Nearly half of California’s youth are struggling with their mental health—a sobering call to action and reminder that our systems must be built to support people before they fall through the cracks.
To meet this challenge, and as part of California’s historic $4.7B Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, Wondros designed and has been running a comprehensive campaign to recruit Certified Wellness Coaches (CWC)—a new frontline behavioral health role focused on prevention and support.
Specific goals:
To meet the challenge of reaching diverse audiences across California, especially in those areas where there are shortages of mental health care and the greatest need, Wondros conducted research, landscape analysis, and used GIS mapping to better target and prioritize where to deploy the campaign. We also conducted a pulse survey with NORC and in-depth interviews with potential audiences to better understand their needs and goals related to the new position of Certified Wellness Coach. This then helped inform our creative and messaging direction for how to best appeal to people who fit the profile of candidates. The campaign was designed to go out across a combination of paid, earned, and owned channels, including a statewide in-person community engagement effort to bring it directly to people in different communities with strategically-aligned community partners. This in-person outreach and awareness building has been working in concert with digital advertising, organic social media, and earned media to spread the word about the opportunity of becoming a Certified Wellness Coach.
As the campaign continues, Wondros has been adjusting creative and messaging based on performance analytics and the shifting priorities of the client, focusing more on reaching people in related mental health roles and college students who may be closest to meeting the certification requirements. An additional audience of focus has been employers, such as school districts and nonprofits. This is to help build the new workforce as quickly as possible—getting Certified Wellness Coaches out into communities.
What makes our approach unique is how we factor in human-centered design, keeping the needs of communities, stakeholders, and target audiences at the center of our process to guide the development and implementation of the campaign. We look at the emotional and behavioral aspects related to this mental health role, both in terms of wanting to become a Certified Wellness Coach and how families, youth, and children might access and make use of them.
Please see our attached case study for more details on our approach to meeting the challenge of helping California develop this critically-needed mental health workforce.