May marks Mental Health Awareness Month – a time to reflect, connect, and act. As the month draws to a close, we’re also wrapping up Mental Health Awareness Week 2025, which this year focused on the power of community. To mark the occasion, Luke Iremonger from STRAT7 Researchbods and Sam Heyes from Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) explore how research was central to CALM’s Missed Birthdays campaign – helping refine messaging, drive connection, and inspire real action. Whether you’re a charity or a commercial brand, these lessons in community-building and communication resonate far beyond mental health.
Suicide is now the leading cause of death among young people in the UK, with 6,929 lives cut tragically short in the last decade – a figure that will only rise without urgent intervention. This alarming message was the driving force behind Missed Birthdays, a multi-channel campaign launched in September 2024 by CALM, a leading suicide-prevention charity whose mission is to ‘help people end their misery, not their lives’.
The Missed Birthdays campaign included a live installation in London’s Westfield White City shopping centre, extensive coverage on ITV’s This Morning, social media ads and more. It was designed to be community-focused, urging adults to look out for the young people in their lives, both in their immediate family and their wider social circles, and to be proactive by having honest, stigma-busting conversations about suicide. Through talking openly, we can create communities of people that are better able to support one another and intervene if someone is struggling.
With such an important message to impart – and in such a crowded, noisy media landscape – it was critical to leave a lasting impression. To achieve this, CALM worked with STRAT7 Researchbods to evaluate the impact of Missed Birthdays campaign assets, so that messaging could be refined and optimised.
What did the research uncover about what’s important to communicate in a campaign such as this? First and foremost, it highlighted the importance of finely balancing emotive and action-oriented messaging – appealing to both the head and the heart. Emotive assets, such as short films that tell personal stories, are highly effective at making people stop and listen – they raise awareness and play an educational role, especially when paired with eye-opening facts and statistics. Perhaps most importantly, by engaging someone emotionally, you’re making them care about the cause. The more people who care, the more potential supporters you have.
Striking an emotional chord alone isn’t enough. Without a tangible call-to-action, you’re likely to end up with a lot of people who would consider supporting your cause, but who aren’t actually providing support. This is an important distinction to make if the goal is to enact genuine change. As such, any campaign should be devised with this question in mind: ‘What do we want people to do after seeing this?’. The more specific the answer you can give to this, the better – whether it be making a donation, phoning a helpline, or engaging with a specific tool or service provided by the charity. This call-to-action then needs to be the prominent throughline in the campaign, so that people aren’t just left feeling a certain way after seeing it – they know exactly how they can act on that feeling.
While it’s great if you can raise awareness, educate, incite strong emotions and trigger a specific action using a single asset, it’s important to consider the campaign holistically. How can the different assets within the campaign complement one another to drive action? When evaluating the Missed Birthdays assets, we found that the campaign film did a great job of deepening knowledge and fostering a sense of connection to the cause, while static social media ads with concise, instructive text were more effective at encouraging action. Interestingly, it was those who recalled seeing both who were most likely to have engaged with CALM’s C.A.R.E Kit – the charity’s online tool for facilitating life-saving conversations. This indicates a powerful, cumulative effect of seeing both emotive and action-oriented messaging.
This shows that it’s not about trying to make people engage with a cause either emotionally or practically – it’s ensuring that they do both as they’re closely linked. This is something pointed out by Les Binet and Peter Field in their 2013 book, The Long and the Short of It. What we found with the Missed Birthdays evaluation mirrors Binet and Field’s analysis of campaigns from huge brands such as John Lewis, British Airways and Dove, which succeeded because they found the right balance between “short-term sales activation” (action-oriented messaging) and “long-term brand building” (emotive messaging).
So, whether you’re a charity or a commercial brand, research is key to understanding what messages audiences are taking away from your different ads, and how these may complement or contradict one another. This can help you to optimise your messaging and refine the mix of channels you’re using to deliver those messages, ensuring that impact is as wide-reaching and tangible as possible.
For Mental Health Awareness Month and Week 2025, CALM is championing their CALM Clubs initiative. CALM Clubs are groups within communities that get together regularly to do something they enjoy, while also focusing on mental health awareness and support. You can find out more about the initiative here.
Luke Iremonger
Insight Manager
Sam Heyes
Senior Insight Manager
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