YoungMinds

YoungMinds is the UK’s leading charity fighting for young people’s mental health. Their mission is to ensure all young people get the mental health support they need, when needed, no matter what.

The Challenge

YoungMinds commissioned our Youth Practice (formerly YouthSight) to:

• Gain insight into how young people see the world and how they would change it to improve their mental health
• Unearth the solutions that would make a difference to their lives
• Focus on those who are most marginalised from the mental health conversation and centre them in the research design and outputs.

 

Our approach

Our client’s research objective was to become the radical voice for systemic political and societal change regarding mental health, creating a blueprint alongside young people. To achieve this, we used a combination of qualitative and quantitative research including:

• Three-day online community
•  Focus groups
• Analysis sessions and workshops
• An online survey

What made this research remarkable was the involvement of young people as peer researchers. Four YoungMinds activists were trained to moderate the online community, get involved in the research design process and contributed to the brainstorm and insight sessions.

We also took a highly collaborative approach with our client, conducting numerous joint analysis and brainstorming sessions throughout the project. YoungMinds used their partnerships to help distribute the survey, including involving the influential Dr Alex George in this questionnaire distribution. With this help, we were able to exceed our aim of collecting 10,000 survey completes – the final number was actually 14,215. And these results were compiled into a final report.

The outcome

YoungMinds have used the insights to:

• Publish evidence that reinvigorated their campaign
• Broadened their policy focus to reflect structural and societal issues
• Updated their youth programmes to better reflect the issues raised by their young audiences

What’s next? The youth charity are using the findings to lobby change through publishing a major report, launching a data visualisation platform, initiating a brand refresh and launching new programmes.