988 STATEWIDE AWARENESS & ENGAGEMENT UPDATE — APRIL 2026
Posted by Lexicon Strategies on behalf of Georgia DBHDD | May 2026
The most important measure of a crisis line is not whether people remember its name. It is whether they reach for it when they need it. By that measure, Georgia 988 is winning. Daily contact volume into Georgia 988 and the Georgia Crisis & Access Line (GCAL) is now sitting above every prior year on record — and Georgians are showing themselves to be a population of advocates: three in four say they would recommend 988 to someone in need.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Lexicon Strategies, in collaboration with the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities (DBHDD), commissioned a statewide awareness and attitudes survey of Georgia residents through Swayable, Inc. The instrument closed on April 14, 2026, with 706 valid Georgia respondents (effective sample 604, post-stratified to U.S. Census benchmarks). The findings — read alongside Georgia's daily 988 and GCAL contact-volume data — point to a campaign that is producing the behavior it was designed to produce.
THE HEADLINE: VOLUME IS UP — THE BEHAVIOR THAT MATTERS MOST
As of April 2026, the seven-day rolling average of calls, texts, and chats into Georgia 988 and GCAL is sitting above every prior year on record. Daily contacts have hovered near 1,050–1,080 since the start of the year, comfortably above 2025's full-year trajectory and dramatically above the pre-launch baseline.
Volume is up despite a deliberate communications pause. From the March 25, 2025 migration to the new Crisis Safety Platform through stabilization in late summer 2025, Lexicon and DBHDD pulled back paid media weight to avoid driving demand into a service temporarily working through transition delays. The system held. Average speed to answer has been restored to 9–12 seconds — well inside the 30-second goal — and contact volume has climbed back above every prior year. Georgia is now operating a higher-capacity, faster-answering 988 system that more Georgians are using than ever before.
THREE IN FOUR GEORGIANS ARE READY TO RECOMMEND 988
The strongest finding in the entire survey is not about awareness — it is about advocacy.
75.1% of Georgia adults say they would recommend 988 to someone in need.
70.7% report bystander comfort — willingness to encourage another person in distress to use the service.
67.4% report personal comfort using 988 themselves.
78.6% recommend intent among women 55+ — the highest of any single segment.
Georgia has built a population of advocates, not just users. The roughly eight-point spread between recommend intent and personal comfort is consistent with the most robust pattern in the help-seeking literature — and it is precisely the dynamic the 988 program is built to leverage. The U.S. Air Force Suicide Prevention Program (Knox et al., BMJ 2003) demonstrated a 33% reduction in suicide rates by mobilizing exactly this kind of community-of-helpers. Georgia has a population that is, by its own report, even more ready.
WHERE AWARENESS IS STRONG
The audiences Lexicon and DBHDD prioritized — young adults, Latinx and AAPI Georgians, military families, urban centers — are precisely the audiences where awareness is highest.
63.8% awareness among Georgia women 18–34 — the highest of any demographic segment.
63.0% awareness among Latinx Georgians; 58.4% among Asian & Pacific Islander Georgians.
65.1% awareness among active military service members — the highest of any single segment in the survey.
14.0% of women 18–34 report having previously used 988 — more than any other segment.
The youth-forward messaging strategy, the social-first channel mix, and the partnerships with university campuses, faith communities, and Spanish-language outlets have produced measurable returns in the populations they were aimed at.
WHERE WE GO NEXT: THE SMALL-TOWN STORY
The persistent assumption that rural Georgia is the coverage gap is not what the 2026 data shows. Rural Georgia sits at the state average on awareness (49.9%), recommend intent, and bystander comfort. The gap is not rural. The gap is small-town — the dense population of Georgians who live in places of roughly 5,000–25,000 people, the county seats and small mill towns and agricultural service centers that are too connected to feel rural and too small to feel suburban.
38.6% awareness in small-town Georgia — 10.6 points below the state average.
70.3% recommend intent (4.8 points below).
62.9% bystander comfort (7.8 points below).
60.9% personal comfort (6.5 points below).
The next phase of investment should land here: a small-town-specific creative track, trusted-messenger activations through faith and education partners, and a reallocation of the channel mix toward local broadcast, weekly newspapers, and AM/FM radio.
CHANNELS: SOCIAL AND TV CARRY THE MIX
66.4% of Georgians who recall 988 information saw it on social media — the dominant channel.
53.6% recall TV.
29.0% recall healthcare provider channels — punching well above the program's clinical-setting investment, with the most consistent recall across geographic segments.
A CLEAR RUNWAY: 'NOTHING' IS THE TOP BARRIER
The single largest answer when Georgians are asked what would prevent them from calling 988 is 'nothing.' Statewide, 36.6% of adults report no barriers at all. Among Georgians 55+, 46.5% say nothing would prevent them from calling. The campaign is not selling against a wall of resistance.
The barriers that do remain are conversational, not structural — stigma (24.7%), privacy concerns (24.1%), and uncertainty about whether one's situation is 'serious enough' (23.7%). Each yields to clear messaging about confidentiality, the breadth of who 988 serves, and the legitimacy of reaching out before a crisis becomes acute.
THE VOICES OF GEORGIANS
"It was comforting and positive and clearly explained what the hotline service provides."
— Woman, 35–54, White, urban Georgia
"They make me feel safe to reach out for help if I ever need it."
— Woman, 18–34, White, suburban Georgia, active military service member
"It shows that no matter what someone is going through there is a confidential and 24-hour service to get help."
— Woman, 35–54, Black, urban Georgia
"It's a great thing to help people during crisis and it's confidential. … This is a great thing that helps a lot of people."
— Woman, 55+, White, suburban Georgia
STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE NEXT PHASE
Anchor on volume, not awareness, as the campaign's primary KPI. Contact volume per capita is the load-bearing measurement and the metric that most directly reflects mission impact.
Close the small-town gap. A purpose-built creative cut paired with concentrated trusted-messenger activations, addressing roughly 13% of the state population at the lowest awareness levels in the survey.
Reframe 988 as a wellness resource, not only a crisis line. A wellness-and-early-intervention message track would directly address the 'serious enough' soft barrier and broaden appeal beyond crisis framing.
Operationalize the advocate population. Three in four Georgians say they will recommend 988. The next phase should include a deliberate advocate-activation stream — trained-volunteer programming, a 'tell-a-friend' digital toolkit, employer-partner playbooks, and a faith-community outreach kit.
A NOTE ON AWARENESS NUMBERS
The 2026 Swayable read of statewide 988 awareness — 48.7% — is materially lower than the 84.7% reported in Lexicon's July 2024 Statewide Awareness Survey. That movement is real, but it is not what it appears to be at first glance. Three factors explain the gap, and only one of them is about awareness on the ground: the question wording is tighter (and methodologically closer to NAMI's national 67% benchmark than to the broad 2024 framing); the panel and vendor are different (Swayable vs. SurveyMonkey); and most importantly the field period followed a deliberate paid-media pause through the CSP migration. Behavior — daily contact volume — is up. That is the load-bearing measurement.
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Prepared by Lexicon Strategies on behalf of the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities. Find the right thing. Then do it right. Plan. Partner. Program. Prove.™
