Overview.

The PR & communications industry is rightly focused on diversity and inclusion, but our work often excludes a community of over one billion people. To address this, Current Global is on a long-term mission to instigate positive change on behalf of every person with a disability who is ignored and excluded by design or by default.

Our goal: close the disability inclusion gap with an industry-changing initiative to make communications accessible for all.

Challenge.

Every day, content is published that’s inaccessible to many and campaigns are launched that aren’t designed to be inclusive to people of all abilities.

According to the World Health Organization, over a billion people have some form of disability. That’s 15% of the world’s population. In addition, with an ageing population, more than 2 billion people will need at least one assistive communication, memory or hearing aid in the next 10 years. And this group also happens to be the one group that anyone can join at any time in their lives. 

Yet, brands exclude them through inaccessible communications. So how do we get the communications industry to be more inclusive?

Insight.

From a moral standpoint, the argument in favor of accessible communications is hard to ignore. One in eight of the world’s population has some form of disability, with millions having significant difficulties in day-to-day life. As communicators, we believe our work should reach all audiences. 

And as a community with a collective purchasing power of $13 trillion, the commercial argument for accessible communications is clear.

Strategy & Approach.

Which is why we launched Accessible by Design. It’s our first-to-market agency commitment and client offering, with the goal that every piece of communication we develop, curate, and publish for our clients and ourselves will meet the highest accessibility standards.

Our integrated strategy addressed three key priorities:

1. Be the change you want to see – committing to transforming our own work, to show leadership and encourage others to follow.

2. Overcome barriers to change – developing insight and sharing best practices to give everyone in the industry the tools, knowledge and inspiration to drive change within their own organisations.

3. Advocate for the under-served – raising awareness of the challenge and solutions in order to make accessible communications an industry priority.

Solution.

Be the change you want to see.

We kicked off with an agency-wide commitment from our leadership team that accessible communications needs to be a priority for our business and that we would invest significant resource to seeing through its adoption internally and bringing the industry along with us.

To facilitate change, we worked with industry bodies the PRCA and PR Council to develop the first-ever, free-to-use best practice guidelines and undertook an agency-wide learning & development initiative to turn the whole agency into accessibility champions. Our expectation was not to be perfect from the start, but to show progress every day towards closing the disability inclusion gap; and be upskilled so we could help our clients deliver on accessible communications.

Overcome barriers to change.

We wanted to establish that accessible communications is not just morally the right thing to do, but that there is a significant commercial imperative for our clients too. To do that, we undertook first-of-its-kind research into the experience of how 800 people with disabilities across the US and UK consume media and content. The findings gave us insight into the challenges faced - and how brands can help - as well as showing the direct impact on brand perception, purchase intent and recommendations for brands who get it right.

Advocate for the under-served.

To fuel a movement, we launched an integrated external communications campaign with ourselves as the client, leveraging earned, owned, social and digital channels. Key to this was the development of a website – accessible-communications.com – both as an industry resource and to enable agencies and in-house brand teams to sign our pledge and publicly join us in committing to accessible communications.

Results & Learning.

We set out to raise awareness and instigate a movement for change: so far, the firms who have signed up to join us represent over 22,000 communications professionals around the world.

Fast Company named Accessible by Design a World Changing Idea with “the potential to effect true systems change or solve wicked problems.” Current Global is the only PR agency to have ever won this accolade.

We leveraged industry partnerships including an alliance with Disability:IN, the leading non-profit resource for business disability inclusion worldwide. We took our campaign to key influencers and trade media, with coverage in Fast Company, PRWeek, Campaign, PRovoke Media, Ability Magazine, PR Moment India, O’Dwyer’s, Media Daily News, and Ad Week among many others.

In terms of direct engagement, we are regularly invited to talk as the industry voice of accessibility in webinars and on podcasts for a variety of organisations and on major industry platforms, including for PRmoment, PR Week, Cannes Lions, Disability:IN’s annual conference, the IPR, The Purpose Room and on the Stories & Strategies podcast.

According to the PRCA, the Accessible Communications Guidelines was their most downloaded content when it went live. We have since updated the guidelines twice, most recently making it available in braille.

Accessibility Champions within our team have been upskilled to deliver deep-dive and crash course-style external training courses to the industry: in 2023, we were invited to join the Valuable 500’s Directory in recognition of our expertise in delivering this content.

Find out more about our hands-on, easy to implement training modules.

If you haven’t yet signed the pledge to join our movement, please do at accessible-communications.com!