Vision for Equality
Social Media Campaign
Community Partner
Vision For Equality is a nonprofit organization that works with individuals with disabilities and their families to assist and empower each individual as they seek equal access to supports and services. Vision For Equality was founded by two women; Audrey Coccia and Maureen Devaney created VFE in 1996 with the goal of redefining societies’ understanding and support for people with disabilities and their families’ experience in the community. They work to find avenues of support for people with autism and varying disabilities.
Challenge
Our design question is as follows: “What is an effective Giving Tuesday campaign, and how can we use one to spread awareness and inspire a demographic that includes younger people and especially young parents to connect with VFE’s mission?” Giving Tuesday is a worldwide day of giving movement that takes place the Tuesday after Thanksgiving and is rooted in generosity. It encourages people to “do good,” get involved in the community and donate to various organizations and nonprofits. After conducting our research on the effectiveness of Giving Tuesday campaigns, we created a series of posts that rely on pathos and empathy in order to appeal to a generation of younger parents.
In discussing the social media campaign with our community partner, there was a specific idea that stuck with our team. We discussed that parents of people with disabilities often have no map or guide for how their life will go, whereas other parents tend to have some understanding of a template for the lives of their children. In addition, many parents worry about who will take care of their children once they are no longer able to. With this in mind, we created a Giving Tuesday campaign in the form of a map to emphasize this idea. This content ranged from information on Vision For Equality and their mission to posts that counted down to Giving Tuesday, all the while attempting to weave a through-line that connected each post back to the organization’s mission and purpose. Our intention in using these strategies was to explain to Vision For Equality’s following the importance of the organization’s purpose, and therefore the importance of donating on Giving Tuesday so that their work to create spaces for all can continue.
Solution
Through our understanding of various studies and research, we were able to generate strategies to connect with Vision For Equality’s audience in an impactful, impassioned way. We were inspired by strategies that elicit empathy and ultimately create a feeling of emotional connectedness to viewers. In “Empathy is the Key to Great Marketing Campaigns”, Abhilash Patel stressed the idea of “writing what you know”; understanding what kind of marketing pulls an emotional response from us personally and comparing it to a campaign’s goals.
To implement that into our marketing plan successfully, we found it to be fit that we thoroughly evaluate the emotional motivators a supporter of Vision For Equality would have. Walking in the target audience’s shoes, we determined that focusing on the lives of families and people being supported by Vision For Equalities programs would be the best way to sell the idea of helping. In addition, because we were creating content for social media, we needed to understand the different dimensions of storytelling that varies for each platform. Through these ideas, we were able to construct a campaign to not only reach the largest audience possible but prompt them to unite around the primary goal of creating support and awareness for those with disabilities.
Results
Throughout this semester, our team created 18 posts for Vision for Equality in addition to our Giving Tuesday Campaign. Our posts consisted of a Giving Tuesday Countdown, general information about VFE, specific programming that they support, and various resources. We were able to use existing information from the VFE website to create our posts. We felt that there are so many resources for information on their website and we wanted to make sure that followers on Facebook had access to the information as well.
For our Giving Tuesday Campaign we created a map graphic. Our map pieces together six individual posts to create one large map graphic. In learning about Vision for Equality’s mission, we learned that for families and parents of people with disabilities, there is often not a clear map for the future of their children or loved ones. The resources and programs that Vision For Equality supports and creates are ones that support families as they create their own map for their loved one as they work to create a future without uncertainty or worry. Our goal in creating this map was to have six individual posts consisting of different pieces of the map to be posted each day leading up to Giving Tuesday.
