Understanding how integrated campaign assets work together to build brand connection AND drive measurable engagement with youth suicide prevention tools.
A charity using insight to strengthen impact
Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) is a suicide prevention charity that provides life-saving services and practical mental health support to anyone who needs it. With their Missed Birthdays campaign, CALM set out to combat youth suicide in particular, with a clear set of objectives: increase awareness of youth suicide as a national issue, strengthen trusted adults’ confidence in their role as advocates and drive engagement with CALM’s support tools – particularly the C.A.R.E. Kit. It wasn’t just about tugging heartstrings, it was about changing behaviours.
Understanding how campaigns translate awareness into action
In 2024, CALM had launched Phase 1 of their “Missed Birthdays” campaign and wanted to understand how it performed. But more importantly, they needed to know not just whether the campaign was boosting awareness of youth suicide and CALM’s role, but whether it was making adults feel equipped to help.
They’d introduced new Phase 2 assets in January 2025 – an emotive film called “Evelyn” and updated digital ads, which had greater focus on driving measurable, preventative action. However, CALM needed clarity on whether assets were working in tandem or in isolation. Key questions emerged:
- Were adults moving from emotional engagement to actual behaviour change?
- Was awareness of the C.A.R.E. Kit increasing ?
- And critically, where was the intention-to-action gap largest?
The challenge was nuanced. CALM needed rigorous, comparable data across campaign phases to understand not just reach, but impact. They needed to measure shifts in adults’ perceptions about their role in suicide prevention, track engagement with specific resources and identify where campaigns were succeeding or falling short.
This wasn’t vanity metrics territory: it was about proving campaign effectiveness and informing strategy for future activations in a sensitive category.
Measuring integrated campaign impact across multiple assets
For Phase 2, we designed an integrated evaluation approach using a focused 15-minute online survey fielded with 1,300 UK residents (March 2025), mirroring our previous pre-campaign and Phase 1 studies for robust comparison. In doing this, we aimed to build a longitudinal picture of campaign impact.
Our Data Integrity methodology ensured rigorous sampling quality through double-layer technological verification and quality checks, removing poor responses and ensuring reliable insights.
CALM suggested exploring the results through the lens of “The Long and the Short of It” by Les Binet and Peter Field. Together, we mapped campaign assets against the framework to understand their distinct and complementary roles:
- The “Evelyn” film as long-term brand building.
- Digital ads as short-term activation.
This collaborative lens reframed the campaign not as a set of isolated assets, but as an intentionally integrated system balancing long and short term effectiveness.
Our approach combined empathy with rigour by understanding the emotional journey adults were on while measuring concrete actions: webpage visits, C.A.R.E Kit sign-ups, donations and conversations sparked.
Aligning emotional engagement with measurable behaviour change
The findings were clear. Adults recalling both campaign phases showed significantly stronger agreement across all key metrics – from understanding their role in ending youth suicide to believing CALM has tools they can use.
The evolution between Phase 1 and Phase 2 made a measurable difference. By bringing the C.A.R.E. Kit more centrally into creative and media execution in Phase 2, CALM reduced the intention-to-action gap identified in the first wave of research. Awareness and engagement with the Kit increased, aligning emotional response with practical steps.
This evidenced how CALM had evolved their campaign strategy; shifting from emotion-first narratives with tacked-on calls-to-action to campaigns where action was more visibly and confidently embedded within the narrative.
This research supported the evolution of CALM’s comms strategy from raising awareness to actively supporting live-saving tools.
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Researchbods were methodical, rigorous and thoughtful in their evaluation of both the phase 1 and phase 2 bursts for our ‘Missed Birthdays’ campaign. The results from phase 1 helped us to adapt our approach to phase 2, and their phase 2 results showed us that our adaptations were effective, with clear learnings to take forwards into future campaigns. Always responsive, collaborative, intelligent and overall a pleasure to work with.”
Sam Heyes, Senior Insight Manager
