How a nonprofit leverages partnerships for their campaign to reduce the stigma of mental illness
Subscribe to the Nonprofit Storytellers Podcast on iTunes, Spotify and Google.
The Iowa Healthiest State Initiative is a nonprofit that wants every Iowan can live a healthy life.
They work to create awareness and integrate solutions to improve the physical, social, and emotional well-being of Iowans. In May each year, they launch a statewide Mental Health Awareness Month campaign called Make it OK. The goal is to reduce the stigma of having a mental illness.
Every nonprofit has a limited budget, and the Healthiest State Initiative is no different. What’s unique is how they’ve developed partnerships across businesses, media, sports, entertainment, and other industries to help leverage their message and campaign.
On this podcast we talk to Jami Haberl, executive director, and Chase Langos, marketing and communications strategist, about:
How they spent no money to develop the Make It OK Campaign
How they leverage and expand partnerships to reach more people
How they made campaign materials relevant for diverse residents
How they leverage volunteer ambassadors to spread and amplify their message
Why they don’t always ask for money — and instead ask for engagement
More podcasts and articles that might interest you
How a statewide youth-serving nonprofit explains their 40 programs in three words
A colorful brand strategy that brightens up the DSM airport with a friendly feel
How a nonprofit uses data to tell ‘micro stories’ and combat myths about hunger
How Des Moines University’s president approached the nonprofit’s board about building a new campus
Below is an edited and condensed version of the interview.
→ Listen to the entire interview online on the Nonprofit Storytellers Podcast on iTunes, Spotify and Google.
Tell us a little bit about Iowa Healthiest State initiative.
We are a nonprofit organization that was launched in 2011 by three business leaders who really recognize that having an overall healthy population not only helps the workplace but also helps our state continue to grow and thrive.
They recognized that health is more than just within your workplace, it needs to happen within our community. Government can't do it by itself. Nonprofits can't do it alone, and the business community can't either. And so really coming together to build a public-private collaboration so that we could all come together to look at how we can improve the overall health of Iowans.
Why do you do what you do?
I think it's really important. Health is critically important for all of us, right? We all know what it's like when you don't feel your best. Making sure that people have access to and resources available to live out their healthiest life is critical.
Personally, my youngest sister, who's 10 years younger than me, was born with a rare metabolic disorder. And from the beginning of her life, she struggled to live her healthiest life and has struggled for many years to continue living her healthiest life.
There's a lot of things that I know we don’t have control over, but also that each one of us can do some things to ensure that we're living our healthiest life. And so this is a personal passion of mine because I've seen how much it can impact families, individuals, and even workplaces in our community.
Let’s talk about the Make It OK campaign. You said this started in 2019, right before the pandemic.
May of 2019 is when we launched the campaign in the state of Iowa. I've joked that if I had a crystal ball, I'd be a billionaire had I known that we were going to have a pandemic. The demand for this type of education and resources has grown since 2019 and continues to grow.
How would you describe the campaign?
It’s a campaign to reduce the stigma around mental illness by starting caring conversations. So I often talk about that for many of us, especially the older generations, we never learned about mental health. In school, we talked about physical health, and we learned first aid and CPR, right? But we didn't learn about mental health or mental illnesses.
So it's understandable that many of us don't have great knowledge and understanding about what mental health and mental illnesses are. The Make It OK campaign is really meant to give us those simple tools to help us to have those conversations. There are one in five Iowans who are actually diagnosed with a mental illness.
What are the goals of the campaign?
When it comes to reach: Part of the campaign includes an ambassador program, so how many ambassadors can we train across the state of Iowa? How many presentations are we also hosting throughout the state of Iowa?
And then really looking at where our marketing materials, the campaign materials, are being distributed throughout the state. We also have an opportunity for workplaces to become registered work sites. So that's another data point that we're tracking, just to see the type of impacts that we're having.
Let's talk a little bit about resources. That's always a big question when it comes to nonprofits. What sort of resources did you start with? How did you grow the campaign with the resources you had?
The Make It OK campaign was launched in Minnesota back in 2012. We began to look at opportunities for us to bring in a campaign that was really focusing on reducing the stigma around mental illness. So we looked at what was already created.
There's no point in reinventing the wheel, to be honest with you. There are a lot of great resources that exist and leveraging partnerships, whether it's within the nonprofit sector, the for-profit sector, with our government partners. It was an opportunity to bring to our state something that wasn’t here.
So that's really what we did with Make It OK. We identified the campaign. We had the opportunity for the owners of that campaign to gift the campaign to us so that we could launch it here in the state of Iowa. It gave us a starting point.
It was evidence-based. It had tools already created that we could immediately start to share and distribute, and then we also looked at how we could build upon it — I always like to say to Iowa-ize it — and to make it our own.
So we had something as a starting point, what we knew we could build upon, and that's what we've done over the last couple of years.
Let’s get into some of the specifics. Can you give me an example of parts of the campaign that have been successful?
We’ve done everything from paid advertising opportunities to asking for donated PSA space on billboards, in newspapers, and on the radio. And we've had great success with that occurring throughout the state of Iowa for a number of years.
I think the most critical part within any of this is recognizing we're small staff. Like most nonprofits, we don't have a marketing department. We have a marketing person.
So how do we leverage the relationships with not only our board member organizations but other organizations that might sponsor or support or believe in the work that we're doing — whether that's private, nonprofit or government partners — to really spread that message even further.
Especially on this topic, I think that's even more critical. Mental health is a very sensitive, personal conversation for many Iowans. So how do we use the networks that already exist within our own personal networks or professional networks to reach others so that we can actually have those conversations and help support those who have a mental illness.
We’ve partnered with Kum & Go, for example, they helped us create some animated videos that took the Make It OK content and streamlined it. They put it into 90 second video pieces that they could showcase to their own employees.
When you think about many of their employees are working on the front line, they're working in a store, they don't have time to sit behind a computer and watch a presentation. So how could we take the content from Make it OK and put it in a format that would be digestible for that frontline workforce?
That also led us to partner with Menace Soccer at a match last May for Mental Health Awareness Month. At that event, they showcased those videos that are now available for others to use. So that's one great way to leverage the work of partners interested in the topic.
How have you seen the campaign grow, change, and adapt?
In 2019, I would say there was an interest, the content that we were doing around Make it OK was there. But then April of 2022 hit, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
In my previous role, prior to coming to the Healthiest State Initiative, I did disaster work for about 15. After every disaster, I've always seen that mental health is a lingering part of the recovery. Typically, though, those disasters are limited, floods or tornados, to a geographical area.
Having done pandemic planning in my previous career, I knew that we were going see a ripple effect of mental health for months, if not years, to come. So as we looked internally in those early days of the pandemic, trying to identify how we pivot. It was an opportunity for us to step back and say: How do we use the Make It OK work that we've started, but also how do we leverage that?
We’ve done everything from Facebook Live sessions to other outreach efforts — the campaign grown substantially every single year.
→ Listen to the entire interview on the Nonprofit Storytellers Podcast on iTunes, Spotify and Google.
———
Have a nonprofit success story that others can lean from? Consider sharing it on our podcast. We look for new approaches to marketing, out-of-the-box fundraising, or novel outreach or communication efforts. As well as the tried-and-true Submit your nonprofit’s story by filling out this form.