Objective Zero App

Objective Zero Co-founder Chris Mercado has over 20 years of military service in the U.S. Army infantry. Over the years Chris has lost several of his peers and former soldiers to suicide. Chris was inspired to act after he had a 6 hour long call that saved the life of a friend and fellow veteran. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of South Dakota and completed his Master of Arts at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He is a General Wayne A. Downing Scholar of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, is a military fellow of the College of William and Mary, and a national security fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Chris deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, and the West Bank. 

We combat the suicide within the military community by enhancing user social connectedness, improving access to free and low-cost mental health care, and enhancing access to wellness and resilience resources. We accomplish this using mobile app technology to provide access to a peer support network available via voice, video, and text. Unfortunately, many veterans struggle to maintain social connectivity when leaving the military which, according to the VA, is a key precipitating factor in veteran suicide. Our app provides veterans and their families access to tools, training, and resources to enhance their health and holistic wellbeing. We work to raise awareness of the issue of suicide in the military community, while combating harmful stereotypes and stigmas associated with seeking help. We believe that the Objective Zero App can benefit other vulnerable and at risk populations across the world though the simple act of listening.

Approximately 20 veterans die by suicide everyday, a rate that is nearly twice that of civilians. This was not always the case. Before 2000, suicide among military members was lower than the general population, but the rate of suicide more than doubled between 2003-2012. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, and rates of suicide have been steadily climbing over the last decade. While no single cause, a number of factors that contribute to suicide, include unemployment, homelessness, lack of social connection, access to lethal means, and poor well-being. 

Post-9/11 veterans often re-enter a community that does not share their military cultural identity and may not see the value in their service and often face a harder time finding employment after the military, and mental health diagnoses are especially high compared to veterans of prior generations. The Veterans Administration reports that 53% of military members have mental health diagnoses; over 17,000 service members are diagnosed with PTSD every year. Many veterans do not seek any treatment. One study showing 60% of military personnel who experience mental health problems do not seek help, and that stigma for receiving treatment is one frequently reported barrier.

The Objective Zero App aims to combat veteran suicide by anonymously connecting service members, veterans, their families and caregivers to a nationwide network of trained peer and civilian support Ambasadors via text, voice, and video chat. App users who are seeking support can filter through our network of Ambassadors to find meaningful connections by age, gender, branch of service, component, military occupational specialty, service academy attended, and campaign served in. Users may not want to filter through the network and can contact the first available Ambassador at the push of a button. Those that are in crisis can connect to the Veterans Crisis Line or 911 instantly, without having to dial any number.

The Objective Zero App links to a number of curated and accessible wellness resources, tools, and training that users can access on their own. This includes yoga and meditation content specifically designed for the veteran and military community, opportunities for care from treatment facilities to wellness retreats, as well as connection to other partners and vetearn nonprofits providing a variety of services from financial support to jiu jitsu and surfing activities. Users are building their own resilience and improving their overall well-being by engaging with the app.

We serve veterans, service members of all branches on active or reserve status,  officers-in-training (ROTC, service academies, cadet corps), military family members, and caregivers. There are over 18 million veterans in the United States, 2.1 million people serving in the military, and an additional 2.6 million family members. Research suggests that military members who are at the highest risk are those who have seen combat, are retiring or reaching the end of active duty, and older veterans reaching late life. 

We understand the military community as our team is all connected to it. We developed an in-app survey to get feedback from our users and Ambassadors after the completion of a connection as part of the CDC and CDC Foundation’s Veteran Suicide Prevention Demonstration Project and program evaluation. We have also conducted additional survey and phone interviews to better understand how people are using the app, what is working, and what needs improvement.  This feedback helps us ensure that we are addressing the needs of our users and volunteers. We have been able to develop new features within the app based on user feedback and will continue to update the app to include additional evidence-based and informed tools.

Our project relates to the dimensions of building awareness and driving action to solve the most difficult problems of our world and the understanding of and between people through changing people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. We are moving away from building awareness of veteran suicide and taking action by using technology as a tool to prevent suicide by connecting the community to support and resources. We also focus on changing the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors through training that dispel stigmas of seeking help, the issue of suicide, and the actions that can be taken to prevent suicide. 

In 2014, Justin Miller was struggling with the transition out of the military. Medically retired after serving 12 years as an infantry soldier, Justin was dealing with medical issues including post traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. After several nights of getting only a few hours of sleep due to nightmares, he reached his breaking point and was ready to take his life. The only thing that stopped him was that he didn't want to wake his wife by loading his weapon. He reached out for help and couldn't get an appointment for 2 days. Within a matter of minutes of hanging up the phone, Chris Mercado, a former platoon leader, called Justin, as he recognized signs on social media that Justin was struggling. This 6+ hour phone call would change both of their lives and sparked the idea that the simple act of listening can save the lives of veterans. After the call between Chris and Justin, they assembled a team to help them launch the Objective Zero Foundation. In addition to Chris and Justin, this team included Ryan Pereira, Blake Bassett, Kayla Bassett, Betsey Mercado, and Amy Eastman.

Our team is motivated to combat suicide in the miltary community because we have each been affected by suicide, losing more of our people to suicide than to combat. Our personal connection to the issue is what makes us committed to doing whatever we can do to support others before they hit that moment of crisis. It’s important that the military community has access to the resources and support they need at the moment they are needed. We have seen the impact veteran suicide has on their family and do not want anyone else experiencing it. Every one suicide impacts, on average, more than 130 people. So many people are impacted by suicide and every suicide prevented is impacting over 100 people.

After a suicide, survivers often wonder what more could have been done to prevent it and what signs they missed. We have the ability to teach others what signs to look for through our Ambassador program while actively solving the problem. We have seen the impact that our organization has had and know that what we’re doing is working, which drives us to work harder to reach and support more service members, veterans, family members and caregivers.

Our accomplishments speak to our ability to deliver results. Since 2016, we have created a global peer support program of over 1,950 volunteers, in all 50 states and in over 20 countries across the globe. We’ve partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide suicide prevention training, organizations like PsychArmor Institute for additional training for our volunteers and Give an Hour to provide free ongoing mental health care for our users. We also have a proven track record for generating income. We launched a successful Kickstarter campaign, raising nearly $40,000 to build our app. We followed that with extensive media exposure, through recognition as a Fast Company World Changing Idea Finalist in 2018 and being featured in Inc. 5000, Military Times, CNN, Mashable, Delta Sky Magazine, and the Today Show. 

We participated in the Fast Forward Accelerator, raising funds and establishing connections with Silicon Valley’s top foundations and companies and recently completed the Visible Connect Accelerator, connecting with mentors, tools, and resources to create additional impact for our users. We were just selected as a CTIA Wireless Foundation Catalyst Grant Winner for our work using mobile technology and currently participating in the Veteran Suicide Prevention Demonstration Project with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and CDC Foundation. With the support of CDC experts in program evaluation and suicide prevention, we were able to build the capacity to develop and start implementing our own program evaluation plan.

Our team began its first round of fundraising in December of 2016 using the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. We had one month to achieve our fundraising goal of $35,000, the minimum amount we needed to develop our minimally viable product. We opted to go with the all-or-nothing campaign, believing that we would be able to reach our goal quickly. Although we met with initial success, reaching $17,000 of our goal rather quickly, we quickly plateaued and started to get really concerned that we would not reach our fundraising goal. As every day passed without notable movement in our campaign we realized that we needed to change our strategy. Realizing that we had not marketed ourselves well, we reached out to a series of veteran and military related Podcasts to heighten awareness of our fundraising campaign and our use of technology to combat military suicides. By approaching these podcasts, we were able to communicate to a variety of military related communities, engaging on a subject that resonated with our community. This change in our approach succeeded, taking us beyond our fundraising objectives and generating the momentum we needed to build our beta and first version of our mobile application.

In addition to co-founding and guiding the Objective Zero Foundation, I have extensive military leadership experience, having led two infantry platoons and commanded three infantry companies. As a platoon leader and commander, I was responsible for the health, welfare, training and safety of between 36 and 300 soldiers, having led most of them into combat zones around the world. As a company commander of B Company, 2-18 Infantry, I led my company to establish Combat Outpost Fortitude, the first company outpost in North Afghanistan’s province of Imam Sahib. From this outpost, my company led counterinsurgency operations, connecting with the populace and identifying sources of instability and remediating their grievances. Working with local leaders, we successfully defeated the Taliban and other armed groups in our district and expanded our influence into the neighboring district of Dast-e Archii. As another example, co-founding and leading operations for Objective Zero, I recognized that the simple act of listening can save lives and that we could use technology to save veteran and military lives. Consequently I recruited a team of friends and comrades to collaborate and launch our non-profit organization to save military lives. 

Technology and people are in our DNA. We crowdsource peer support and leverage technology to deliver tools, training, and resources to combat the spiral into depression and suicide. We reach users where they are, connecting them through text, voice, or video chat to our Ambassador network instantly and anonymously. Our app is free to download and use. Our app offers mindfulness, meditation, and yoga content and suicide prevention training to aid in wellness to build resilience. Our solution is innovative in its upstream approach to preventing suicide, its use of filters to increase the probability of a meaningful connection, and our use of technology to deliver support and resources at the point of need. Our users do not need to know a number for a crisis hotline to connect to lifesaving support; our peer supporters are available at the touch of a button. 

While conventional crisis hotlines existed long before we developed our mobile app, we distinguish ourselves from them in several key respects. First, we allow our users to apply filters to our network of peer supporters, allowing them to sort through Ambassadors  to find their most likely meaningful match. With conventional crisis hotlines, an at-risk individual is connected to whomever picks up the line, but there is no guarantee that they have anything in common. We used technology to deliver a shortcut to trust, ensuring that our users are connected to a peer supporter who has a similar background and experience, increasing the likelihood of a meaningful connection.

Funding, partners, technology, and volunteers allows us to engage in activities to include outreach, Ambassador training, connection between users and Ambassadors through the Objective Zero App, connection mental health and wellness tools, training, and resources, dissemination of caring messages, and partnership building.

Outputs include the number of community members reached and how many that download the app, and the number of app users, Ambassadors trained, users connected to peer support, and users engaging in texts, voice, and video connections, resources, and caring messages. 

Our short term goals include an increase in community awareness of veteran suicide, user awarness of mental health and wellness resources, an increase in the user belief that both resources and caring messages will help. Our medium term goals include an increase in user sense of wellbeing, use of relevant resources, social connectedness for both our users and Ambassadors, sense of community, and offerings of support and a decrease in barriers to users receiving care. Our long term goals include an increase in wellness skills for our users, and decreases in burden on crisis response systems due to our upstream approach and user suicidal ideation and attempts. Our impact over the two years and beyond includes an increase in resilience within the military and veteran community and a decrease in the rates of suicide within these communities.

One factor for overcoming barriers to seeking care for military members was having family and friends strongly encourage soldiers to get help. Similar findings suggest that social support could explain how individuals who are disinclined to seek help subsequently seek help. Research demonstrates that peer supporters may improve connectedness by providing emotional support, decreasing loneliness and stigma, and facilitate improved relationships with others and that peer support improves hope and connectedness. Research on veterans with PTSD  has shown that veterans who are recommended to engage in therapy from a peer are more likely to start therapy than those who received a recommendation from a medical professional. Peers also were able to help veterans practice coping mechanisms learned in therapy, helping bridge the gap between knowledge and acquired skills.

To date, the Objective Zero App has supported nearly 9,000 users and trained over 1,900 peer and civilian support suicide prevention Ambassadors. In the next year, we anticipate serving 25,000 users and in five years, our goal is to serve 125,000 users.

Over the course of the next year we seek to scale our user base to 25,000 users. To accomplish this, and achieve the impact we hope to achieve, we need to develop and deploy new evidence-based and evidence-informed tools using technology as our mechanism of delivery. 

The benefit of using technology is our ability to measure app usage over time, from how our users are engaging in the app, how often they are using it, and using surveying tools to get a sense of outcomes, impact, and the opportunity for them to solicit feedback. The intended impact would be to create tools that bring our users into the app daily, as part of their routine to build upon their own self-awareness and recovery, and to receive peer support as needed. This also offers our organization the insights on what resources we need to build to promote resilience.

In the next five years, our goal is to connect over 125,000 service members, veterans, family members, and caregivers to peer support and tools, training, and resources to increase the resilience of the military community while meaningfully and measurably reducing the incidence of veteran and military suicides. 

We have learned through experience that there are numerous factors and risks that may affect our successful implementation of this project. Development frequently takes longer than estimated, testing and evaluation are more challenging than expected, and cost overruns may necessitate sacrificing some development priorities over others. Although time is of the essence and the deployment of these tools is necessary to make a meaningful impact on combating suicide in the military community, we value the development of consistently reliable and consistently effective tools over less reliable solutions deployed in haste. We do not rush to failure, but devote all the time necessary to delivery of evidence-based tools that function, consistently and effectively, for our users.

We have to keep funds coming in so that we can facilitate the connections between our growing user and Ambassador base, keep the app updated, and add in additional features to meet the needs of our users. We look to bring on a paid staff to support our growth and strategy. As we grow, so do our costs.

We may also face some issues as we license our app and build that revenue stream, which include cultural, financial, legal, and technical barriers.

We plan to overcome our barriers by working together with partners to bring relevant and appropriate resources to our users, by working with our pro-bono law firm to ensure that we maintain compliance with all applicable laws and regulations concerning the health, wellness, and privacy of our users and Ambassadors, and by working through our developers to ensure our mobile app can consistently and effectively deliver results for our users by providing them access to instant and anonymous peer support and wellness resources. Moving forward, we seek to diversify our revenue streams, integrating white labeling / licensing to give us more flexibility and move us away from individual donors. This will help us to become more sustainable in the long term and allow us to grow into a professional organization with paid staff members. 

We understand the importance partnering with the right organizations to advance our mission of combating suicide in the military community. Our current partners include the VA, PsychArmor Institute, Give an Hour,  Vets4Warriors, Crisis Text Line, Comeback Yoga, PTSD Foundation of America, and Lemonade. The VA provides us with training, experts, and outreach to the veterans within their care. PsychArmor Institute has provided us with most of our Ambassador training, which allows us to support our users. This training includes how to connect with veterans, determine their suicide risk with the Columbia Scale, and better understand the issues of sucide, moral injuy, service-connected issues like post traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries.

We operate on an upstream approach and in the event that our users need access to professional support or a higher level of support, we can connect them to the Veterans Crisis Line, Vets4Warriors, or the Crisis Text Line for crisis support or to Give an Hour which provides free mental health care for the military and veteran community. Comeback Yoga provides our users with free, trauma and evidence informed yoga content, specifically designed for veterans. We also partner with other vetean nonprofits such as PTSD Foundation of America to connect our users to their services specifically for combat veterans and they in turn share our resource with their program participants. We also partner with companies such as Lemonade, which provide us with financial support. Lemonade allows their policyholders to donate unclaimed premiums to nonprofits like Objective Zero.

Objective Zero operates on a get support, give support model, providing a free tool for our users to connect to support and resources or provide support and resources. We leverage technology to reach users wherever they are, as service members, veterans, and their families are located all over the world. Through research, we learned that a lack of social connectedness and access to resource are two factors that relate to suicide. Through our app users can build relationships and reconnect with their ‘tribe’. 

We offer access to our technology to users for free, harnessing the power of peer support Ambassadors in a volunteer capacity. As a small non-profit organization, we maintain our business viability through the generous donations of individual donors, corporate and government grants, and by leveraging the power of our relationships with partners. 

We have been very successful in raising money through individual donors to date. As we grow, so do the backend costs to support the app and user activity. We believe a combination of grants, individual and corporate donors, and app licensing will help us cover all of Objective Zero's expenses. Through white labeling/licensing, we will strip all military related content, imagery, and resources from the Objective Zero App and allow other organizations to license the technology to support other vulnerable and at-risk communities with a monthly or yearly licensing fee.

Most of our funds prior to 2020 came from individual donors, but we understand that it is not sustainable. In late 2019 we changed our fundraising strategy to focus on corporate and government grants and simultaneously began working to create recurring revenue streams. In the last 12 months, we have fundraised over $380,000 to include $150,000 from Twilio.org/Tide Foundation, $100,000 from CTIA Wireless Foundation, $50,000 from the CDC Foundation, $16,667 from Visible Connect, and the rest coming from individual donors, employee matching programs, and small corporate and foundation donations.

We are working to license and white label the Objective Zero App so that other at-risk and vulnerable populations can benefit from our technology and peer support. This will allow us to remain focused on our own mission while being able to support other communities that face high rates of suicide. The Connecting With Our Youth project is one example of our licensing projects, connecting Native American youth in a specific geographic area to connect with community support using our technology, stripping away any military content, resources, and imagery and replacing it with culturally relevant and age appropriate resources and support to prevent suicide within their community.

Over the next three years, we seek to raise $1.55 million to reach our goal of connecting 75,000 users to peer support and resources. We believe a combination of grants, individual donors, and licensing revenue will help us reach that goal. 

Our estimated expenses for 2020 are approximately $285,000. This includes fixed expenses such as app maintenance, business expenses, and app development totalling $165,000 and variable expenses to support the backend of our app, Ambassador training program, and program evaluation of $120,000.

We are applying for The Elevate Prize because although veterans make up merely a minority percentage of Americans, they are dying of suicide at a rate twice that of non-veterans and because existing solutions by themselves have proven insufficient at achieving functional zero, or the point at which military service is no longer a distinguishing characteristic of suicide. The Elevate Prize will electrify our impact and help us to overcome organizational barriers that prevent us from scaling our services to meet a greater population of the military community.

We are always looking for support and partnerships that help us with our mission of combating suicide within the military community. Mentors that can aid us in determining licensing arrangements to build a revenue stream, those with experience in technology and nonprofit legal matters, program evaluation, as well as marketing will help us reach our goals. 

We look to partner with the Department of Defense and other organizations that work with service members and veterans. We have a great relationship and community partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs and see value in working with the DoD to prevent losing more service members to suicide. Having the support of the DoD will help us support more active duty service members to raise awareness of our app, especially as they transition out of the military. Sharing our resource with transitioning service members will save lives.