Suicide Prevention Communication Playbook

Introduction

Suicide is a serious public health problem affecting communities across the United States and the world. Suicide is among the leading causes of death in the United States. Every 11 minutes, a person in the United States dies by suicide. Every suicide is tragic and has far-reaching impacts on families and communities. Communication campaigns founded on best practices and using safe messaging can play an important role in prevention.

This playbook can help you develop suicide prevention communication campaigns that contribute to behavior change. The success of this type of campaign relies on adhering to behavior change science and best practices.

This playbook is for:

• Federal agencies
• State, local, tribal, and territorial health departments
• Nonprofit organizations
• Private sector
• Suicide prevention coalitions

How to use the playbook

This playbook can help you clarify your goals, define and understand your audience, and develop and evaluate your campaign. It will be helpful to read the playbook from start to finish before you begin. The development process is not linear, so understanding the full breadth of steps and considerations will help you as you develop your campaign. You can use this playbook and the accompanying Brainstorm Book to walk through each step:

• Step 1: Understand your place in suicide prevention
• Step 2: Understand the suicide prevention landscape
• Step 3: Identify your campaign beneficiary
• Step 4: Identify the campaign audience
• Step 5: Design your campaign strategy
• Step 6: Craft an effective message
• Step 7: Spread your message
• Step 8: Evaluate your campaign

What's included

The playbook contains the following:

• Descriptions of the actions in each step, why they are important, and helpful tips
• Critical questions to help guide decision-making
• Key considerations and suggestions for identifying
  • Potential personal or organizational biases
  • Existing opportunities that complement your intended work
  • Barriers to success
  • Feasible goals
  • The best measures of success
• Relevant resources for additional information on the topics presented in the playbook
• Exercises to help you think through and document your ideas, decisions, plans, and data

There are many other excellent resources that can help you with the steps outlined in this tool. We provide links to many of them throughout if you want to explore more outside this playbook. The gap that we are trying to fill is providing a "start to finish" guide for creating a communication campaign that follows best practices and aligns with the 2024 National Strategy for Suicide Prevention. We encourage you to align your work with other comprehensive suicide prevention work going on in your community or with your audience to ensure the greatest impact.

Playbook terminology

Let's start with defining some of the terminology used throughout the playbook:

• Suicide prevention communication campaigns – Campaigns that use communication science to drive behavior change and reduce suicide risk.
• Campaign beneficiary – The group that benefits from the campaign being successful. The campaign beneficiary is one or more specific populations identified as being at higher risk of suicide. The beneficiary may also be your campaign audience.
• Campaign audience – The group that your campaign is trying to reach and compel to take action. Your campaign audience and campaign beneficiaries might be the same group or the campaign audience may be people in the network/support system of the campaign beneficiary.
• Community factors –Social conditions or context that may influence the campaign's effectiveness. These conditions may beunchangeable but are important to consider. They could include social pressure, political climate, or trauma impacting a particular community.
• Comprehensive approach to suicide prevention – A comprehensive approach includes strong leadership to convene and connect multi-sectoral partnerships, using data, identifying and assessing gaps in existing programs in the jurisdiction, implementing and evaluating complementary strategies with the best available evidence, developing, implementing, and evaluating a communication and dissemination plan to communicate trends, progress, successes, and lessons learned to partners.
• Health disparity – Preventable differences that populations experience in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities. When people have limited access to resources they need to be healthy, they are more likely to struggle with health issues.Health inequities affect groups of people who have systematically experienced greater obstacles to health based on their:
  • Age
  • Cognitive, sensory, or physical abilities
  • Gender
  • Geographic location
  • Mental health
  • Racial or ethnic group
  • Religion
  • Sexual orientation or gender identity
  • Socioeconomic status
  • Other characteristic linked to discrimination or exclusion

Suicide prevention communication campaigns focused on behavior change go beyond raising awareness to include actionable steps that people can take to help prevent suicide. For suicide prevention in particular, it's also a good idea to include stories of resilience and hope as you are able.

The objectives and strategies you develop should focus on specific behavior changes among your campaign audience. Upstream behavior change campaigns will focus on actions that keep someone from reaching a crisis point. They can promote behaviors that the campaign beneficiary can use or behaviors that their friends, family members, teachers, coaches, or others can use to support them.

Communication campaigns focused on behavior change include the following best practices:

• Integrate the campaign into broader behavior change efforts
• Use audience research and behavior change theories or models
• Focus on a specific audience
• Engage individuals with diverse perspectives and lived experiences to develop and test messaging that resonates with the audience
• Promote an easy-to-understand call to action
• Include evidence based actions
• Rely on an evaluation plan to measure progress toward intended outcomes

Setting the tone for creativity

Suicide can be a difficult and very personal topic. Creating a nonjudgmental space for your team to talk candidly is important. It will help you get the most out of this playbook and maximize creativity during the development process. Let your team know you may encounter challenging questions and conversations. They shouldn't fear saying the "wrong" thing in these discussions. This will help you develop a more meaningful, authentic, and impactful campaign. It may also help your team to reassure them that talking about suicide does not encourage suicide attempts.