Promoting mental health and wellbeing in individuals and communities: the ‘Act-Belong-Commit’ campaign

Abstract

The Act-Belong-Commit campaign is an evidence-based social marketing program making extensive use of social franchising to promote the mental health and wellbeing of individuals and communities. The campaign targets individuals with respect to engaging in activities that strengthen and maintain good mental health. At the same time, the campaign targets organisations that offer mentally healthy activities to act as social franchises for the campaign, promoting the messages internally to their staff and/or externally to their clients or local communities. Act-Belong-Commit’s overarching framework allows for implementation at the population level, as well as in specific settings and for targeted groups. The campaign has a mass and targeted media presence and is implemented through partnerships with local governments, schools, workplaces, health services, state government departments, community organizations, and local sporting and recreational clubs. This chapter describes the campaign, how it operates in the community, how it is evolving from a largely population wide (universal) approach to include targeted (selective) approaches, its geographic diffusion, and evaluation.