgroup Singapore | Group Creative Director |
According to research by IMH, 1 in 7 Singaporeans will experience a mental health condition in their lifetime, up from the 1 in 8 identified 6 years ago. To understand the quality of life for people with mental health conditions (PMHCs), the National Council of Social Service (NCSS) found that more than 50% admitted having feelings of prejudice towards PMHCs and half would not even work or live near someone with mental health issues. As a result, 3 of 4 Singaporeans who suspect they have a mental health condition do not seek help out of fear of being stigmatized, with a treatment gap of as long as 12 years as the median time between when they first experienced symptoms and when they finally sought help. Beyond the Label aims to raise awareness of this stigma, build empathy towards PMHCs and most importantly, encourage help-seeking behaviours in respond to this crisis.
Our research identified several behavioral biases affecting this issue: - Avoidance coping: we typically change our behaviour to avoid thinking or feeling things that are uncomfortable or complex, so we sought to confront that avoidance upfront, and shift mindsets to Active coping. - Choice overload: The paradox of overchoice prevents us from taking action, is associated with unhappiness, decision fatigue and choice deferral - avoiding decisions altogether. In response: - We developed Belle, a chat-based mental health search tool that curates all local resources & helplines to overcome the daunting task of face-to-face queries or filtering through search engines. - Our key visuals and videos drew Singaporeans to the issue at-hand by reflecting their self-stigma in the context of their personal lives as schoolmates and romantic partners (for youths), among their parents, employers and co-workers and showing how this fear of losing face, prevents one from finding help.
We faced a multitude of issues hindering our efforts: - No single channel for young Singaporeans to find mental health help. - Search engine and social searches for resources raised more questions than answers for a PMHC yet to understand their condition. - NCSS’ research reflected that PMHCs and public held strong internal biases - we say we “should be more tolerant”, and yet behavioral data suggest strong social distancing. - PMHCs are vulnerable to endorsing such biases to fit into society, thus preventing treatment. We focused on 2 segments: - Youth PMHCs aged 18 – 35 - Parents, caregivers, employers and partners of Youth PMHCs To overcome deep seated internal bias and convert help-seeking behaviour, our approach was 2-pronged: - Build a tool that alleviates the daunting task of searching for mental health help online. - Surface Singaporeans’ self-stigma and show how these hidden biases hinders recovery.
Connect youths to help: -We developed Belle, a mental health helpbot that aggregates Singapore counselling, treatment, helplines, and other resources by geography and audience segments in one chat-based platform. -Rapidly connect undiagnosed PMHCs & emergency queries to actual mental health related social service workers. -A social-first, mobile-first, messaging-first resource directly for Singapore youths who are predominantly on mobile devices. Confront self-stigma to provoke action: -Key visuals (Interactive, Social GIFs: 24 Sep – 16 Oct) cited real-life statements of self-stigma, to provoke traffic to Belle and find help. -Manifesto videos (Social, Programmatic: 7 Oct – 5 Dec) encouraged taking the first step to recovery via Belle. -Editorial partnerships and social editorials (Facebook/Instagram: 24 Oct – 18 Nov) raised the importance of having more open conversations – to drive awareness of Belle. -Beyond the Label Festival (on-ground-to-online: 28 Sep) allowed Singaporeans to “experience” the topic firsthand and try Belle out.
Support Help-seeking: - Since Belle launched in September 2019, NCSS routes an average of 174 previously unreachable requests daily to more than a hundred different helplines, centres, programmes and services. - 86.64% uplift in no. of users even after campaign ended – and growing. - Average dwell time of 8.46 min vs global^ Facebook Messenger average of 1.48 min for resource based bots. (^statista 2020) - Freeing NCSS to focus on social services instead of social traffic, with 95.8% of all queries resolved by the bot itself. Get stigma noticed: - Overall campaign awareness reached 51% vs 40% nationally, easily surpassing our yearly benchmark. (Ipsos) - More than 6.4 million OOH impressions, 4.5 million digital/paid social impressions, 1.9 million free-to-air impressions off media budget under $1 million (Media reports) Build empathy: - 2x improvement in positive attitudes towards PMHCs [6 % vs 3% nationally] (IPSOS) measured via pre/post attitude studies.