A multi-method approach to planning a webinar series for young people and their caregivers accessing mental health and substance use health services

Young people and their caregivers often encounter barriers to both awareness of and access to mental health and substance use health (MHSUH) services. Webinars represent an effective yet underutilized approach for delivering actionable, accessible, and stigma-reducing content to support help-seeking. We describe a multi-method planning process for developing a user-centered and evidence-informed webinar series aimed at improving MHSUH awareness and access among young people and caregivers. Five complementary methods informed the planning process: an environmental scan, Intervention Mapping (IM), virtual advisory council consultations, an online survey, and a virtual workshop with young people and caregivers. While each method contributed distinct insights, IM served as the integrative backbone, organizing findings from all methods within a coherent theoretical structure and aligning evidence, theory, and community input toward intervention design. An adapted help-seeking model and a logic model guided the structure and content of the series. Key findings identified help-seeking as a priority and under addressed topic, with young people and caregivers emphasizing interactivity, lived expertise and storytelling, practical navigation-focused content, and inclusive, culturally responsive design. The integration of complementary methods provided breadth and depth across the planning process, while the iterative and participatory approach ensured planning decisions were progressively refined and grounded in the perspectives of the intended audience. This study demonstrates the value of a multi-method approach to intervention planning, showing how diverse inputs produce more comprehensive, credible, and responsive decisions than any single method alone. It contributes a transparent and replicable model that may inform future MHSUH initiatives and similar efforts.