To ensure no young person feels alone with their mental health, we’ve grown our digital presence, with over a million users accessing our website. We’ve coproduced new web guides with young people and clinical specialists on topics including disability, neurodiversity, and cultural identity, which are raising understanding of the diversity of mental health impacts, with a particular focus on support in marginalised and minoritised communities.
Our blog posts and social media are giving a stronger platform for young people to connect with others and feel part of a community. This year, we handed the mic over to young people to share their story directly, in their own words, providing space and funding to support young creatives to produce content relating to their own mental health experience or reflect on themes in society more widely. We also earnt a PIF TICK accreditation for our guides and resources this year, providing recognition that our content provides trustworthy, expert-informed advice and guidance.
Every young person who needs us can find us quickly and easily.
Every young person we engage with feels more hopeful about their mental health and can do something positive to improve their situation.
Every young person who wants to be a source of support to their friends can come to us to gain the skills and confidence to do so.
Over the last 12 months, we’ve continuously evolved the essential information and resources we provide to support young people's mental health.
Last year, over a million people (1,025,940 users) accessed information, support, and guidance through our website, with 80% of young people telling us our guidance helped them to feel more hopeful about their situation.
We’ve created new web guides on important topics like Disability and Mental Health, OCD, and Cultural Identity and Mental Health. Young people continue to tell us it’s key they can trust where the content they see comes from, so we’re proud that many guides earned the PIF TICK accreditation this year, showing we’re a trusted source of mental health information in the UK.
The blog remains very popular, with 624,311 page views, giving our audience real-life stories to feel more connected to others. We had 13 young people graduating the first year of our Writer’s Programme, and our blogger’s pool and Writer’s Programme created 14 new blogs.
The writers spent time with acclaimed writers and journalists, including Sarah Haque, Katie Goh, Ben Smoke, Ellen Scott and Cathy Newman and we’ve already recruited 20 young people for next year.
Our Instagram community has grown 8% to over 180,000 followers, 13 million impressions and over 600,000 engagements and our TikTok channel isn’t far behind, with 6% increase, over 17,000 followers and videos being viewed almost 290,000 times.
A critical part of our mission is to create authentic, meaningful mental health support for underrepresented communities of young people.
Our new campaign with young Black Disabled creators, disability specialist agency Purple Goat and The Triple Cripples consultancy, explored what young Black Disabled people really need from mental health support, and how to genuinely represent their experiences.
The campaign showed how meaningful it is when young people own the creative direction and share what they want to say on their terms. The creatives developed videos, blogs, poetry, rap, comics and more. Each piece brings to life their day-to-day experience and celebrates joy, creativity, community, and hope.
The project, funded by Nominet, has delivered new web pages highlighting the young creators’ stories, and produced a web guide on mental health and Disability.
In the last year, we’ve commissioned staff training through Chronically Brown, focussing on Intersectionality, helping us produce guides on Creating Accessible and Inclusive Content, Design Best Practice and Writing About Disability, and completing an accessibility audit on our website through RNIB.
This year, we worked with Livity, a specialist youth agency, and over 30 young people, with a focus on Black, minoritised and marginalised young people to establish our new brand direction. One that resonates with and reaches more diverse audiences, and provides practical, authentic mental health support.
The young people gave us valuable insights throughout the project. They told us of their frustration with empty promises and ‘noise’ from organisations and brands claiming to stand up for what young people believe, but who never delivered any meaningful change. The young people had a particularly low level of trust in organisations and establishments, including charities, leading them to quickly judge the information and content they find online.
The young people stressed they wanted to be confident the mental health information and advice they received was credible and informed by experts – whether that be individuals with lived experiences or professionals in the mental health field. They discussed the individual, nuanced, and unique nature of mental health experiences, and shared a deep need to feel seen and heard, rather than being given a one size-fits-all solution. It was clear there is also an urgent need for better and more authentic representations of diversity from organisations, truly reflecting the lives and experiences of young people.
Based on this insight, our new brand aims to bridge the trust gap between YoungMinds and young people. We’re working to better represent the realities of what it’s like to be young today. Our new brand positions us as a "facilitator" and "connector," amplifying the stories and demands for change from young people and connecting them with decision-makers and other young individuals creating positive change. This naturally shifts the brand away from focusing on YoungMinds as an organisation and brings young people's joy and power front and centre.
It’s important to say that, despite the dark times, young people continue to show up for themselves and each other. We want to platform their belief in a hopeful future. A more positive future that we won't stop striving for until it’s there for every young person.
