For Mental Health Awareness Month, Rare Beauty partnered with Mental Health First Aid to launch Rare Impact’s Your Words Matter educational campaign to educate on the power of your words when talking about mental health. The campaign highlighted how the words we use have more power than we may realize and discusses the importance of word choice and vocabulary as a tool for destigmatizing mental health.
We used our platform to share a Social Media Toolkit of resources including concrete examples of person-first language that helped our community members, employees and partners put the campaign teachings into action. We also highlighted mental health experts throughout the month and used our platform to bring awareness to the power of your words.
Alongside this campaign, we created and launched our first ever Rare Impact Virtual Mental Health Event bringing together our community with some of the most influential and impactful voices in mental health.
We also released a limited-edition crewneck sweatshirt with 100% of proceeds supporting the Rare Impact Fund, which was available exclusively on RareBeauty.com for $35.
Goals:
· Raise awareness that the words we use and how we respond can impact someone’s mental health.
· Educate people to be mindful of word choice and the vocabulary they use.
· Destigmatize mental health through the power of words.
· Raise funds to support grantmaking and expanding access to mental health education and services for young people.
Rare Impact in partnership with Mental Health First Aid, a course that trains people to recognize signs of mental illness and substance abuse, as well as gives them the skills to help someone who is developing a mental illness or is in crisis, launched our educational campaign, Your Words Matter, that focused on the power of our words and word choice when discussing mental health. The initiative aimed to educate on the power of your words when talking about mental health and raise awareness around the seemingly harmless jokes that people make about mental illness (i.e. psycho, crazy, etc.), the campaign spreads education around how to properly talk about mental health to reduce the stigma associated with mental health. We activated our Rare Beauty Mental Health Council, Influencers, and grantees to raise awareness on the words people use when discussing mental health while sharing resources, showcasing expert insights, and offering guidance about changing language to focus on the person and not their mental health. Rare Beauty’s platform is used to share resources, showcase expert insights, and bring awareness to the power and influence of your words. Additionally, Rare Impact launched our first exclusive, limited-edition “Your Words Matter” Crewneck Sweatshirt, designed to remind you on the daily that your words do, in fact, matter. 100% of net proceeds of this crewneck went to support the Rare Impact Fund to expand mental health services for young people.
With ongoing COVID concerns, and wanting to bring this experience to as many people as possible without the limits of access, we chose to pivot and hosted our event virtually, over Zoom. Despite the challenges of pivoting, Rare Impact held our first-ever Rare Impact Virtual Mental Health Event free to attend for our entire Rare community. With a welcome message from our founder, the event also served as an introduction of our Your Words Matter educational campaign and enlisted some of the top influential voices in mental health and education from our Rare Beauty Mental Health Council, community mental health leaders, and sought after speakers such as NYT Best-Selling Author, Jay Shetty, Editor-In-Chief of Allure, Jessica Cruel, and Mental Health Advocate and Content Creator Whitney Simmons. With over 800 community members tuning in to learn more about the partnership and campaign, the event emphasized the importance of effectively communicating about mental health. The event highlighted that the words we use can unintentionally increase the stigma associated with mental health, which can prevent people from seeking and receiving the help they need. Speakers noted the importance of knowing that a person isn’t defined by their mental health condition, therefore when clinical terms are misused, we run the risk of making light of larger concerns or defining something incorrectly. The event supported overall efforts to raise awareness and encourage the implementation of this practice, particularly in younger generations, to create a culture that is mindful and sensitive to mental health topics and a world where mental health is treated just like any other physical condition.
Within the month of May, we secured key media placements with outlets like ELLE, Billboard, ESSENCE and Yahoo! News, amongst others, that helped raise awareness of the campaign and guided people on how to share and how to respond when talking about mental health. These placements resulted in over 108.4M media impressions. Our Your Words Matter Educational Campaign resulted in 25,329 users and counting visiting our Your Words Matter educational mental health blogs.
Over 700 members of our community tuned in to our Virtual Mental Health Event to learn about Rare Impact’s Your Words Matter campaign resulting 22 social media posts, $141K EMV and a total reach of 19.1M from influencer attendees.
Rare Impact’s Your Words Matter social media content, reached over 3.2M members of our Instagram community resulting in 304,602 total engagements.
We also sold out of our limited-edition Rare Impact Your Words Matter Crewneck sweatshirt allowing Rare Beauty (with the support of our community) to make a significant contribution to the Rare Impact Fund continuing our fundraising efforts through exclusive merch items.
