Top tips

Follow our top tips to make your events successful and engaging:

Team work really does work

Involving colleagues is a great way to boost your campaign. Identify ways members of your organisation can contribute to the success of the campaign.

Partner up with other organisations

Creating partnerships with mental health organisations, service users and carer groups, voluntary groups, local businesses or NHS and council organisations will make sure your campaign is joined up locally and helps raise the profile of your activity. It will also help to ensure social contact is at heart of your campaign. 

Use the voices of experience

Include people with lived experience in the planning and delivery of your activity

Use what you have

Think about how you could use your existing communications channels to promote Time to Change messages, for example, staff intranets, newsletters etc.

Choose a good venue

Target venues where lots of people go as part of their daily lives – like shopping centres, sports centres or stations with a high footfall of local people who would not normally engage in a ‘mental health event’

Explore existing opportunities

Look for events already taking place in your area to ‘piggy-back’ onto.

Use our online resources

Staff intranets, screen savers, e-learning packages and posters can be great ways of getting the Time to Change message out to staff and are quick, cheap and easy to use.

Become a social networker

Enter the debate, share and ‘like’ and make TTC viral! Twitter, Facebook, forums, blogs... there are loads of ways to spread the word online and get people talking.

Use our videos

Our videos are a great conversation starter – play them at your event or embed them in your website. Download our videos from You Tube or order a Time to Change Event Box by registering your event and play our DVD featuring all our videos.

Order Time to Change materials

We have everything you need to run your own anti-stigma campaign including leaflets, posters, badges, online adverts and banners. Using Time to Change materials will help you initiate conversations, save costs on developing your own and means your activity is part of a movement across England.

Recruit an army

Recruit a team of volunteers to help you engage the public at events. Even better... provide them with TTC materials to help them ‘break the ice’ and start those conversations.

Make it real

Ask people to start their own conversation about mental health to help end prejudice. This could be supporting a family member, getting back in touch with a friend who has a mental health problem or, for someone who’s experienced a mental health problem, speaking out more about it.

Start as you mean to go on

Evaluate your activity from the start. Not only will it show the impact your work has had but it will help you understand what worked and what didn’t. If you share any results with us, it will help us develop our social movement across England and lot other organisations know what works.

Useful questions to consider when planning your campaign event:

1. Where can you reach your audience?
2. How can you encourage people to talk about what can often be a difficult subject? Read our tips! 
3. How can you work with other local organisations or employers?
4. How can you use the Time to Change materials?
5. How can you use your internal communication channels as part of your activity?
6. Who are your local media and how can you get coverage?
7. Can you get a local celebrity or MP involved?
8. How can you work with people with personal experience of mental illness?
9. What are the key messages you want people to remember from your event?

Get in Touch!

For more information on the latest campaign and advice on running your own campaign event, contact Vikkie Judd at campaign@time-to-change.org.uk.