These were the two drivers. We keep coming back to them. Comms leads on the first, Fundraising on the second. But both have equal weighting. Project has two project managers and two project sponsors. This was important because it needs to be jointly owned. It’s forced us to talk to eack other and to make the effort to understand each other’s teams, work and priority. Sometimes it means it’s taken longer to come to an agreement.
Sounds obvious, but actually goes to the heart of why we could and should make the project work. Stakeholders tell us that they want us to challenge stigma and discrimination by raising awareness and understanding of mental health problems. One of the reasons people don’t donate is they think mental health has nothing to do with them, or that it doesn’t need their help. We need to raise awareness both of the impact of mental health problems and of what Mind offers as a solution.
Dan to talk here?
On our side it’s awareness, understanding, profile. On fundraising, it’s getting the money in. Important that comms don’t forget that, without the money, we can’t do anything. This project has made us think about the relationship between the two priorities On the brand side, we might prefer to take a little bit longer to embed the brand and win support from across the network. However, fundraising have the financial pressures of target to meet and year end approaching. Not insurmountable, but has meant we need to talk to each other and negotiate priorities We have a great support base of people with experience of mental health problems. Some of these vocal and opinionated. Many charities have to tread a line between envoking sympathy for beneficiaries to encourage donations and making sure we don’t portray them as victime
Addressing consistency – we need to get the new visual and verbal identity understood and used across the Mind network Testing out creative and the new asks in fundraising asks We’ve run integrated campaigns before, but in reality one department has had to fit in with the other – this time we’ll plan from the outset for a campaign that both meets our charitable aim to raise awareness and promote understanding, but also aims to appeal to potential donors and position us clearly as a charity in need of donations.