Medallia has launched a series of new initiatives to help individuals in crisis, including BIPOC, LGBTQ+, veterans, and caretakers.
We’re up against a growing number of challenges — the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustices, global economic turmoil, and natural disasters, to name a few of the most pressing crises. With the impacts of each of these sure to be lasting upon our collective mental health, the call to action is clear. This is a moment for listening, understanding, and reaching out — and for helping individuals in need.
That’s why we at Medallia, in collaboration with our social impact arm, Medallia.org, has announced a series of new initiatives we’re launching to help individuals in crisis, particularly the most impacted among us — including BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), LGBTQ+, veterans, and caretakers. As a company dedicated to listening to understand and take action, we cannot think of a more important issue to tackle with this philosophy than in the areas of mental health and suicide prevention.
Among the first of many new mental health initiatives in the works, we’re thrilled to share that we have awarded an $80,000 USD grant round from our new Medallia.org Fund, a donor advised fund of Tides Foundation, to two mental health nonprofits ($40,000 USD each). As part of this grant, we are also contributing two years’ free subscriptions of Medallia products along with Professional Services support and Experience Management training to these two organizations.
Championing the Causes Selected by Our Employees and the Community
To kick off this new grant, we invited leading nonprofits to share their technology-forward, innovative, and human-centered solutions for tackling mental health issues and suicide prevention on the Medallia crowdsourcing platform, Crowdicity. Our Medallians and other companies had the chance to vote in support of their favorite causes.
Meet the Nonprofits and Learn About Their Missions 
Black Girls Smile
With a mission of providing young Black women education, resources, and support to lead mentally healthy lives, Black Girls Smile will use our $40,000 grant to expand its Charlyne McFarland Therapy Scholarship program that offers young Black women financial assistance for mental health therapy with a licensed mental health professional. In addition, the nonprofit hopes to leverage Medallia’s Experience Management expertise to track participant feedback, measure the impact of its work, and analyze participant progress pre- and post-programming to ensure the oversight and effectiveness of the program.
How the nonprofit uses feedback: Black Girls Smile currently utilizes surveys throughout the program and plans to use technology to offer a more personalized communication with participants, expand its outreach beyond email, and increase overall participant engagement.
“Black Girls Smile is excited to partner with Medallia to expand our programming and initiatives to empower and support the mental health and wellbeing of black women and girls. We believe that by partnering with Medallia to leverage technology and support we will be able to expand our reporting and tracking to guide our programming in more effective and efficient ways to serve our community,” said Lauren Carson, founder and executive director of Black Girls Smile.
Heroes Health Initiative
Developed through a collaboration between the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and One Mind Institute, Heroes Health Initiative is an app-based initiative offering healthcare workers an easy way to track their mental health and access crisis support and resources in times of need. Heroes Health plans to leverage the grant to support its expansion of the app, making it available to more hospitals. In addition, the team plans to utilize feedback technology to build out digital feedback mechanisms within the app.
How the nonprofit uses feedback: Currently, the group leverages in-app mental health assessments to gather participant feedback. Individuals can see a summary of their mental well-being, along with trends in their reported mental health over time as well as give feedback on the quality and quantity of PPE, what support their healthcare institution offers workers, and more. Plus, leadership at participating healthcare institutions receive an anonymized summary of this information, enabling them to pinpoint when additional support is needed for workers.
“Heroes Health, an initiative led by UNC Health and supported by One Mind, is proud to partner with Medallia to support the mental wellbeing of our nation’s healthcare heroes. This grant helps Heroes Health to support its critical services, and ensure quick and effective enhancements to our mobile app, with feedback received directly from our healthcare users,” said Dr. Sam McLean, founder of Heroes Health and director of the Institute for Trauma Recovery at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Additional Mental Health Initiatives
This new grant is just one step of many as part of our larger commitment to leverage our best resources to help move the needle on mental health. We have a lot to learn as we scale our efforts, but we’re honored to be working with the leading organizations on the ground to do so. Below is what we’ve already done and how we’ll be expanding these resources.
Helping our partners listen, monitor and act upon crisis signals of their customers and employees in distress. Customers like the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) are using Medallia’s text analytics to shine a light on individuals in need of help. The VA has leveraged Medallia as a warning system for at-risk veterans to intervene in response to 3,000 of these crisis signals related to suicide and homelessnes, providing early intervention for veterans in need within minutes. Taking learnings from the VA, we are already deploying this technology for our commercial customers to support the holistic wellbeing of their own customer base and will continue to support more and more of our partners.
Supporting mental health nonprofits. In addition to supporting the two nonprofits announced here, Medallia is also a proud Bronze Sponsor of The Trevor Project, the world’s largest nonprofit dedicated to preventing suicide for LGBTQ+ youth. All year long, we will be working to amplify The Trevor Project’s work during Pride Month, Suicide Prevention Month, and Medallia’s Global Week of Giving, our week of giving back across our global employee base.
Prioritizing caring for our employees’ wellbeing. Medallia is proud to offer programs that both nurture and support mental health through Unmind, our Employee Assistance Program, and mental health care navigations through Spring Health. Further programming through these benefits, along with wellness and educational workshops in partnership with our Employee Resource Groups, will ensure we stay committed to our employees at all times.
We aim to harness our people and product power for social good. Learn more about how Medallia helps nonprofits deliver more.
