#DoItDay: Delivering a winning pitch for Young Minds UK

On Tuesday, I was lucky enough to head to London for The Drum’s annual Do It Day event – a hack developed to showcase how marketing really can change the world.

Taking place globally in Singapore, London and New York, this year’s theme was destigmatising mental health to coincide with World Mental Health Day – and we were treated to some fantastic briefs.

I chose to work on a brief for Young Minds, a charity dedicated to raising awareness about mental health in young people. Their comms team was seeking a concept to encourage parents to visit their website and consume their ‘Find Your Feet’ toolkit, which empowers parents to help their children through the challenging transition from primary school to high school.

The right tools for the job 

To get the project underway, Dave Birss delivered a talk on how to be creative. He’s developed a number to innovative tools (accessible at rightthinking.co), which we used to kick-start our creative process.

The ‘industry swap’ tool encourages you to explore your idea in the context of random industries, so we explored how we could answer the brief in a laundrette or a grocers.

We also had a lot of fun with the ‘brain-swap’ tool, which picks random celebrities and challenges you to ask what they would do. In the end, it was this tool and Nelson Mandela who helped us settle on a winning idea.

The big idea! 

On Nelson Mandela Day in South Africa, people spend 67 minutes doing good things for others. This inspired the idea of taking time regularly to do anything good.

Creating a time and a place for parents to engage with their children is behaviour we wanted to inspire. What started out as a rough and ready ‘pause’ concept morphed into a #Take15 pledge, data capture and weekly opportunity for parents to spend time with their children doing something mutually beneficial.

What’s next?

For the next six weeks, I’ll be working with talented marketeers from Undercurrent, RPM, Impero, Coull, Microsoft and Good Agency to bring the campaign to life.

If you want to take the #Take15 pledge and see more of the campaign, keep your eyes peeled – launch day is on 16th November.