Voices of Hope

Research
Creative Strategy
Video Production
Creative Direction
Editing

Voices of Hope (VOH) is a mental health charity founded by Genevieve Mora and Jazz Thornton. It aims to help those struggling with their mental health by building new narratives and providing resources via content, campaigns and community initiatives.

They have large, high profile campaigns annually and recently received funding from Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation to create youth focussed content. They engaged Drum agency, where I helped conceptualise and execute this campaign.

Brief

Concept and craft a fresh campaign that speaks to NZ youth, is entirely different from previous Voices of Hope work while maintaining their brand. This was briefed as 10 content pieces to support and educate young people struggling with mental health.

Research
Before landing a creative idea I started with a research phase: looking at best-in-class resources online, identifying gaps in NZ resources for young people as well as reaching out and talking to a small group of people struggling with similar circumstances. We shared this knowledge with VOH, and together started framing up themes and pillars to build our content around together. These sessions followed similar processes to UX research and we used afffinity mapping and user-first principals to ensure we were talking about the subjects relevant to our audience. I also strongly advocated for a user-journey mapping process so that we could encourage next steps for viewers who may need access to further resources or help.

Response
VOH strongly encourage the act of letter writing as a form of therapy. I pitched a group session for people with similar backgrounds or diagnoses to write a letter and read to the group - using this as a catalyst for conversation and shared experience. VOH worked closely with participants and clinicians to ensure the experience was safe and we created a comfortable set in a darkened room so that crew were as invisible to the process as possible. We had a range of cameras set up to allow edits for both horizontal and vertical edits. The resulting conversations were incredibly vulnerable - making this the most emotional shoot day I have been on and incredibly grateful to the participants for their openness.

Result
The resulting content was powerful and we had a lot more viable footage than could fit in the initial brief. We worked with VOH to pivot on some of our initial deliverables and provided them with short engagement driving pieces that led users to long-form evergreen content and on to the website. We found that having a larger group of participants with their own social followings allowed exponential reach when collaborating on these posts.

VOH were thrilled with the outcome. They expanded the initial campaign to include merch, their own landing pages/web-flow and continued to make more social cuts from the raw footage once our brief was complete.