Well, what a couple of weeks it’s been here at CALM Towers. On 2nd November, we launched the #BiggerIssues campaign in partnership with Lynx; we watched and we wondered ‘how will this be received?’ In the first day alone, we were overwhelmed with supportive messages and tweets, with so many social influencers and supporters signing up to our Thunderclap that we smashed our target in under 24 hours and it became a trending campaign on Thunderclap itself.

On day 1, the campaign received more than 1,000 mentions, mainly on Twitter, with the vast majority being in support. Jonny Benjamin, Stuart Broad, Tulisa and Hobbie Stuart, Luciana Berger, Professor Green, Mistajam and David Baddiel all backed the campaign.

By the end of day 4, Huey Morgan, Lauren Pope, Shayne Ward and Jeff Brazier had all tweeted their support, with Stephen Fry signing up to the Thunderclap catapulting its social reach to over 13 million.

By the end of week 1, CALM had nearly 1,000 new Twitter followers with 75,716 people seeing our updates on Facebook, and brand new CALM writer Luke Chandley had made the front page of the Huffington Post with his piece ‘What Does It Mean To Be A Man‘, which was also listed as ‘top news’ on Twitter. The likes of George Lamb, Ronan Keating and FEMME all expressed their support, and after week 1, visitors to CALM ‘s website via the campaign splash page, went up by 600% compared to the previous week, with referrals by the end of week 2 coming from nhs.uk, biggerissues.co.uk (in the first week this accounted for 22% of all traffic), Huffington Post, BBC, Samaritans and the Guardian. For both weeks, we had record numbers of signups to CALM’s database.

On International Men’s Day itself, the Thunderclap sounded at 8am reaching 23,401,792 people. Yes, that’s twenty-three-million-four-hundred-and-one-thousand-seven-hundred-and-ninety-two people, 469% over our original target. Our campaign was featured on Thunderclap’s homepage and made it into the 20 most successful campaigns on their site. Unsurprisingly, the ‘best performing’ tweet came from Stephen Fry, which received 1,931 RTs. We added the likes of Stephen Merchant and Jamie Campbell Bower to our list of supporters, and #BiggerIssues trended in Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Tyneside, Manchester, Nottingham, Dublin, Ireland and Australia! According to trendsmap.com, #BiggerIssues was among the most trending topics in London and across the UK too.

The campaign was also pushed out via two Buzzfeed articles, ‘12 Topics Men Should Really Talk About‘, which got over 30,000 views, and ‘10 Facts About Male Suicide That Need To Be Known‘, which received nearly 5,000 views.

Also on International Men’s Day, CALM live tweeted the historic debate in Parliament on male suicide, which featured comments by MP Philip Davies, who brought the debate to Commons, MP Madelaine Moon, MP Maria Miller, MP Rachel Maskell, MP David Nuttall, MP Amanda Solloway, MP Lucy Allen, plus Shadow Mental Health Minister Luciana Berger and Minister of State for Community and Social Care MP Alistair Burt. Here’s the full text of what was said and who attended.

Without you, we couldn’t have done this. You signed up to the Thunderclap, you tweeted celebs about the campaign and the cause, you shared on Facebook, you lobbied your MP and opened up about your own experiences for CALM’s YOUR VOICE section and in some cases on Huffington Post too. You made this campaign happen.

So, where do we go from here? Well, as CEO Jane Powell wrote in her initial email about the campaign launch, we campaign until the day “I never take a call again from a parent who says they were worried about a son who was depressed, but never thought he’d take his life.” One thing you can do right now is view and share the Don’t Be A Statistic playlist on YouTube, and sign up to our Instant Action Network (IAN) to be the first to hear when there’s something you can do that might just help to save a life.