Something is off in how we talk about wellness on campus.
The banners go up. The email goes out. The Instagram graphic is clean and on-brand. And then… not much happens. People scroll past. Staff glance at the flyer and keep walking to their next meeting. Students see the resource link and never click.
It’s not that people don’t care about their well-being. They do. Deeply. It’s that most wellness campaigns are built to inform, not to connect.
And in digital spaces, especially, connection is everything.
The Numbers are Improving. Loneliness Isn’t.
Here’s something the awareness-month posts rarely say out loud: on the clinical measures, student mental health is actually getting better.
The 2024-2025 Healthy Minds Study, the largest survey of its kind, found that moderate-to-severe depression among college students dropped to 37% from 44% in 2022. Anxiety fell to 32%. Suicidal ideation declined to 11% from 15%. Three straight years of movement in the right direction.
That’s real progress. And it isn’t the whole story. Those numbers, while down from pandemic peaks, still sit well above where they were before 2020.
The harder problem was never only clinical. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national epidemic. On campus, it shows. More than half of students report feeling lonely. That floor holds across study after study, and a Trellis Strategies brief of nearly 44,000 students puts it at 57%. Only about a third of students describe themselves as flourishing, and that number slipped this year. One in four feel isolated from the people around them.
And loneliness doesn’t stay personal. In the Trellis data, students who were frequently lonely were far less likely to feel supported by their institution. Barely one in ten said they would recommend their school. Among their peers, it was nearly one in three.
The acute crisis is easing. The quieter one, the absence of connection and belonging, is not.
You cannot post your way out of loneliness. A polished graphic about a counseling hotline does little for a student who feels unseen. Belonging gets built the same way trust does. Consistent, human presence over time.
So the real question for a wellness strategy isn’t how loud your next campaign is. It’s whether your digital presence makes a student feel less alone on an ordinary Tuesday, when nothing is wrong and no one is in crisis.
The Problem Isn’t Awareness. It’s Relevance.
Here’s what I keep seeing across the campuses and organizations: wellness campaigns often speak at people rather than with them.
They lead with statistics and hotline numbers. They assume that knowing a resource exists is the same as someone feeling safe enough to reach out. They treat wellness as a topic to announce, not a culture to build.
A thriving wellness culture requires more than programs and promotions. It demands a genuine sense of care and belonging in which individuals feel valued and connected. That can’t be conveyed with a single graphic.
And staff are often the people least reached by these campaigns. The need is not small. The same Healthy Minds researchers who survey students now survey campus employees, and more than a quarter of faculty and staff report high or very high burnout. One in four higher ed staff say they’re likely to look for another job in the coming year. In student affairs the strain runs deeper still. Nearly one-third are unsure whether they’ll stay in the field, while 84% point to the stress and crisis-management demands of their jobs as a driver of burnout. The people keeping your campus running are quietly running on empty, and a wellness week poster isn’t going to change that.
What Effective Wellness Campaigns Actually Do on Digital
The campaigns that move people share a few things in common. They’re not flashier or bigger. They’re just built differently.
They start with honest naming. Before you promote a resource, name the reality. “We know this year has been a lot.” “We know your inbox is full and your plate is even fuller.” When people feel seen in the complexity of what they’re actually carrying, they become open to what you’re offering. Skip this step and even the best resource will fall flat.
They build over time, not in bursts. A single Mental Health Awareness Month push isn’t a strategy. It’s a moment. The campuses doing this well treat wellness as a through-line, not a campaign. They show up in digital spaces with consistent, human content across the whole year, with short videos, honest posts, staff spotlights, and student reflections, so that by the time someone really needs support, the connection and trust are already there.
They include faculty and staff, not as an afterthought. If your wellness content is directed only at students, you’re missing half the ecosystem. More than 80% of student affairs professionals already feel underappreciated by their institution. Recognition isn’t a nicety. It’s a need. Shout-out your team. Share what sustainable looks like for the people behind the scenes. Model the culture you’re trying to build.
They make it easy to take one small step. The mistake most campaigns make is offering too many options or making the path forward feel overwhelming. Instead, try starting with one tangible item: one link, one next step, or one invitation. “Here’s one thing you can try this week.” The goal isn’t to solve wellness in a post. It’s to lower the barrier to beginning.
Platform by Platform: What Works
Digital wellness content isn’t one-size-fits-all. Here’s a quick orientation:
Instagram and TikTok are where you build emotional resonance. Think short videos from real staff and students, behind-the-scenes glimpses of what care looks like on your campus, or simple affirmations that actually land. Authenticity over production value, always.
LinkedIn is where you lead with insight. Share what you’re learning about wellness culture, lift up staff doing meaningful work, and speak directly to the leaders and professionals who shape campus climate. This is digital leadership in practice. This is where you move the field, not just the moment.
Email and newsletters are still incredibly powerful for wellness, especially for staff who aren’t scrolling social feeds during their workday. A brief, warm mid-week check-in can do more than a month of posts. Keep it short. Make it feel human. One resource, reflection, and/or reminder that they matter.
A Note on Sustainability and Resources
Wellness campaigns can themselves become a source of burnout for the teams running them. And here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough: many campus wellness and health departments are under-resourced relative to the scope of what they’re being asked to do.
They’re expected to meet students where they are, across Instagram, TikTok, email, in-person events, and everywhere in between, often with small teams, limited budgets, and little dedicated support for digital strategy.
If you’re in a senior student affairs role, this question is worth asking: When did you last look at what your wellness team actually has to work with digitally? Not just their programming budget. Their capacity to show up consistently in the spaces where students are actually spending time.
This isn’t only a wellness question. It’s a retention one. CUPA-HR’s 2025 data found that employees’ confidence in their leadership is now one of the strongest predictors of whether they stay, second only to job satisfaction and well-being. How you resource the people doing this work is itself a signal of whether they should.
Visibility and reach require investment. That might look like a dedicated social media support role or shared resource across departments. It might mean bringing in a digital strategist to help build systems that don’t require heroic individual effort to maintain. It might simply mean protecting their time so they’re not rebuilding the wheel every semester.
The most powerful thing leadership can model here is this: wellness isn’t just a student initiative. It’s an institutional commitment. And that commitment has to show up in how you resource the people doing the work.
Where to Begin
Start with an honest audit of both your content and your capacity.
Look at your last six months of wellness communication. Who is it reaching? Who is missing? Is the tone informative, transactional, or genuinely relational? And then go one layer deeper: What is it costing your team to produce it?
From there, pick one platform, one audience, and one consistent rhythm. Build the infrastructure before you build the campaigns. When wellness departments have clear systems, real support, and protected bandwidth, they stop spinning their wheels and start building the kind of sustained, trust-based digital presence that actually moves people.
Your community doesn’t need more information about wellness. They need to feel it in how you show up for them. Consistently, humanly, and with the institutional backing that makes that possible.
So here’s the harder question. Not whether your campus cares about wellness. Whether you’ve resourced it like you mean it.
If you’re looking for support to get there, my team works with campuses to do exactly this kind of work, from communications audits and strategy development to skill-building for staff and social media coaching. Every partnership starts with a conversation. Let’s connect.
