Sporting Chance Stigma Campaign

OVERVIEW

Project Brief

Sporting Chance is a charity that helps professional athletes with different struggles, these can range from mental health issues to addiction. Our task was to ‘explore different ways in which we can communicate and promote Sporting Chance to athletes in order to encourage them to seek help if they are facing mental health problems’. We had 4 weeks in total to complete this brief.

The Goal

Our goal was to create a video campaign that helped reduce the stigma around mental health in sports, this would be a collection of animated videos that offer professional athletes the chance to share their story anonymously.

Tools

Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Sketch, Figma

View my full design process: Sporting Chance Design Document

Previous Mental Health Campaigns

To start off our research we looked into different mental health campaigns that previously existed. These included Headspace, Wysa and Calm.

Survey Creation

We decided to create a survey to send out to people in sports and individual sporting people. We did this as we wanted a first-hand insight into what mental health is really like in sports since none of us plays sports ourselves. We not only posted our surveys on sporting forums and handed them out to sporting people we know, but we also emailed popular football teams around the UK to distribute the survey.

Some examples of the useful feedback we received are:

• Mental health is rarely spoken about in professional football clubs.

• 60% of participants mental health was affected by their sports.

• 92% of the participants hadn’t heard about Sporting Chance before.

Interviewing Professional Athletes

We managed to get in touch with a professional Rugby player and a professional Hockey player, we used this opportunity to interview them about their own mental health stories in sports.

I was able to tackle these interviews due to my previous knowledge of how to interview around sensitive topics. I used the technique of asking open-ended questions and leading the conversation. The interview transcripts are on my full design document linked at the top of this page.

Idea Generation

After researching all the different mental health issues around sports and looking into our survey results, we started to think about potential ideas to tackle the brief. We looked into various campaigns for mental health as well as what applications and websites are already out there. From this, we collectively brainstormed different solutions to the brief statement. Our concepts were based on apps, campaigns and websites.

Our chosen Concept

Our proposal is to have people who have experienced mental health issues within sport, anonymously speak about times they have struggled with their own mental health. This will help show people that there are support and options available - including Sporting Chance. Similar to TED TALKS, however, what strengthens this campaign, is the speakers are anonymous through the use of animations.

Instead of recording their face, we use their story as a narrative for appealing visuals and animations. With the anonymous feature, people will be more open to sharing their stories and experiences. The storyboards you can see is just a small insight into the potential this campaign has.

(We chose this concept based on the clients own feedback.)

Branding

For our colour scheme, we chose a vibrant colourful scheme including hues of blue, pinks, oranges and greens. After researching around the colours that impact the user’s emotions we found that these colours would be best suited to the animation. Using the bright colours for our branding as we hoped these would help break the stigma with these powerful emotive colours rather than a plain colour scheme.

We also thought these colours would compliment a 2d animation and we could use the darker colours for shading on the characters.

Campaign name and logo

We initially started mind-mapping out potential campaign names. We liked the idea of including the concept of having something ‘hidden’. Initially, we liked “unseen”, “hidden stories” and anon. However, we thought that “out of sight” would fit our brand perfectly as it represents the stories of athletes with mental health issues that are usually hidden and not spoken about.

As for the logo we played around with using speech marks and exclamation marks incorporated with the eye logo however we didn’t think these fit the brand. After this, we went back to the eye logo and thought about the iris of the eye. We wanted a fairly abstract shape to fit the brand, so this was an ideal shape. We decided then to go with the iris logo with a dot that represents the glare in the eye.

Examples of our design process are seen below.

Storyboarding the animation

Now that we had a brand, it was time to start storyboarding the animation. We were able to get permission to use the stories from the Professional Rugby and Hockey player that we interviewed previously (as long as they remained anonymous). So we used our interviews to create a script and then we could base the animation storyboard around them.

For the first animation including the Rugby player (top image), we chose to make the visuals quite literal. The scene would show the rugby player going through life as the voiceover talks about their issues around mental health. However, the second animation of the Hockey player (bottom image), would be more abstract and show symbolic visuals as the voiceover talks about their mental health.

Low fidelity App/Website Wireframes

For our campaign, we created website and app wireframes that could store all of the animated videos, as well as provide information around the campaign itself. These wireframes show a homepage, recent recordings, about us, live chat feature and contact us.

App usability testing

For the user testing, we managed to recruit an amateur football player to go through the application screens and complete tasks.

Some important notes from the testing session are:

• They would prefer if they could start a recording from the bottom navigation bar as it would be easily accessible.

• They were confused about the live feature.

• They were able to find everything else fairly easily and without any additional help.

After the user testing, we decided to get rid of the live chat feature as it was too confusing.

Anonymous animation videos

Here are the two anonymous animation videos that we presented to the client. The first is about the Rugby player and the second video is about the Hockey player. We created these based on all of our research as well as the Out of Sight branding. The final videos not only attempt to normalise mental health struggles in sport, but they also promote the help/support that you can find at Sporting Chance.

Website and App Prototype

Here is a quick walkthrough of the final Website and App design. These would be a place to store the information from the campaign, including all of the recordings, as well as further information about the campaign itself.

Marketing posters

Along with the animations and website/app, we wanted a marketing campaign of posters to help spread awareness for how common mental health problems are within sports. These posters had to be eye-catching in order to draw attention to the campaign itself and be able to act alone in reducing the stigma. For this reason, we created two kinds of poster:

1) Statistics around mental health in sports - these would inform people about how common it is while also drawing their attention.

2) Quotes from famous sports psychologists, athletes etc - these would allow people to see a different perspective on the topic.

Our concept not only brings awareness to how common mental health problems are in professional sports athletes, but this entire campaign is also geared at highly promoting Sporting Chance as the source of help and support. This definitely answers the brief ‘To Explore different ways in which we can communicate and promote ‘sporting chance’ to athletes in order to encourage them to seek help if they are facing mental health problems.’

Hopefully, by bringing awareness to other athletes mental health struggles it can work towards breaking the stigma around the topic. This in turn should encourage current athletes struggling to come forward, and keep this campaign running long term.