Wow. What a party. The Secret Garden Party never fails to deliver. The Mindapples team had great fun cavorting around the fairy tale-esque back drop of Huntingdon. We had our Head Gardener, Andy Gibson, dressing up as a fawn (just like Mr Tumnus in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and our digital advisor and all round ‘Bad Apple’, Daniel Kolodziej, sporting a rather *ahem* ‘fetching’ pony tail..
But, more importantly the team was able to spread the good word that mental health is a subject that should be openly talked about, whatever the setting. We were lucky enough to ‘plant’ three Mindapples trees across the Secret Garden Party, where our team asked people “What’s the 5-a-day for your mind?”. Much like we look after our bodies by exercising or having 5-a-day of fruit and veg, we ask people to consider and share what they do to look after their mind by jotting them down on our Mindapples cards and hanging them on our tree – as ever the Mindapples tree’s attracted a great deal of attention with 100s of people sharing their 5-a-day!
Secret Garden Party 2014 was also the first stage of our plans for promoting the new Mindapples app, Moodbug. Moodbug is a free app for Apple iOS that allows users to safely share their mood and how they really feel about life’s ups and downs with their close friends, family and even work colleagues. After all, isn’t it easier to look out for one another and effectively communicate if we have an idea of how people are REALLY feeling at any given time? Already, Moodbug has been a success for Mindapples, as we were able to get to the finals for the 2014 App Design Awards, with one of our happy users saying, “I’ve been using Moodbug for a couple of weeks now and I really love it. It’s a simple and friendly way to share and track your moods. I love that it lets you map your moods over time and my favourite part is the lovely little gifts you can give and receive to help a friend who’s feeling bad or celebrate with someone who is feeling good. Moodbug makes me happy. And it’s pretty too”
In order to raise awareness of the significant benefits of understanding how moods work and how important it can be to understand how those who matter to us are feeling, we asked the good folk at the Secret Garden Party to send in a text telling us how they actually feel about the Secret Garden Party. Our personal favourite being, “Like a fairy sparkling and buzzing in the pink frothy tutu of life!”
Once people had texted in, we then randomly selected 3 winners who would win, wait for it.. a haul of ‘Mind Cider!’. Below we can see Bad Apple, Daniel Kolodziej, helping one of the event attendees to pick one of our lucky winners. Thank heavens we cant see his pony tail! 🙂
After having such a fun and successful Secret Garden Party, we want to continue spreading the word about positive mental health and also hopefully get even more happy users on our new app, Moodbug. So, please visit the Moodbug website, www.moodbug.me, and even better still, download it and start sharing how you REALLY feel with those that matter to you, today!