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	National Office for Suicide Prevention to spend up to &euro;1m on multimedia campaign</p>
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	The first commercial-scale suicide-prevention communications campaign rolls out this week with Little Things, a multimedia campaign created by Dublin agency Rothco. The Health Service Executive&rsquo;s National Office for Suicide Prevention (NOSP) is to spend up to &euro;1 million on the campaign, which was devised with the assistance of 20 partner organisations in the mental health and suicide prevention sector.</p>
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	Research for the campaign began in January of this year and, to the HSE&rsquo;s surprise, showed that for this subject people preferred animation to live action. And so for the television treatment three 40- second films were made by animation experts Art &amp; Graft. They tell the personal stories of &Uacute;na-Minh Kavanagh, Alan O&rsquo;Mara and Robert Carley, who provide the voiceovers. The idea is that everyone has a &ldquo;little thing&rdquo; that they do to help them through difficult times.</p>
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	While the target audience is, according to the NOSP &ldquo;everyone &ndash; that old idea that one in four people is affected by mental health issues is wrong: it&rsquo;s four out of four&rdquo; &ndash; the prime targets are, because of suicide statistics, two categories of men: those aged 19 to 25, and those aged 25 to 44; and so a digital media strategy is a key part of the Little Things message, whose media strategy is by Carat.</p>
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	The Facebook and Twitter side of the campaign will be managed in-house by the NOSP, initially due, it says, to the sensitivity of the subject matter so that mental health experts can respond to and manage the posts.</p>
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	The HSE&rsquo;s Quit campaign saw significant Facebook engagement, with about 50,000 people now using the campaign site, some as a community quit-smoking support forum. That campaign is the one the HSE intends to benchmark others on.<br />
	The NOSP has persuaded several well-known people to engage with its social media strategy and who will tweet their own &ldquo;little thing&rdquo; &ndash; including, it says, the Taoiseach who has shown a remarkable reluctance to use Twitter, his last tweet to his 19,200 followers being on July 8th, 2011.</p>
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	<a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/business/sectors/media-and-marketing/suicide-prevention-campaign-begins-1.1972658">http://www.irishtimes.com/business/sectors/media-and-marketing/suicide-prevention-campaign-begins-1.1972658</a></p>
