Our Achievements in 2018
07 Jan 2019 | Action for Happiness
2018 was another great year for the Action for Happiness
movement and we're so grateful to all our supporters for their
amazing kindness, inspiration and friendship.
It was a year when public discussion of mental wellbeing took
another encouraging step forward, with conversations about mental
health and happiness rising up the agenda.
Here are some of our key achievements during the year:
1. Launch of new charity
Having previously been based inside The Young
Foundation, we successfully launched the new independent Action for Happiness
charity.
2. Children's book
We published a very popular new Action for Happiness book for
children called 50 Ways to Feel Happy and it had a really
amazing response.
3. Action calendars
We created and shared 12 monthly action calendars that have now been
viewed and downloaded by over 2.5 million people. Amazing!
4. Community courses
We saw encouraging growth in our Exploring What Matters courses. We recruited
hundreds of new volunteers who went on to run over 100 new courses
with around 2,000 participants.
5. Get-Togethers
We launched new materials and guidance to support
monthly Get-Togethers and integrated these with
our courses to help groups continue to meet after their course has
finished.
6. Academic evaluation
We received extremely positive results from a full independent
evaluation of our courses, showing significant improvements in
wellbeing, mental health, social trust and compassion.
7. Public Events
We held 14 major public events with 5,000 attendees. Speakers in
2018 included Andy Puddicombe, Rangan Chatterjee, Mo Gawdat,
Matthieu Ricard, Satish Kumar, Rachel Kelly and more.
8. Happy Cafes
We saw continued growth in numbers of Happy Cafés, taking the total in the network to
over 100 cafes across 20 countries.
9. School Toolkits
Lots more schools ordered our Keys to Happier Living Toolkit, with over 150
schools now using it. We also developed a new version of the
Toolkit for use with younger children.
10. Engaging Influencers
We held a very successful supporters event with Gus O'Donnell
and Wellbeing discussion dinners with key influencers including the
Education Secretary and the Head of Ofsted.
11. Companies &
Conferences
We delivered training, talks and workshops for over 20
organisations and spoke about Action for Happiness at many tens of
conferences in the UK and around the world.
12. Website visitors
We had over 2 million new visits to our main website
during the year, taking the total visits since launch to over 10
million people.
13. AfH Community
We saw our online/social media community grow to over 1.1
million followers. We also added 22,000 more AfH members, taking
the total to over 128,000 from 175 countries.
14. Strategy &
Fundraising
We developed our "Theory of Change" and created a new strategic
plan. We brought on board a fundraising expert and submitted new
funding applications.
15. Communications
We generated some great media coverage during the year and also
recruited a new Head of Communications who will be ramping up our
media engagement in 2019.
16. New App
We developed a new Action for Happiness smartphone app (based on
our calendar actions) and shared this with a pilot group of users,
ahead of a full public launch planned in 2019.
17. Student project
We completed a student-led project looking at ways for us to
engage more successfully with students at universities, with key
recommendations to take forward in 2019.
18. Day of Happiness
We ran a successful campaign to support the UN
International Day of Happiness (20 March), with over 200,000 people
engaging online.
19. International reach
AfH chapters launched in Germany and Italy and our calendars were translated by
volunteers into 16 different languages, including Arabic, Chinese,
Japanese and Russian.
20. Providing support
We responded to over 100,000 emails from the AfH community
across the team during the year (that's an average of around 9,000
a month or 2,000 a week!).
Thanks for being part of this amazing community
:)