“At a time of economic and social unrest it’s even more important that we put suicide prevention back on the national agenda,” said CALM CEO Simon Gunning.
A total of 125 lives are lost to suicide every week in the UK.
Last month, suicide prevention charity Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM), captivated the nation with a marketing campaign built around the phrase ‘Suicide doesn’t always look suicidal.’
Around 50 6.5-foot high ‘smiling portraits’ were placed in London’s South Bank area, grabbing the attention of passers-by. It was later revealed on ITV’s This Morning that each smiling image was in fact the last photograph of someone who took their own life shortly afterwards.
In a bid to reshape the UK’s understanding of suicide, a heart-breaking 90-second TV spot made by creative agency Adam&eveDDB accompanied the out-of-home campaign, featuring real home videos of ‘apparently happy’ people enjoying life.
Towards the end of the spot it was revealed that all the videos featured were the last digital memories of people who later died by suicide.
CALM revealed that 61% of people said they would struggle to tell if someone they knew felt suicidal.
The campaign highlights that suicidal behaviour does not always look like ‘reclusiveness, crying and silence’, and that, in reality, “suicidal behaviour takes many forms. Often people can seem happy just moments before taking their own lives”.
What inspired the campaign?
According to CALM’s CEO Simon Gunning, passionate people who have been directly affected by suicide are at the centre of the charity’s audience.
“We work with bereaved people quite a lot, people who have experienced the worst thing in the world,” he says.
“It’s incredible to see that most of our vociferous supporters are motivated to try to prevent it from happening to other people.”
The Last Photo campaign focused on the humanising effects of using pictures of people who had died by suicide, in direct juxtaposition to the charity’s previous campaign Project 84, where faces were covered and made anonymous.
“The mistake we made with campaigns in the past was that we thought about ways for people to spot signs” says Gunning.
“The more we pushed on that door the more we would realise that we were pushing in the wrong way. The most frequent thing we heard from people was that the act came out of the blue and that sometimes the person was the happiest person at the party.”
Worked alongside the clinical board, Gunning concluded that it would be worthwhile to talk about the absence of signs and foreseeability.
“If we understand that it happens to people that we recognise, rather than people that are abstract, then we can start to make it a part of our daily discourse and a part of our social function as a society by removing stigma.”
How did you work with the families of those involved to ensure that they were celebrated and respected?
CALM worked very closely with Adam&eveDDB to source people from its existing support database who were willing to participate and would not be excessively harmed by doing so.
Gunning emphasises CALM’s history of “deep dedication to customer care”, adding that “all the families and those working on the campaign were provided with professional counselling services.”
“We realise we were taking people into really awful places, but with this campaign we wanted to help them move through some elements of grief, into a position where they were able to feel empowered and proud, because they’re making a difference. We wanted to take some of the anger and dedication involved and spin it into positivity,” he adds.
On the Wednesday before the event launch, CALM showed all of the 50 families the film.
“It was a very, very moving experience – to be able to see their faces. The families had clearly become a community together.”
Loved ones also set up for the day to accompany and admire the smiling portraits throughout the duration of exhibition.
“How sobering was that?,” Gunning mused.
“One really lovely participant had made a teddy bear out of her brother’s clothes. There was also a family who had brought a great big comic box. They were all having gin and tonics and toasting the picture of their loved one.”
“It’s one of those rare opportunities where the more real we made the campaign, the more effective it was. The families’ satisfaction and pride in participating was brilliant.”
What response have you had so far?
According to Gunning, CALM mostly measures the success of campaigns through the use of the charity’s helpline, website and social media accounts.
“This campaign was not a call for donations, it was absolutely service-driven, like all of the campaigns we do with Adam&eveDDB.”
“We can see when people access help content, as they tend to then engage with us and become a part of our movement. Further down the line they tend to want to support us financially.”
“The success of the campaign has been CALM’s most successful to date, with an earned media value just past £60 million, over 900 editorial mentions and a 70% increase in Instagram followers.
“We’re driving a national agenda change,” says Gunning.
“As we’ve highlighted on ITV’s This Morning and through OOH with JCDecaux we wanted to have a conversation about suicide. It’s horrible, but you have to do it.”
How did you strike a balance between being hard-hitting but also educational?
Gunning believes CALM differs from traditional charity communications as it uses more contemporary messaging techniques.
“Most non-profits are very forthright with the problems they support. We are very much about storytelling and audience engagement, which I think resonate more deeply.”
“The messaging and the subject matter that we deal with is inherently mired in negativity. However, while we always try to elicit a positive reaction, the aim with Last Photo was to break people’s hearts and to engage them fully in the messaging. Sometimes the darkness can do good.”
The CEO also touched on the speed with which you have to get to the point when dealing such a sensitive subject matter.
“With these campaigns you’ve got to move really fast to the solution, otherwise you risk creating impotent rage or worse – terror. We had to rapidly ask people to save a life by coming to us to learn more about the topic.
“It’s about having a conversation about that horrible word that you don’t even want to say, because we know from our clinical advisers that having a conversation about it is a directly preventative measure.”
What’s next for CALM marketing campaign?
“We are going to have to go hard on fundraising now because the cost of living crisis and the way it is affecting charities, but I think we’ve accomplished what we wanted to with The Last Photo.”
During the campaign people added their own photographs of people that they’d lost to suicide, Gunning reveals. “That was pretty moving. There were two or three benches with pictures stacked up on them.”
“I’m very proud of this campaign. It’s time to put suicide prevention back on the national agenda.”
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