Since launching a new brand and strategy at Mind in 2021, we’ve been using our social channels to speak out in the fight for mental health.
It’s been a steep learning curve, and we haven’t got everything right first time. But the results speak for themselves: viral Tweets, a huge increase in engagement, and a kinder audience.
Here’s how we did it:
Shifting from soft and safe to bold and brave
Our new strategy is about the fight for mental health. We want to be more outspoken in fighting for a better world for people with mental health problems.
For some context, here’s what we were like on social media before the new strategy:
We think it was good content! But it was very gentle. It’s very wellbeing focused. The branding is soft lines, and the language can be quite timid at times – a lot of hedging our bets.
And we never came out too strongly on any particular issue, because we were scared of upsetting people.
So, what are we like now?
Now we say what we’re thinking. Even if we know it will be divisive, or if we know people will think it’s controversial. We aren’t so scared of upsetting people if we know we’re being outspoken about our values.
We also aren’t afraid of being a bit cheeky to get people’s attention, like the GIF of Alice in Wonderland (top left).
We directly target stigma, with posts like those above about OCD and schizophrenia. We use lived experience in a new way – really working to understand the issues that affect people with mental health problems to steer the kind of content we create.
We call out racism when we see it in the mental health space and are prepared to discuss racism with people who disagree with us.
Tip:
This change in tone and style has led to an increase in moderation work. When thinking about becoming bolder on social media, factor in your team’s capacity to manage the response. And think about how to look after your moderators too – how are you going to make sure dealing with negativity on social doesn’t affect their wellbeing at work?
Putting things into practice
One of the first examples of us being more outspoken after the launch of the new strategy was our public Twitter response to piers Morgan’s comments about not believing Meghan Markle’s experiences about suicidal thoughts.
We were scared to post our message calling Piers out – it was unlike anything we’d ever done before. But we felt it was important, and so we went for it.
The response was overwhelming, with 33k retweets and 95k likes.
This Tweet has formed the basis of our content strategy since – we have indisputable proof that people are desperate for Mind to use their voice as the largest mental health charity in the UK to call out stigma, discrimination and injustice.
That’s just one example though, here are some overarching stats:
- Total engagement across channels went from 3.9 million to 7.9 million following the launch of the new strategy.
- Engagement per post on Twitter went from 63 to 203.
- Video views went from 7.7 million to 13.5 million.
- Our audience grew from 1.28 million to 1.39 million.
Tip:
It’s not all about numbers. Part of our new strategy is about becoming an anti-racist organisation. We recognised that speaking out about racism may lose us some followers – and we were fine with that. Instead, what we’ve seen is ‘churn’. We’ve lost followers in record numbers, but we’ve also gained followers in record numbers (leading to overall growth). We’ve also noticed our audiences being much kinder now. Where we used to get a lot of racist comments whenever we posted anything about race – this has reduced significantly. And that makes our channels a much safer space for people of colour.
Handling backlash
You might be asking yourself, was there backlash? Well, naturally.
For example, last summer we shared a Tweet when #transmenaremen was trending. It was part of our drive to be a more inclusive charity.
It didn’t get much traction at first, but then it started being picked up by networks across Twitter. By the evening, we were faced with what has been called a ‘transphobic pile-on’. At the time it felt like we might have made a huge mistake.
But we held fast, and in the morning, we shared a thread cementing our position that we are here for everyone with a mental health problem.
After that, the positivity came flooding in. People were thanking us for holding firm against the hate, for not giving in to transphobia.
Although it felt like everyone hated us when we shared the first Tweet, it became clear the negativity was coming from a small, organised group of people on Twitter.
We had so many lovely comments (and I look over these every time I’m wondering whether to share something that might cause backlash), but this one about values really stood out:
Bringing the organisation with you
There was some pushback internally when we began this new approach. Some felt we weren’t taking mental health problems seriously enough. Some felt we were being too outspoken, or not matching Mind’s overall tone of voice.
But ultimately, we’ve been allowed to experiment fully, make mistakes, learn from them, and continuously improve.
One of the biggest factors in this is a shift in attitudes towards the social team. Previously we were a service delivery function – just supporting other teams to deliver their work. But now we see social media as its own tool – able to share what our audiences really want to see, rather than just what Mind wants to broadcast. We fully own our channels now and have the final say over what we post.
Tip:
Make your work visible across the organisation. Share your successes on the intranet, through all-staff meetings, department updates, etc. If people can see that the changes you’re making on social media are having a tangible impact, they’ll start to trust you more.
Takeaway tips
- If you have the capacity, try to be more reactive to external events. This is where the best engagement comes from.
- Keep it fun. No one will want to follow you if you’re always telling them how rubbish the world is. Charities need to share serious content, but we can balance that out with fun content too (and by fun content I obviously mean photos of cats).
- Look after your followers. Being bolder and braver leads to more backlash. Make sure you’re keeping your followers safe by responding quickly, hiding relevant comments (our social media community guidelines are here), and turning off comments if you think it will keep people safer.
Want to discover which other charities are being bold on social media? Social Media Network: Being bold and managing risk is available on-demand.
Our next Social Media Network will explore – Social media marketing: back to basics.
You may also enjoy reading: Charities using their social media voice to address big social issues.
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