No Limits Media

Fellow: Gabby Guzzardo

Team: Jamie Fruncillo, Lily Mcstravick, Natalie Nevins

Community Partner

No Limits Media is a non-profit organization based out of Boston, Massachusetts. The organization works to provide equal opportunities to people with disabilities by giving them a platform. According to the CDC, 61 million adults live with disabilities everyday. However these people are underrepresented and often deal with inequality because of the lack of education in society. No Limits Media acts as an advocate for the disabled community and educator to society to amplify experiences for those with different abilities. Through their social media, podcasts and fundraising they strive to grant people with different abilities the opportunity to share their stories, and expand the knowledge surrounding the community of people with different abilities as a whole. The overall goal of No Limits Media is to unpack legislation and laws specifically connected to people with different abilities in order to change accessibility and inclusion at work.

Design Question

The overarching design question for our project asks how we create an inclusive social media campaign to increase the social presence for No Limits Media. Additionally, it focuses on raising awareness and creating opportunity for the disability community, while simultaneously proposing a strong fundraising plan for the organization.Together with our community partner we have discussed the importance of increasing No Limits Media’s entire social media presence in order to increase their views, which in turn led to the creation of our design question. As a result, the majority of our work done in this project focuses on improving No Limits Media’s presence on social media. In order to do so, we have created an editorial calendar with monthly topics for posts. To address the issue our design question asked, we have created different posts and story templates as well as new story highlights and highlight covers, to help increase engagement across the board for No Limits Media’s social platforms. As a team we have also discussed different potential methods of fundraising to raise money for No Limits Media, which addresses the second component of our initial design question.

Strategic Thinking

Over the course of the semester we want to shed light on No Limits Media and help improve their social media presence to highlight the extraordinary work they are doing within the disabled community. They have the largest presence on their Instagram account, so our thought process was to focus on that area. We looked at the social media for other nonprofits that had similar ideas to ours and looked at what worked and what did not work for them. We created a calendar to allow us to stay organized and work collaboratively with our community partner. This calendar enabled our partner to look at what we were creating and make sure that we all kept our ideas aligned. Along with the calendar, we designed and plugged in templates for social media posts that are readily available for use when No Limits Media feels necessary throughout the year. We met with our community partner every two weeks to go over what had been accomplished so far and what still needed to be worked on for the remaining weeks. No Limits Media creates a positive difference in their community and we want to get their mission out to others by creating informative media posts, posting about season two of their podcast, and highlighting peoples past experience with the non-profit.

Co-Creation

Throughout the duration of our project we have worked very closely with our community partner No Limits Media, in order to co-create knowledge together. Throughout the semester, we regularly met to gain a wider understanding of No Limits Media’s “why”, in order to provide a purpose and intention behind all of the specific work that we were going to be doing. Lexi Mignona, the Director of Social Media and Fundraising at No Limits Media, was a former fellow with the Beautiful Social Collaborative which helped lead her to her position at No Limits Media. Her previous experience as a fellow allowed for her to relate and deeply understand what it is we do in the collaborative, which fostered a great relationship between our group and everyone we worked together with at No Limits Media. Lexi was very eager to utilize our time together while meeting to help all of us understand her vision. From these meetings, we were able to grasp a hold of exactly what No Limits Media envisioned of our work, as well as the type of content we would be creating for them. As a result, the templates and posts we went on to design were entirely reflective of both the mission statement of No Limits Media, as well as their personal goals and visions for their social media accounts.

Results

No Limits Media is a small non-profit organization focusing on the education surrounding the reality of living with different abilities. Many of the people behind this organization are working other jobs and have other commitments along with No Limits Media. Their time is very limited and oftentimes they become over tasked and cannot complete all the work they desire to be done for the organization. We are dedicated to helping with tasks, whether big or small, that can improve the organization. This is through work like an editorial calendar for the year, individual posts, and fundraising. Access to these assets allows for a boost in engagement and possibilities to reach an even broader audience, growing the No Limits Media community. From the work we have done, the No Limits Media social accounts have become much more active by posting more frequently, and have a uniform look that is up to date and aesthetically pleasing.