988 Day

988 Day Overview

A New Day of Action

988 Day is a national Day of Action held annually on 9/8 with a goal of raising awareness and positive buzz about the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline through creative activities led by communities, organizations, and individuals. Prior to my tenure at Vibrant Emotional Health, the idea of such a day had been floated earlier at Vibrant, but 2024 was the first year SAMHSA committed to actually launching it.

2024

The Inaugural 988 Day

SAMHSA, in collaboration with Vibrant, launched the first-ever 988 Day in 2024, an idea that had been floated internally at Vibrant years earlier but never gotten off the ground. SAMHSA was the primary owner of the initiative and worked through its own contracted vendor, which built the original 988 Day logo and a small set of supporting creative under the theme “No Judgment. Just Help.”

My team and I at Vibrant served as SAMHSA’s execution partner on the ground: we recruited and onboarded partner organizations and celebrities (such as Jacoby Shaddix from Papa Roach) from to boost visibility, composed communications for crisis centers nationwide, developed social media messaging, and helped facilitate SAMHSA’s partner activation webinars. I also brought over an idea from my time at the Institute for Sustainable Communities — a live social media wall — to bring this national day of action to a central location for people across the country to check into. I built and moderated that wall with my team using Walls.io before, during, and for a several days after 988 Day itself. The inaugural year generated a combined social media reach of more than 152 million, proving there was real appetite for a dedicated 988 Day and setting up the much larger expansion I’d go on to lead in 2025. View the 2024 recap.

That year also produced one of my favorite examples of what this kind of partnership-building can do. Earlier in the year, the rock band Papa Roach and their management reached out to us directly. We coordinated with AFSP, which had already been working closely with Papa Roach for their Talk Away the Dark campaign, and through those relationships, and Papa Roach's own connection to Carrie Underwood, we were able to release a 988 Day PSA featuring both Carrie and Jacoby Shaddix of Papa Roach, entirely unpaid.

Independently monitored media coverage for the year (via Critical Mention) showed 1,746 earned-media mentions, an estimated audience of 1.85 billion, and $21.9 million in publicity value, a strong baseline I’d go on to build past in 2025.

2025

988 Day Year 2

In 2025, SAMHSA handed primary ownership of 988 Day over to Vibrant, and I led the expanded second edition from the ground up. Working with agency partner Bellweather, I took the program from a handful of basic social graphics and fact sheets in 2024 to a seven-category bilingual toolkit covering activation ideas, brand assets, print materials, email content, social media, and trusted content. I also oversaw a visual refresh of the 988 Day brand itself, including a new logo and lockup of the 2025 theme, “Compassionate Help. Anytime. Anywhere.”

Bellweather handled design and build, but I personally wrote or heavily edited every piece of copy in the toolkit myself including social captions, fact sheets, flyers, trusted content, and email language. because the role required a close working relationship with SAMHSA and a specific understanding of mental health language, stigma, and how 988 actually works that couldn’t be handed off in full to an outside agency. I also stepped in to lead SAMHSA’s activation webinars, and represented 988 Day as a speaker at two additional activation events.

The toolkit expansion and growing awareness through earlier webinars showed up in our numbers, too. Earned media coverage for 988 Day in 2025 reached an estimated audience of 9.3 billion and generated $30.3 million in publicity value, a 39% increase over 2024’s $21.9 million. This was achieved with even with fewer total media mentions than the year before, reflecting higher-caliber placements rather than just more volume. On 988lifeline.org, we also saw a 31.5% single-day spike in active users on 9/8 itself, with the 988 Day toolkit page becoming one of the site’s most-visited pages in the weeks leading up to it.

Watch the 2025 recap video and view the 2025 988 Day Toolkit in the wayback machine.

Flyers

I developed content for a series of 988 Day flyers in English , which were transcreated for Spanish. They were designed to be co-branded by participating organizations, states, crisis centers, etc.. The co-branding design was intentionally developed in direct response to feedback we received from partners following the inaugural 988 Day. We also created two versions: one that was a digitally-ready PDF and a second, that was a print-ready file with full bleed marks.