OUR HISTORY

The Mental Health Marketing Conference was started by Austin Harrison back in 2016. Almost a decade later we still find ourselves as a company benefiting from his founder vision when he looked into the mental health, marketing vertical nearly a decade ago.

Austin launched the inaugural mental health marketing conference in 2016. He likes to tell the story that two weeks before the event only 12 people were signed up and most of them were his friends and family. However, he leaned into the Nashville community and more than 100 people showed up for that first event.

CEO and Executive Director Steve Turney got involved in late 2018 when Austin and Steve partnered together on the 2019 conference at the lovely Noah Liff Opera Center in Nashville, Tennessee. The event continued to grow and attract high quality presenters, panelists and sponsors.

In 2020 Austin and Steve pivoted to a virtual conference in light of the challenges surrounding Covid and in person events. More than 700 people registered for the conference.

The conference was postponed in 2021 as Austin stepped out of the organization and handed the torch to Steve for the next season of the conference.

2022 was the conference’s Phoenix Rising Moment, as Steve describes it, at the Riverside Revival in East Nashville, Tennessee. More than 200 people showed up for the event.

In 2023 the conference outgrew that space and moved to the Factory at Franklin, TN, twenty miles south of Nashville. More than 300 people attended. The venue was so suitable and scalable for the conference, that the team, which included Daniele Kimes, Rosemary Radford and Shayna Vance, hosted the eighth annual conference again at the factory in Franklin, with an additional stage at Harbor + Union on the same campus. More than 400 people attended the event. 

In 2025, the Factory at Franklin and Harbor + Union are once again the home venues for the event. More than 500 people are expected to attend.

And the 2025 event, like the 2024 event, will be produced by TURN.Productions, an event planning, production and promotion company born from our collective experiences gleaned from running the Mental Health Marketing Conference.