1 session inside Boa
Milly Bannister
Founder, Allkind
Milly Bannister is the founder of Allkind, a social enterprise and charity redefining how young people experience and talk about mental health. She studied journalism in Brisbane, moved into media and comms, spent an exchange year in California and built a personal brand during the early travel-blogger era of Instagram, before starting Allkind around COVID and running it for almost five years. Allkind's free peer-to-peer Mental Health First Aid training, Good Mate, was developed with educational psychologists who sit on its board and is backed by a university.
The session
What Milly teaches
Ask your youngest customers for a feed tour
Milly hosted two 15-year-old work experience students for two days and used the time to ask a million questions, listen to how they spoke, and get a tour of what was actually showing up on their algorithm. Her rule: if you are targeting young people, hire young people, and if you are targeting new mums, hire a mum. There is no point guessing when your customer is sitting right there and usually happy to tell you.
From Milly Bannister: storytelling, Gen Z and founder burnout →Run customer calls about the brand, not just the product
Milly pointed to Davey from Boring Without You Skincare, who runs calls with customers who want to give feedback. Not about the formulations, which are already sorted, but about the brand and the way it speaks to people. Ask questions you cannot guess the answer to, like whether they want the newsletter the day before a launch or on launch day.
From Milly Bannister: storytelling, Gen Z and founder burnout →Co-create the joke instead of borrowing it
Big brands come off cringe when they use Gen Z language without knowing where the meme came from or being in on the joke. Milly's point: young people are marketing machines who create culture themselves, so the brands that land are co-creating culture with their demographic rather than tapping into it after the fact. She named Rhode by Hailey Bieber as the extreme example of a brand creating culture rather than chasing it.
From Milly Bannister: storytelling, Gen Z and founder burnout →Stop pushing uphill on a channel that will not open
Allkind's training is built by educational psychologists and backed by a university, but schools kept rejecting the direct language around self-harm and panic attacks. Rather than keep selling to principals, Milly dropped that channel and went straight to social media, where a single video reaches thousands of young people and the tone lands better because the context suits it. If a gatekeeper keeps saying no, check whether you can reach the end user directly.
From Milly Bannister: storytelling, Gen Z and founder burnout →
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Session notes are free. The recordings, the live advisories and the founders in the room are for members.