Problem

Singapore’s National Council on Social Services came to us with a problem: “persons living with mental health issues here face challenges living with dignity, because of the attitudes and actions of others.” 

That’s putting it mildly: in hyper-competitive, performance-obsessed Singapore, people with mental health conditions (“PMHCs”, for word-limit purposes) are heavily stigmatized. The irony is rich, because equality of race and of religion are enshrined in both culture and law here. And equality of (economic) opportunity features prominently in Singapore’s “from fishing village to global financial capital” success story. 

But equality for PMHCs? Not so much. Though they want to play their part in Singapore’s economy, the vast majority are shut out of meaningful jobs. 

Unpacking the stigma 

One in eight Singaporeans will suffer a mental health condition in their lifetime. Yet Singapore’s conservative, keep-it-all-within-the-family cultural norms stifle conversation about (and often even acknowledgement of) mental health issues. Even among PMHCs themselves. 

This is a very tough place to be “different”, and in a culture relentlessly focused on economic progress, we’ve devalued people we deem unable to contribute economically. 

Today’s PMHCs also face stigma because “they don’t look sick” – which makes other Singaporeans, who are unsure of the etiquette of interacting with PMHCs, uncomfortable.

Net/net: if you’re unlucky enough to experience mental health challenges here, you quickly find yourself isolated – socially, culturally, economically and even therapeutically.

So while previous NCSS campaigns had addressed PMHCs themselves and focused on specific treatments, this effort had a far bigger job to do: to shift the mental-health narrative amongst all Singaporeans: 

1. Get noticed: generate 40% campaign awareness 

2. Build empathy: drive 5% uplift in positive attitudes/beliefs about PMHCs among those seeing the campaign 

3. Inspire change: drive 3% uplift in positive behaviour vis-a-vis PMHCs among those seeing the campaign 

Solution

NCSS research showed that while the vast majority of Singaporeans believe that other Singaporeans should be more supportive of PMHCs, their own behavior is anything but. This is the curse of “implicit bias”, the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. We don’t even realize we’ve got them, yet they drive a lot of what we do.

The good news: these biases can be unlearned – but first, you’ve got to introduce people to their own prejudice. Which means “reframing” a story they think they already know pretty well.

Now, Singapore’s origin story (“from fishing village to global financial capital”) emphasizes hard work and perseverance; “civic resilience” is our national ethos. Singaporeans also respond positively to stories of individual resilience, of people navigating through hardship on their way to (typically business) success. 

So our campaign taps this ethos to reframe “sick people” as “resilient Singaporeans” – meaning, we tell PMHCs’ own stories of personal resilience, while deploying techniques proven by researchers to counteract implicit bias: 

• Individuation (people empathize more with “specific victims” than disadvantaged groups) 

• Replacing stereotypical responses with positive, non-stereotypical examples 

• Increasing opportunities for contact 

Individually, each technique proved useful. But we didn’t have a ton of time. So rather than waiting for “contact opportunities” to occur naturally, we engineered some, combining these techniques in a social experiment that brought unsuspecting Singaporeans literally face to face with their prejudice – and yielded a piece of filmed content that drove significant positive shifts.

Delivery

Paid media was planned to reach Singaporeans aged 18-49 for 2 months, starting 24th August 2018, and focused as follows: 

• Video: YouTube, additional networks and even Cinema to extend our reach 

• Paid social: FB/IG to engage while building the fan/follower base 

• Engaging content partnerships with popular social publishers to extend our reach amongst the most potentially “talkative” 

• OOH: high-traffic MRT stations, 6-sheet panels and digital screens at bus stops, buses plying key routes 

• Campaign-specific FB page to host our communication materials and provide a means for the public to support PMHCs in a more tangible form 

• Section on NCSS corporate site to serve information about the campaign and its ambassadors and also offer “help” contacts 

• Reshare social content from Beyond The Label campaign page to NCSS official FB and IG pages 

Performance

Objective 1. Get noticed: target 40% campaign awareness 

• Overall campaign awareness reached 66%, driven largely by the Social Experiment Video and the OOH, beating the target by 65%. Ipsos 

• The Social Experiment video garnered more than 2.9 million views – enough to make it YouTube’s top ad for the 2nd half of 2018, beating (among others) the iPhone XS launch. YouTube 

Objective 2. Build empathy: target 5% uplift in positive attitudes/beliefs about PMHCs among those seeing the campaign 

• Beyond The Label improved attitudes toward PMHCs well beyond the target – indeed, on almost every measure the gain far exceeded 5%. (For simplicity, all these results are indexed to pre-campaign measurements – note that for the negative sentiments we targeted a decrease of 5%.) 

In an “empathy impact” test on the Social Experiment Video, comparing viewer response against a control group, the exposed group demonstrated dramatic shifts in attitude.

Objective 3. Inspire change: target 3% uplift in positive behaviour vis-a-vis PMHCs among those seeing the campaign 

• Beyond The Label improved positive behaviours (and decreased negative ones) well beyond the target – indeed, the minimum improvement measured was 3x the target level. (For simplicity, all these results are indexed to pre-campaign measurements – note that for the negative sentiments we targeted a decrease of 3%.) 

Behaviour change wasn’t limited to individuals: as part of the campaign NCSS also managed to rally significant corporate support, with 61 employers pledging their commitment to the cause, including big names like Accenture, Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson and Oracle. NCSS

The campaign’s Facebook page not only opened up a channel for an outpouring of support among Singaporeans in general (with over 400k engagements and 76k stories posted), but also created a safe space for PMHCs themselves to share stories of lived experience and recovery. Facebook, NCSS