Why a nonprofit hosts a podcast to share mental health stories and promote employee benefits
Subscribe to the Nonprofit Storytellers Podcast on iTunes, Spotify and Google.
How do you reduce the stigma of mental health while raising awareness about your nonprofit’s services?
Employee & Family Resources hosts a monthly podcast called Emotion Well, which shares stories of mental health challenges and how individuals have sought support and community through their journey.
From cancer diagnosis to a loved one’s suicide, the episodes paint a raw picture of mental health while also tying back to EFR’s services as an employee benefits provider. Offering mental health and wellness services through the workforce is often a first stop on an individual’s mental health journey.
On this podcast, we talk with Johanna Dunlevy, the wellness and marketing manager at EFR, and the host of the Emotional Well podcast:
Why the nonprofit started a podcast about mental health and wellbeing
How she approaches people to share personal stories about their emotional health
How it ties back to their marketing strategy and promotes their services
Their podcast set up, including software and production process
More podcasts and articles that might interest you
Why a nonprofit built relationships with the media and stoked a local controversy
How a nonprofit leverages partnerships for their campaign to reduce the stigma of mental illness
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 me a little bit about EFR.
EFR, or Employee and Family Resources, is a nonprofit in Des Moines, Iowa. We help workplaces, organizations, schools, and communities thrive. So our focus is getting organizations, workplaces, and schools we work with to tap into our resources, especially mental health resources, for employees, students, and their families.
What connects you to the mission personally?
As someone who's worked in the field of worksite wellness for almost 20 years, I feel like there was a lot of emphasis on physical health and wellbeing.
Mental health is just as important as physical health. So our work at EFR is to reduce and hopefully, someday, break that stigma associated with reaching out for help and accessing mental health services. It’s just as important as the need to address things like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. So I'm just really passionate about the work we do because I feel like everyone can benefit from our services.
What sort of benefits do you offer?
We offer employee assistance programming, or EAP benefits, and also student assistance, or SAP benefits. An EAP is a benefit that many workplaces and organizations have in place to give employees the tools they need to live their best lives. And these benefits often include mental health counseling as well as things like financial consultation, legal consultation, and life coaching.
It didn't always offer benefits. EFR has an interesting historical perspective because it started as a resource for alcoholism, right?
We were founded in 1964 by Dorothea Tone and Anna Meredith as part of the National Council on Alcoholism. If you think about it, people who are working but also struggling with addiction, such as alcoholism, will have things that get in the way of showing up and being productive in a consistent and helpful way to the organization. We are Iowa's first EAP provider, but we do provide services across the nation.
Let's talk about the podcast. What made you decide that a podcast would be a good fit for all of the marketing and outreach you do?
I was going for a walk one day in the skywalk. We are officed downtown Des Moines, and I was listening to a podcast of a peer organization, and I thought, this is really interesting, I could do this.
But that organization was really focused on physical health as it related to total wellbeing. And I thought, we could do this about emotional health and wellbeing. So we started a podcast called Emotion Well right before the pandemic.
How do you focus the episodes?
It's been a really interesting journey because I'm someone who's always been interested in people's stories. I think we can learn a lot from each other and through peer support.
When I first started the idea of developing a podcast, I thought, OK, do I know people that could contribute their stories? And immediately, I thought of my colleague Louise, who's a breast cancer survivor. She is part of the Above and Beyond Cancer program through Mercy Hospital in Des Moines. \
There are a lot of people living with cancer or who have connections to cancer. I wonder what she could share. Then I started thinking initially about the people in our own network at EFR, my colleagues, and some of our business associates and what stories they may have. And it just kind of grew from there.
So you started asking colleagues about their mental health?
About their mental health, yes, but about all aspects of their health. I always tie it back to their emotional and mental health. Like Louise's episode, for example, she talks a lot about how making connections through her cancer diagnosis was so important.
So her mental health was positively impacted during one of the hardest times of her life because she knew other people going through cancer, she knew other cancer survivors, and she was able to form a community.
When people are open about their life experiences, I'm usually quick to say, would you like to be on the podcast?
What is it like to ask someone to share such a personal story?
It's interesting because another episode we did was with a friend of mine from high school, and her brother had mental health issues and died by suicide in 2009. And I was nervous to reach out to Destiny because I didn't know how she felt about talking publicly about her brother and his life and how his life ended.
But I did it because I think it's important that we understand that suicide exists and that you never know whose life may be affected or whose life may be taken by that. And with that episode, I felt it was really important to talk about how no one suspected that he was struggling.
We all have stories that we don't share, and they all are very life-changing. It is hard to ask people to share such intimate details of their lives, but I feel like if they're willing to talk, then there's something that's going to be good that comes from it.
Have you found that they feel empowered or like they're helping in some way?
Absolutely. With that episode with Destiny, after I reached out to her, she said, "It's so funny you reached out to me because, for a long time, I've been wondering how I can talk about this and how I can help other people." This was the perfect platform for it.
In another episode, I connected with a woman who is a psychologist and spoke about emotional abuse and abusive relationships. And for her, it was very empowering because she's experienced that in her own life. For her to say, "I'm a psychologist, and guess what, this happened to me too." Very empowering for her. And I think empowering for a lot of our listeners.
One of the things I wanted to ask was how the podcast fits into your overall marketing mix.
When I first started the podcast, I was curious about people's stories and how we can tie that back to emotional health and wellbeing. But my leader said, “How can we also tie it back to our benefits?”.
I go episode by episode, and I look at the story that we have in front of us, and is there a benefit or a service that EFR provides that can be connected to that? So if you take something like the emotional abuse episode, we provide EAP counseling services for individuals with our benefits and their family members.
At the end of that episode, I share the National Domestic Violence Hotline number, but also, if you're listening and have EFR'S benefits, we are a confidential resource for you to turn to if you need to talk to a licensed mental health counselor.
To be honest, I don't promote our benefits in every single episode. They all relate to emotional health and wellbeing, but not all of them tie specifically to a benefit we've done.
One of our most popular episodes was actually about financial health and wellbeing. And you know, when you think about it, we all have financial stress, right? So that's a topic that has broad appeal, and we offer financial consultation and retirement readiness courses. And so that was a really easy one to tie back to specific benefits, and it was also wildly popular.
I'm always surprised by the episodes that take off in popularity and how those can help us promote our services.
———
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.