Partner Spotlight: Suicide&Co.
Luke - I am delighted and to welcome the wonderful and inspirational Amelia Wrighton, co-founder and CEO of our partner Suicide&Co. Amelia, thank you for joining us. Could we start with a bit of your background pre setting up Suicide&Co?
Amelia - Thank you, I'm thrilled to be here. My background story is 8 to 10 years in media and advertising. I started working in research and consumer insights right about the time when advertisers realised that data was the story. That quickly took me into marketing, and then into sales, and probably wider business development.
That’s where I met my co-founder, Emma. We had a conversation about our personal lives which was the sparking of Suicide&Co an organisation. I lost my mum to suicide at 19. I was at university and living in a different country and an only child so I very much went into survival mode, I guess trying to prove my independence. And that ended up delaying the processing of my grief. The big unlocking moment for me was when I went into counselling, because I realised that talking to a professional in a confidential setting was going to allow me to really process what I was going through and for me to - I use the word - heal. That, for me, was a really empowering moment.
And it's been a journey to date. Eight years after my mum died, when I had this conversation with Emma, at work, we realised that even though both of us have processed that grief and done our own healing, there’s still so much conversation that wasn't happening around suicide, and around bereavement, and a need for better services. And that led us to look into the space. What we found is a huge gulf of support and options between suicide prevention and suicide bereavement. And the bereavement side of things is really where we saw an ability to help people get through their grief, help prevent their mental health deteriorating, and in turn, prevent suicide through that lens. That was the motivator to get in and help.
Luke - Do you have a sense of why there wasn’t - isnt’ - more support available for suicide bereavement?
Amelia - It's not like there was no one there but there's definitely a significant gap. There's an organisation still around today called Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide. They've been around for 25 years doing peer to peer support. And at the time that we went in, the government decided for the first time ever, to invest £57m into the suicide bereavement space, specifically to create local pathways of support. They determined that these local pathways didn't exist, mainly because of the structures that they were in. So bereavement, after somebody dies in hospital, as an example, has a much more structured system, because you've got all the data in one place, and you can trigger all of the different referrals that you need. Whereas when it comes to a suicide, often the first people on the scene are the police. Then you've got the coroner and it's not even called suicide until there’s been an inquest. It's a very complex system that varies greatly in different regions. It’s also the case that a lot of mental health services didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago. Putting a priority on mental health, and then bereavement as a subset within it, is a new movement in itself.
Luke - You’ve mentioned counselling, and support - how do you help people?
Amelia - We saw the local funding coming in for practical and emotional support and we saw Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide doing peer to peer. And because the space was so small, with such a big audience of 34,000 people newly bereaved every year, and 700,000 people affected, we wanted to do something different, i.e. not doing what somebody else was doing already, and providing another option. We decided to be really focused on counselling and providing access to professionals because counselling can be really inaccessible due to price point. We believe that it’s an incredibly beneficial mode of support, especially for a grief that can be this complex. So our primary USP is that we have a counselling service that runs across England and Wales which offers anybody over the age of 18?? Twelve sessions of counselling by qualified counsellors.
That’s an amazing provision and we've had over 950 applicants in the two years that the service has been open. Because of that demand we now have a helpline, open Monday to Friday, 9am to 9pm, that's a Listening Service. The other area we’re involved in is around providing digital resources that can empower self care. Every grief journey is unique and if you're accessing peer to peer support, or counselling, or both, the likelihood is you'll also benefit from reading an article or a book, listening to a podcast, finding an app, etc. And so it's those kinds of softer resources that we help people navigate and find through our website and social media channels
Luke - Have you found it difficult to build up that network of professionals? Are there enough people out there with the level of training and qualification that you need?
Amelia - A lot of charities use trainees for counselling because trainees need to get free placement powers. We decided that we can't do that because of what we've learned around the complexity of the work involved. There are plenty of counsellors aroundAnd we find that people are really passionate and motivated by the work that we're doing. And by the fact that they can build a relationship with clients over 12 sessions. It's not long, long-term work, but it's also not industry standard, which is normally about 6 sessions
Luke - And so how do people find you? How do you get the word out?
Amelia - It's been very organic. About 50% of applications are from the sector, so local resources, local services, Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide. We've worked very hard at outreach because the whole sector is under pressure. We want to be able to give support for people who are already reaching out for it. Apart from that it's through social media, Google, and then word of mouth and fundraising. We've got a big team of volunteers, a big team of ambassadors, we get introduced to people every week. We’re not doing any active advertising. We did do one campaign last year, but that was because we won funding to do it. We are now in a moment where we want awareness for fundraising, but not for demand. I want everyone to be able to know about our services, but it will just mean our waitlist will grow. And we are trying to get to a point where we're raising awareness when we have the funds to actually deliver on that awareness.
Luke - How are you finding the fundraising space at the moment?
Amelia - As a headline fundraising is going really well. Last year we grew 3x year on year. But I think we have several blockers. One of the blockers is that when people think about suicide, they think about suicide prevention versus the understanding that when you lose someone to suicide, your life has shattered and you are at risk and in need of support. So there’s an educational piece there. Also I think we struggled to know what channel to give our attention to because we’re a really tiny team. We’ve spread ourselves thin and then tried to make data driven decisions about which direction to go in. And because we’re still so new I find it hard to answer certain questions like ‘how was Covid’? And I’m like - well we launched in COVID so I don't know the difference!
Corporate is a really interesting space for us. We've got a new corporate proposition where we're providing organisations with a service in return for a donation. It’s a support service for HR professionals in case they need to navigate somebody being bereaved by suicide, or an employee dying by suicide. But that's fairly new off the ground so I don't have any case studies on that yet. I've got lots of opinions on corporate giving and how I think it's changing. It's definitely challenging. I'm looking at a tissue box right here that says that they're supporting Mind!
Luke - It seems to me that the corporate offering is something that needs to be in every company's HR toolbox because - sadly - suicide is one of those things that everyone could be affected by. And my sense from my own experience is that most companies don’t know what to do. And, given the importance that people place on their workplace and their relationships in it, could be very detrimental to someone at an already very, very difficult time. Do you think the corporate sector has a greater awareness of their responsibility to help and to support when it comes to dealing with this kind of tragedy?
Amelia - I think it really comes down to their wellbeing / HR / mental health provision, and then charitable giving. When I started work a fruit bowl was considered to be an innovation in this space whereas now you have Mental Health First Aider Training. People are being more proactive and investing in mental health initiatives and that’s fantastic but that doesn’t stop people being bereaved by suicide.
I think companies are massively improving when it comes to charitable giving and I think people are becoming smarter in their CSR schemes. And I think one of the biggest shifts is that they are starting to hear from employees about what they want to do - for instance all of the matching schemes that now exist. So the two big improvements that have been around since I've been in the working world have been charity days, and matching schemes. Charity days are great but most people don't use them. I used all of mine to set up a charity, but most people don't use them. And then matching is brilliant, matching works really well but what tends to happen, is that everything's done in lots of little pools. There's charities, there's matching, there's the marketing promotion they're doing with this charity, there's the event that they've decided to sponsor over there, and it's all just not coming together. And that’s what makes it very difficult to do real, accurate impact measurement.
Luke - One of our observations is that the S (Social) in ESG is a lot more difficult to measure because there’s less science to it. Unlike the Environment piece for instance.
Amelia - I think everybody gets the concept of a counselling session and the impact that speaking to a professional for 50 minutes has. When we get into grant applications, when we get into longer term partnerships, we capture efficacy data, we ask people to rate their feelings across three different aims, navigating their grief coping strategies, etc, at the start, and at the end of the process, and we can show the increase that that has. But mental health impact measurement is just nowhere near where it needs to be. If we take the counselling practice, the majority of people use a form called Core 10, which a lot of them disagree with! So we're not in a good place in terms of impact measurement. It's also a very unscientific thing to measure. How do you measure the ‘improvement’ of someone’s navigation of their grief?
I think the comparison with the environment, in the context of ESG, is really interesting. I'm noticing a bit of a trend with buyers, who genuinely seem enthused to make a difference versus the tick box exercise, which we’re all really familiar with. There definitely seems to be a completely varying scale of maturity across all of the areas that come under ESG.
Luke - That's very much aligned with what we see as well. There's a maturity curve or perhaps stages that an organisation is at in their ESG journey. What are you most excited about in terms of the direction that you're going in?
Amelia - We have a very exciting project. We’ve kind of set precedents for doing things differently from our branding through to our tone of voice. We have had some incredible people in the space reach out with innovations and with ideas and capitalising on that has been the maker of our success. And we've got a couple of those projects on at the moment. We are looking into an app that we have got a user research project going on with, we sell merchandise, we're planning a pub quiz and so on. But I think the ultimate motivator for me is not having a waitlist. At the moment, we have a three month waitlist. I want to get to a balance where you have enough sustainable funding coming in to be able to map capacity against a growing demand.
Luke - What kind of words of guidance and wisdom might you be able to pass on to someone who’s looking to set up a charity?
Amelia - A big competitor analysis is the best thing we did when we started. So we're suicide bereavement - we went across suicide prevention, bereavement, we went across general mental health, to see if there was anybody out there doing what we were doing. And we couldn't find anyone. And that has been the leader of our success for the last two and a half years and the reason we're growing so quickly. The sector needs more collaboration, there's duplication everywhere. We need more collaboration and better working together. So get as much advice as possible. Everyone that you know, that's ever been involved in charity, just get in and talk to them and have a coffee. Advice is something I'm still getting all the time and it's the most beneficial part of what we're doing. And then try not to duplicate. There's things like building directories, building templates, policies. All of these things have been done and we should all share a lot more of that. But as we grow, it gets harder to actually have the time to share and enable that to happen. Ultimately, the sector needs more talent, more people getting involved. It doesn't necessarily need loads more organisations.
I would also say more on what you guys are doing. I really believe in the product, the ability to look at an organization's charitable giving and ESG impact in a holistic way. Impact Reporting is a huge opportunity because - as you’ve noted - it’s not efficient and making it more efficient is going to help companies move along that maturity curve we were talking about.
Luke - Thank you for that. And thank you so much for speaking to us. I’m already looking forward to our next chat.
