Challenge & Opportunity

How to promote inclusion across diverse geographies and languages? Turn to Special Olympics Youth Leaders for energy, drive, and insight.

Many people with disabilities aren't included in facets of everyday life – from employment to friendships. Special Olympics Youth Leaders are finding ways to bring positive change to their communities by promoting inclusion. Microsoft provided grants to specific Youth Leaders and athletes to use technology to make their local communities more inclusive. These stories needed to be gathered and shared – as their potential ripple effect was significant and meaningful. But how to gather stories in multiple languages, across multiple continents, in ways that threaded together universal themes of inclusion, with the intimate and local nature of the projects they were leading?

Solutions & Outcomes

Let the story makers do the story telling.

Working across a number of partners, Formative created a multichannel global campaign to tell the story of each leader and athlete pair – inspiring a broad audience, including their peers, to include people with disabilities.

A collection of videos brought the stories to life and paid off the campaign theme – inclusion takes heart. Individual teams from 5 countries explained their projects in 2-minute stories. Shorter videos for social channels elevated their voices and allowed them to share what inclusion means to them – helping create a sense of connection with their peers online and sparking a two-way conversation.

The paid media plan targeted young adults on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.