Ohio Department of Taxation employees interact on occasion with taxpayers who express suicidal ideations or threaten self harm. This project focused on developing instructional materials for our customer service agents - especially those on the phones - on how to direct taxpayers to the lifeline.
The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is a national resource that has free resources available for developing educational materials. I was able to draw on many of these resources to quickly turn out a video that reflected the specific needs and context of the Department of Taxation. Many of the silhouetted figures were assets I downloaded from their site and supplemented with stock photos and videos from Adobe. I then carried the silhouette theme into Vyond to create the animated call center employee and distressed taxpayers.
In addition to working with stakeholders who helped write the script for the video, I reached out to department employees who had direct experience working on the phone and interacting with distressed taxpayers. From this, I was able to add authentic examples of language they had encountered during calls with taxpayers. These examples appear early in the video.
The project sponsors wanted a quick reference tool for the department's call center agents who were most likely to encounter distressed taxpayers. I developed this handout to highlight language agents should use to guide the taxpayers to the 988 lifeline. This handout also features a silhouette figure and the red asterisk that I was able to pull directly from the 988 media kit.