Comprehensive Communications Campaign to Engage Community Partners for the Prevention of Suicide

Introduction: The Reserve and National Guard (NG) population is largely dispersed and each have significantly differing policies, cultures, and approaches to education/training and outreach. There is no comprehensive communications campaign to engage community partners to raise awareness of the causes, development, and innovative treatment of mental health issues experienced by Service Members (SMs) and their military family members. The aim of this study was to establish a pilot program that increases the number of NG and Reserve members that receive empirically-supported services.

 

Method:

The study aimed to increase community perception and involvement to heighten awareness of support services via a website usmilitarymatters.org. This education and outreach campaign targeted members of the NG and Reserves, their family members, caregivers and the general public about mental health, substance use disorders, suicide prevention and Traumatic Brain Injury. The strategy reaches the target via multiple touch points throughout the day, which leverages the effectiveness of each platform and results in higher recall of the message. The National Advertising Campaign included: broadcast television, digital, email marketing, and mobile.

Results: The USMilitaryMatters.org campaign ran across 117 radio station sites and 29 television station sites in 28 markets. Email direct includes a database of over 250,000,000 addressees across the country and by using custom filters we specifically targeted the NG and Active Military members across the country to encourage viewers to visit USMilitaryMatters.org and to register for training classes. Mobile Plus has the ability to target over 200,000,000 mobile devices across the country by device ID. This technology allows to "geo-fence" active devices around military bases across the country to serve the USMilitaryMatters.org message. Measures of effectiveness include: 1) Number of impressions associated with message and 2) employ metrics as the principal mechanisms to balance resources, identify and mitigate risks, and determine outreach messaging awareness and education portfolio effectiveness. The campaign delivery resulted in 114,741,000 impressions.

 

Conclusion: Study deliverables include increasing the supply of registered providers, communication on the availability of the program to the target market, and the resultant generation of self-help/referral behavior of the target market. There is significant evidence that the outreach & education campaign has been effective by increasing the community’s (family members and the public) awareness and support by providing national-level outreach/awareness about suicide prevention and mental health. This study employed metrics as the principal mechanisms to balance resources, identify and mitigate risks, and determine outreach messaging awareness and education portfolio effectiveness.