Developing ‘support’ content for ‘mymentalhealth’ with Barnardo’s service teams

Where is the overlap between users’ needs and Barnardo’s expertise?

In our research calls with Barnardo’s service teams, we spoke with our colleagues to understand more about the information they shared (usually offline) with young people.

Next, we wanted to work with them to understand if/how we could repurpose some of this information to create ‘support’ content we could publish — and test — on mymentalhealth.

Our starting point

Our ideas were based on experiences the teams shared in the research sessions combined with feedback from the young people we spoke to in phase 1 of our project.

We wanted to see if this ‘support’ content could address some of the overlapping needs and themes we’d identified to:

• create an entry point for young people looking independently for help
• reassure them about how they might be feeling or about what to expect in a particular scenario
• allow the services to share their knowledge of young peoples’ common experiences
• establish centralised content any of our mental health services could refer their young people to
• free up time for services to provide more help offline — tailored to individual needs

How we worked

We met with each of the teams to discuss an idea they’d mentioned and then asked if they’d work with us to develop the content based on this idea, which we could then publish.

We asked each team if they would like to draft something to get us started, or if they’d prefer we speak about their idea and then we put together a draft for them to review — we had a mixture of responses.

We tried to reassure teams that a few paragraphs — an introduction — were all we needed, so not to worry or try to explain everything they did in these single ‘support’ pages.

We asked for content that:

• was 5 to 6 paragraphs — absolute max 1 page
• was written as if they were having a conversation with a young person — in simple, straightforward language
• had a tone of authority to help but to also reassure
• explained the topic as if it was the first conversation they were having with someone — without any other context
• stated if a particular thing is complicated; it’s ok to say ‘this step is complicated, so we’d speak with you about it in person’ — or similar
• mentioned if there were fixed steps a person needed to know or if they’d agree them with the young person individually

A thank you

We wanted to say particular thanks to our first volunteers! Their experience has been invaluable and we are so grateful for their help — because we also know they are incredibly busy.

Morgan from Fife mental health and wellbeing service worked with us to develop some content that offers advice about managing and maintaining mental health.

Carol from Barnardo’s young people and families team in Newcastle explained how they work with young people to create individual support plans based on specific help they agree together.

Amy from Orchard mosaic in Newcastle showed what counselling is and how it can work.

Kay from Positive mental health and wellbeing in Falkirk explained how they support young people to talk if they feel anxious about school.

Identifying future content and measuring response

We aimed to have a small batch of support content to start and want to develop more with other services over the coming months; we plan to use the first articles as examples to help service teams understand our work and to encourage them to contribute too.

We set measures on all articles, so we can track which types/themes of support content young people find the most helpful.

Ellen is a product manager in the Barnardo’s Innovation Lab team.
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