1. Context and challenge

The WHO Foundation raises funds and builds partnerships in support of the World Health Organization’s work. It needed to understand how it is perceived across the wider information environment and to track news coverage that could affect its reputation. As it prepared a major campaign push on mental health and other issues, it also needed evidence of what resonates with the public, the media and donors in its key fundraising markets.

2. Our role

Research for Purpose conducted brand reputation and narrative analysis for the WHO Foundation, set up issue monitoring, and delivered a campaign planning report on mental health.

3. What we did

We built multilingual Boolean queries covering the Foundation’s priority issues, including public health emergencies, Gaza and Ukraine, in languages such as English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Danish, Turkish and Greek. These queries feed ongoing monitoring and alerts on news coverage.

For the mental health campaign, we analysed 93,000 media articles and 89,000 social media posts, which together generated 596 million engagements. The data covered eight donor markets (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Sweden) from January 2025 to July 2026. Content was classified by sentiment, topic and emotion using our AI toolkit, which we adapted to mental health through repeated testing. We then assessed the Foundation’s draft campaign concept against the findings.

4. Results

Social connection emerged as the most engaged mental health topic in every market. Media coverage, by contrast, framed mental health mainly through illness and policy. 

We recommended a specific structure as the fundraising backbone and leading the public campaign with social connection. We also proposed specific media angles grounded in data.

The analysis tested a campaign concept before launch, treating the public, the media and donors as three distinct audiences.