Project Green Ribbon is a Singapore non-profit dedicated to mental health support and awareness, working through a family-based approach to create a safe and supportive environment for individuals navigating mental health challenges. In late 2021, they were planning a livestream event for World Mental Health Day and needed digital PR outreach that would extend the conversation beyond their existing supporter base — into the wider Singapore audience that the cause needed to reach.
The brief was tight in scope and tighter in timeline.
Brief
Mental health awareness in Singapore in 2021 was at a moment of genuine cultural shift. Conversations that had previously been private were starting to surface in mainstream media. Stigma was easing, but unevenly. Project Green Ribbon’s positioning — empathy-led, family-based, non-clinical — placed them well to contribute to that conversation, but only if their event reached audiences beyond the existing community of supporters and clinicians.
The event itself was structured around a single concept:
- Title: The Unheard: Human Library
- Date: 10 October 2021
- Format: Livestream, 3.30pm – 5.30pm GMT+8
- Programming: Keynote speeches from advocates with lived experience, panel discussions with mental health professionals, community contributions
The digital PR challenge was twofold. First, mental health editorial coverage in Singapore is genuinely competitive — publications run mental health pieces routinely, and a livestream pitch needs to differentiate itself from the dozens of similar events that Mental Health Day generates each year. Second, the event was free to attend with optional donations, which constrained the framing — this was not a commercial event with PR upside but a community initiative needing earned coverage on its own merits.
Coverage needed to do two jobs: drive registrations for the event itself, and build longer-term institutional credibility that would help Project Green Ribbon’s broader fundraising and grant applications.
Approach
Editorial mapping. Identified the Singapore publications and journalists actively covering mental health, community, and youth wellness — not just the obvious mainstream outlets but also the digital-first publications (RICE Media, Mothership, AsiaOne) where Singapore’s under-35 audience actually reads.
Pitch development. Each pitch tailored to the publication’s editorial voice and audience. The mainstream outlets received a structured event-brief pitch with quotes and interview availability. The digital-first publications received a longer narrative angle — the Human Library concept, the lived-experience speakers, the cultural shift the event was contributing to.
Asset preparation. Worked with Project Green Ribbon to prepare the supporting assets editors would need: event imagery, speaker bios and headshots, organisational background, and clear quote material from the founders that publications could lift directly.
Outreach execution. Coordinated outreach across the target list with appropriate sequencing — the digital-first publications generally moved faster than the mainstream outlets, so coverage built up in waves.
Event-day support. Real-time social and digital coordination on event day to amplify coverage and surface the most quotable moments for follow-up media interest.
Result
The livestream itself drew strong attendance for a free community event of this format, and earned coverage from a meaningful spread of Singapore digital publications — AsiaOne and RICE Media among the named outlets, with additional coverage and social amplification from adjacent community publications and influencers in the wellness and mental health space.
The downstream effect mattered more than the immediate coverage. The combined visibility from event-day attendance plus media coverage strengthened Project Green Ribbon’s institutional credibility, which fed directly into subsequent grant applications and government funding conversations. The organisation went on to secure additional funding and grant support that would have been considerably harder to win without the demonstrated public reach.
This is the kind of compounding outcome that earned media is supposed to produce, and rarely does. A free community event by itself does not move the needle on grant applications. A free community event plus credible third-party media coverage plus a clear demonstration of audience reach does.
Why this kind of work matters
Non-profit digital PR is a category where the standard agency playbooks tend to fail. The budgets do not support the volume of outreach that commercial digital PR programmes assume. The pitches need to be more substantively framed because editors are appropriately sceptical of cause-related coverage that feels promotional. The success metrics are usually downstream — institutional credibility, grant outcomes, partner conversations — rather than direct response.
What works is treating the cause itself as the editorial product, and doing the unglamorous work of matching the right angle to the right publication. That is what we did for Project Green Ribbon, and what we do for the small number of non-profit and cause-led organisations we work with.
If you run an organisation in this space and are planning a moment that needs to land beyond your existing community, get in touch.