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Background - Writing a brief

Involve disabled people to help you incorporate images of disability in your brief

 

If you want to include disability in a campaign, it's important to stick firmly to your communication objective and not get distracted by trying to fit disability into it.

The challenge is to incorporate images of disability as part of normal life, in the same way we approach reflecting gender and ethnicity. The examples in the section on advertising show how this can be done.

Communicators often feel uncertain about including disabled people in their products but it has been done successfully many times, adding impact.

Communicators are also often anxious about getting it wrong, getting complaints or that using a disabled person will undermine the effectiveness of the communication.

Involving disabled people - via focus groups or in other ways - will give you important feedback on whether it works.

You may get the odd complaint. That's life. Don't let that tame your creativity or that of your agents. Acknowledge the complaint, consider its merits and feed back any useful learning to the team to inform future work.

For practical tips, visit the top tips section of this guidance.

For other information resources, go to the resources section of this guidance.

Page last reviewed: 11 August 2008

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