Mike King beside the tractor he will be riding up the country to create advocacy for Gumboot Friday in which he hopes to raise $5 million towards providing free counselling for those aged six to 25.

Mental health advocate Mike King will be sleeping in an armchair for the next month as he chases a $5 million fundraising figure to help youth.

King launched a campaign to promote Gumboot Friday in Invercargill on Wednesday and hoped to triple the amount raised from the initiative last year of $1.3m.

The funding went towards providing 10,670 free counselling sessions for more than 2500 New Zealanders aged between 6 and 25.

However, the initiative was not without its hiccups. The $1.3m was used within five months and the manual booking system used proved to be costly and inefficient, King said.

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Seven people were hired to run the service, "mistakes were made" and calls were not returned frustrating councillors, he said.

This year a new online booking system would be used to mitigate the costs and run a more efficient service.

If successful, the $5 million goal would roughly provide 40,000 counselling sessions.

On Wednesday, King was in Invercargill to kickoff a nation-wide tour to promote Gumboot Friday on April 3.

He will travel from Bluff to Cape Reinga in a convoy of 20 tractors to raise awareness of the event.

It may not be a comfortable tour for King, who was involved in a motorcycle crash recently.

King will sleep on a lazyboy in the back of a trailer as he is unable to stand up easily.

He had metal plates in his shoulder and was on painkillers but continued to push through for his ambitious cause.

While in Southland, King said Southlanders had one of the lowest uptakes for the counselling service and that could be explained because of rural attitudes to mental health.

"They see counselling as only people who are mentally ill go a see counselling."