After more than 1.4 billion interactions with its best-known media campaign, telecommunications giant Bell Canada is ending its practice of donating five cents to mental-health charities every time someone tweets, texts or posts the #BellLetsTalk hashtag on a chosen day in January.
Instead, this Jan. 25, the company will launch a multimedia campaign entitled “Let’s Change This,” and make a lump-sum $10-million donation to mental-health charities. (That is more than the much-publicized five-cents-a-tweet approach ever raised in a single year, the company says.)
The change, from promoting talk to encouraging action, is overdue and welcome.
But we should also take a moment to recognize how impactful the Bell Let’s Talk initiative has been over the years.
When the groundbreaking campaign began in 2010, there was still a lot of stigma – reluctance to talk openly about mental illness. One of the main reasons that Bell Let’s Talk captured the public imagination was the way in which celebrities, such as Olympic super-champion Clara Hughes, came forward and told their stories.
It was brave (some argued foolhardy) for a company to make mental health the focus of its philanthropic activity – especially a big, conservative corporation like Bell Canada. More impressive still was that Bell went all-in, promising to donate $50-million over a five-year period to mental-health charities when the program first launched.
Many companies have followed Bell’s lead, picking a cause to support, and making it part of their corporate identity, instead of scattering their donations across many charities.
Bell’s fundraising target has changed many times over the years. Since the launch of Bell Let’s Talk, the company has donated more than $129-million to more than 1,400 different organizations in Canada, and has promised the total amount will hit at least $155-million.
Much of the credit must go to former Bell CEO George Cope. He was inspired to embrace the mental-health cause by his mother, who suffered from bipolar disorder and was institutionalized for two years when he was a boy. Mr. Cope not only changed the company’s charitable-giving practices, but its employment practices as well. Bell dramatically increased benefits for psychological care for its employees, and it trained managers in how to deal with workers struggling with mental illness or substance-use disorder.
The approach paid dividends, with the company noting a 20-per-cent drop in short-term disability claims and a 50-per-cent drop in workers suffering relapses related to mental health. (Mental illness is the number one cause of short- and long-term disability claims in Canada, and mismanagement of workers costs companies billions.)
Bell estimates that every $1 it invested in mental-health programs provided a return of $4.10. That, too, got the attention of Corporate Canada, and a growing number of companies are adopting the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace.
Of course, Bell Let’s Talk has not been without its critics. Over the years, many have dismissed it as nothing more than a marketing gimmick.
After all, when people use cellphones and social media (and the requisite internet connection), Bell profits handsomely.
Last year, on Bell Let’s Talk day, there were almost 165 million interactions, raising $8.2-million. That’s roughly what a 30-second ad costs during the Super Bowl, so pretty cheap from a marketing perspective. Media attention (like this column) also provides a lot of free advertising. Not to mention that for a company that had $23.4-billion in revenue and net earnings of $2.89-billion in 2021, a few million bucks is a pittance.
And despite the positive internal results described above, Bell is still not exactly a model employer. Workers, especially in its call centres, have routinely complained of mistreatment. The corporation has been criticized for its approach to layoffs, especially in its media division. The firing of beloved CTV National News anchor Lisa LaFlamme was also a debacle of ageist, sexist behaviour.
But the most constant criticism of Bell Let’s Talk over the years has been that, when it comes to mental health, we need less talk and more action.
The stigma-busting approach was important in the early years but, when you encourage people to come forward and share their stories, there is an implicit promise that help will be available.
In Canada, we have failed to follow through on that promise. Millions of people are struggling to get affordable mental-health care, and the situation has grown far worse as the pandemic battered our psyches, individually and collectively.
As Margaret Eaton, CEO of the Canadian Mental Health Association, says: “Canadians deserve mental-health care whenever and wherever they need it.”
Fixing that problem requires action – not just talk. And we need action not just from Bell, but from governments, non-profits and other big companies as well.