How can creative industries do more to challenge negative attitudes?

This week at Scope, we launched our new groundbreaking ‘What Works’ report into changing attitudes towards disability and disabled people.?

We created five actions for creative organisations to take based on research from the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT).?

At an event on Wednesday, along with ParalympicsGB, we brought together creative industry giants and disabled people to embrace disability and disabled people in campaigns.?

The launch event brought together a hundred industry giants like ParalympicsGB, British Film Institute (BFI) and Adam&Eve DBB (creators of WeThe15) along with disability campaigners to call on the creative industry to take messaging and representation seriously, with five top tips on best practice.?

Meticulously tested with over 5000 members of the public, alongside BIT, we revealed what messages and approaches work best to improve our attitudes and perceptions of disability and disabled people.?

This is important because 3 in 4 disabled people have experienced negative attitudes and behaviour from others in the last 5 years.?

At the launch, we called on the creative industry to produce campaigns that reflect the findings of the research. ?

What works?

So, what works? The world-leading BIT stress-tested seven different approaches for campaign messaging to change attitudes towards disability and disabled people to see what works with the public.?

The insight from testing approaches with over 5,000 nationally representative people found we should: ?

• Affirm the status of disabled people. This approach challenges the negative stereotype of perceived incompetence. The focus is not about inspirational ‘overcoming’ of disability. It’s about fostering respect and preserving the dignity of disabled people. ?
• Share stories and personal experiences. Stories are persuasive and create an emotional connection. They can challenge people’s preconceptions and defy stereotypes. ?
• Encourage people to think about how they would feel if they faced inequality. This isn’t asking people to imagine being disabled, but to imagine how they would feel if placed in an unfair situation.?
• Be careful with how facts and figures are used to highlight injustice. Using statistics alone may make it difficult for the audience to relate to the experiences of disabled people. This can have unintended consequences for attitudes. ?

How can creative organisations challenge negative attitudes?

Based on this insight, we're suggesting 5 actions creative organisations can take to challenge negative attitudes?

1. Well-rounded representation of disabled people. Disabled people are often subjected to harmful stereotypes and assumptions. Good representation can challenge these assumptions by presenting disabled people as fully realised individuals with complex lives, dreams, and accomplishments. By defying stereotypes, good representation can help promote a more inclusive society. ?
2. Co-produce campaigns with disabled people. You might know the term “Nothing about us, without us”, and this is where it comes into play. By bringing in disabled people to discuss a campaign, you can hear first-hand how your audiences want to be represented. This is key if you want your content to be accurately representative. ?
3. Involve disabled talent on and off-screen. There is a wealth of disabled talent in the creative and media industries. Representation opens the door for more voices, stories, and insights into your storytelling. Just like co-production, having representative talent involved in the process will allow you to have a range of input and feedback on your campaign, which is especially important if you’re portraying disability as part of it. ?
4. Create accessible content. If you want to reach a wider audience with your content, you need to make sure it’s accessible. This might include adding captions to videos, alt-text to images or considering colour contrast. Knowing where to start can be difficult, but Scope for business runs bespoke training on content accessibility, with a free beginners guide.
5. Create and accessible environment. It’s important that whatever actions you take to make your content accessible, also need to apply to your everyday business. Back up your representative content by making sure your organisation trained in disability awareness and accessibility. This might start with something as small as adding a line on meeting invitations to ask if you can make any adjustments to make this meeting more accessible, such as live captioning, transcription, or even as simple as allowing people to have cameras off. ?