Colorado Crisis Services is Colorado's first statewide resource for mental health, substance use or emotional crisis help, information, and referrals. Its purpose is to strengthen Colorado’s mental health services, ensuring Coloradoans get the right services in the right locations at the right time. Whether it's anxiety, stress, a relationship issue, or another life challenge that lies just below the surface, it can be hard to know where to turn for help. In Colorado alone, suicide is the number one cause of death among youth aged 10-24.
The objective for this campaign was to build statewide awareness of CCS – inclusive of phone, text, chat services and walk-in centers – among Youth (ages 13-21) in Colorado.
To effectively reach Youth (ages 13-21) in Colorado, our campaign featured custom content designed for primarily mobile distribution on the following channels: digital display, paid social: static, paid social: video, and PPC. Our strategy targeted four key areas of mental health for teens: sadness, anxiety, depression and loneliness.
The placements were cleverly designed to attract attention with colorful, bold lettering, which delivered our message that we understand how “feelings sometimes lie just below the surface” with a powerful one-two punch (see visual examples provided). Knowing the teen audience consumes the majority of their media on mobile, all placements included a CTA to text TALK to 38255 to text a support line where a real, personal, confidential, trained counselor would be ready to listen and provide help 24/7.
For the paid social placements, we focused on Instagram and YouTube because of their extensive market penetration among Colorado Youth ages 13-21. The :15 video placements animated the messaging within the static ads for increased effect and were strategically played within music and gaming content.
In addition to the above program, we leveraged Colorado-based social media creators who have had their own experiences dealing with a variety of mental health challenges to speak authentically to fellow teens and relate to their feelings that may be hiding just below the surface. The creators filmed themselves in full vertical video format so the aesthetic suited distribution on Instagram Stories and Snapchat. The content was then published organically to their feeds and amplified to our target with paid media. All posts included a CTA to text TALK to ‘38255’ or to SWIPE UP to speak to a trained counselor.
The campaign was a huge success across the board, achieving over 13.5MM impressions and successfully building statewide awareness of CCS among Youth (ages 13-21) in Colorado while surpassing benchmarks across all channels. Most importantly, we were able to grow the number of meaningful text conversations teens had with trained counselors, providing help and support for Colorado Youth who were in need of someone to talk to.
