Communicating Through Social Media and Beyond to

Audiences in Crisis

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Who We Are:The Trevor Project

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The Trevor Project is the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning) young people.

We provide crisis counseling by phone, chat, text and we host TrevorSpace, the world’s largest safe space social networking site for LGBTQ youth, and operate innovative education, research, and advocacy programs.

Meet Your PresenterRory Gory

Pronouns: they/them/theirs

Title: Digital Marketing Manager

Role in One Sentence: Engaging The Trevor Project’s social media audience of over a million followers across platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.

Previous Experience: 5+ years of experience advocating for nonprofits through social media and digital marketing.

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Messaging During a Pandemic

Following COVID-19 shelter-in-place

orders, crisis contacts to The Trevor Project increased as we shifted our support centers into virtual teams.

For LGBTQ young people that have lost

their support systems amid quarantine, the pandemic has serious mental health implications. However, people within all industries are also facing mental health strain.

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Messaging During a Pandemic

Brand managers across organizations and

industries who are looking to provide support during isolation may be wondering:

• How do we talk about mental health,

suicide, and identity appropriately?• How do we message to an audience that

may be struggling right now?• How can we support a community

during times of crisis?

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Talking About Mental Health and SuicideSafe messaging is a broad term used by the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention. Certain forms of media reporting about suicide can increase risk, which has led to the development of reporting recommendations for media professionals: • Recommendations for Reporting on Suicide

When talking to your audience about emotional crisis and suicide, we also recommend this safety guide for anyone using social media to communicate:• #chatsafe: A Young Person’s Guide for Communicating Safely Online about

Suicide

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Messaging Tips for Mental Health ConversationsTalking about suicide and mental health is important to destigmatize mental illness, there are moments when sharing explicit stories about suicide can cause more harm than good. This is especially important to take into account when sharing on the internet, because any person or brand can influence a large audience if their content goes viral.

We worked with Dictionary.com to outline the ways in which talking about mental health can both help and harm, and how to get it right:• How to Talk About Suicide And Mental Health During Mental Health Month

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Talking About Identity

Messaging around identity is complicated, due to

the fact that we rarely hold just one identity. This is the concept of intersectionality, which Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw defines from a legal perspective as:

“Intersectionality is the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of privilege and oppression.”

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Messaging Tips for Intersectional IdentitiesAt The Trevor Project, we use safe messaging standards for suicide and mental health, while communicating to a diverse LGBTQ audience. Here are some tips for how to improve your messaging for a diverse audience:

● For any brand or organization speaking to identity, understanding intersectionality is key to creating inclusive messages.

● We all have unique perspectives and biases. It’s helpful to get to know your

own point of view and its limitations as a content creator.

● Given the immense diversity of our world, allyship is something we all must

practice. There may be multiple ways in which we are marginalized and privileged in our identities.

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Messaging Tips for Intersectional Identities

The Trevor Project has created two resources

to help during this time:

• Approaching Conversations on the

Intersection of Race and LGBTQ Identity

• A Guide to Being an Ally to Transgender and Nonbinary Youth

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Supporting Ourselves and Our Community

Social media management already requires a high level of

emotional labor. Your audience may be feeling the mental health consequences of the pandemic, in addition to current public outrage around police brutality and systemic racism. It’s important to remember to also care for yourself during this time as you respond the needs of your audience.

The Trevor Project created these tips to cope with anxiety and

stress during COVID-19. We then worked with Instagram to illustrate these tips for our audience, which you can also view on @instagram’s highlights.

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Thank you!

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