STUDY PROTOCOL Open Access The PRINTEMPS study: protocol of a cluster- randomized controlled trial of the local promotion of a smartphone application and associated website for the prevention of suicidal behaviors in the adult general population in France Coralie Gandré 1 , Anaïs Le Jeannic 1,2 , Marie-Amélie Vinet 1,2 , Kathleen Turmaine 1 , Philippe Courtet 3,4 , Jean-Luc Roelandt 1,5 , Guillaume Vaiva 6,7 , Bruno Giraudeau 8,9 , Corinne Alberti 1,10 and Karine Chevreul 1,2* Abstract Background: Suicide constitutes a cause of death which could be prevented by e-health programs accessible to the general population. Effective promotion has the potential to maximize the uptake of such programs. However, few e-health programs have been combined with promotion campaigns. The primary objective of this trial is to assess the effectiveness of a tailored promotion, at a local level, of a mobile application and website offering evidence-based content for suicide prevention (the StopBlues program), and to compare the effectiveness of two types of local promotion in terms of their impact on suicidal acts. Secondary objectives focus on the effectiveness of the promotion in terms of the intensity of utilization of the StopBlues program, help-seeking behaviors and the level of psychological impairment of program users. Methods/design: This is a three-arm, parallel-group, cluster-randomized controlled trial, with before-and-after observation. Thirty-four clusters, corresponding to geographical areas sharing a common local authority in France, will be included. They will be randomly assigned to one of the following arms with a ratio of 1:1:1: a control group; a basic promotion group in which promotion of the StopBlues program will be done by local authorities; and an intensified promotion group in which basic promotion will be supplemented by an additional one in a general practitioner’s waiting room. The primary outcome measure will be the number of suicidal acts within each cluster over a 12-month period following the launch of the intervention. Baseline data will be collected for each cluster over the 12-month period prior to the trial. Secondary outcomes will include length of use of the StopBlues program, measures of help-seeking behaviors and level of psychological distress among users of the program, as (Continued on next page) © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. * Correspondence: karine.chevreul@urc-eco.fr 1 Université de Paris, Unité UMR 1123 ECEVE, INSERM, Paris, France 2 Health Economics Clinical Research Platform (URC Eco), AP-HP, 1 Place du Parvis Notre-Dame, 75004 Paris, France Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Gandré et al. Trials (2020) 21:553 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13063-020-04464-2