On 25th May, it was Missing Children’s Day. An opportunity for us to raise awareness about the issue of missing. This year, we decided to focus on the issue of mental health.
To highlight the effect mental health can have on why someone goes missing, we shared Tom’s* story.
Tom* was feeling a lot of pressure from family and school expectations and this led to him running away. Unfortunately, he is not the only young person who is struggling.
As this is a common issue, it was important for us to bring the conversation to light and share how our supporters can help.
In April, we launched our new Principles. These Principles outline what families should expect from the police when their loved one disappears. So many of the people we support have spoken out about the need for this guidance, so we were delighted to finally share it.
We want these Principles to be put into practice so as part of this campaign, we encouraged our supporters to email their Police and Crime Commissioners about our new Principles to ensure the principles are enacted in their force.
To make this as easy as possible for our supporters, we provided a template email that could be sent. Supporters only needed to enter a few details to complete it.
Recently there has been an increase in awareness of missing people cases in the news. This means that our cause is at the front of people’s minds right now.
But unfortunately, as with many missing people cases, an increase in awareness leads to a surge in speculation. Whilst this is something we cannot control, we challenged the misinformation with our survey. This survey debunked myths about missing and allowed supporters to gain a better, more accurate understanding of the issue of missing.
We advertised this survey through paid ads and have had around 2,000 supporters complete the survey.
This Christmas, we will once again be participating in the Big Give Christmas Challenge!
The challenge will take place between 3rd December – 10th December so we will be counting on you, our loyal supporters, to help us be there for missing people and those who miss them this Christmas.
We will keep you posted on more details about the challenge VERY soon so keep your eyes peeled!
