What difference do you want to make? And to whom?

These questions are key. This helps you to think about why you’re doing what you’re doing and why. Most importantly, it also helps you to identify the ‘what’, and more importantly the ‘who’ will benefit from the difference. This will help you to focus your data research, your service development and your messaging.

Try and actually picture it rather than think of your answers as broad statements. So, if out of all of the statements that come up, the strongest that everyone agrees with is to ‘reduce the stigma of mental health’ - Try and picture what that actually looks like?

More people accessing your service? Who are those ‘more’ people? is it more men picking up the phone? More young people talking to you before they get to a crisis point? Really try and break it down.

If you were then to write a marketing strategy you would then break it down further and picture a specific person of a specific age and story to talk to. This then helps you to define what different messaging you will need for men to access the service than to young people as they both may have different hurdles to overcome.

However, for the purposes of this, let’s keep it high level. By the end of this exercise you would want to be clear about what difference you want to make and who will benefit from your efforts.