Since London 2012, Paralympians have become mainstream superstars.

Yet over the same period participation in sport by young people with disabilities has declined by 10%.

The longstanding cultural and logistical barriers to participating have not changed. Critically young people lack the guidance they need to try a new Sport:

“If you’re young and with a disability, a significant barrier to getting started in sport is access to trainers with expertise” - Craig Spence, International Paralympic Committee.

Allianz, long-time partner to the International Paralympic Committee, approached us to devise a content series to extend their existing Move Now campaign, that addressed this challenge, to help young people with disabilities “prepare for the best” (Allianz’s brand promise).

The only problem - whereas around 20% of the audience had disabilities, just 9% of our advertising and production industry are disabled. Could we really make social content with a legitimate voice in disability inclusion?

‘Day 1 Done’ is a digital training series for kids with disabilities, co-created by people with disabilities.

The hardest part of any journey into sport is getting started, so we enlisted the help of Paralympians to help the next generation break through. Accessible training content featured real kids participating in their own day 1, with drills designed by Paralympic coach Guido Bonsen. Digital tools including interactive training plans, calendar syncs and personal prompts from Paralympians gave young disabled kids the knowledge and support to keep going beyond day 1, in accessible formats that they could access any time.

Radical inclusivity was at the core of our idea. 50% of the film crew were disabled, and every asset was designed and produced with inclusivity in mind. We created an open-source Production Blueprint to share our inclusivity learnings.

Our audience didn’t need “inspiration”, they need a pathway to participation.

Our strategy was to focus on Day One because this is the hardest part of anyone’s journey in Sport.

We found that in addition, disabled people are discouraged by not seeing “people like me” in sport content so we brought paralympians and young people with a range of disabilities into the content throughout.

The next challenge was that they lack access to instructors with the skills and willingness to be inclusive. So our coaches didn’t just provide us with one video workout, they also helped us to produce downloadable digital tools: interactive training plans and calendar-synced prompts which put coaches in their phones.

Finally, we devised a Production Blueprint, providing what the industry needs to create an inclusive workplace for disabled production talent.

The content programme included a series of 5 minute, accessible training workouts, in which real kids participating in their own day 1 demonstrated drills designed by Paralympic coach Guido Bonsen.

We promoted this in shorter films featuring our paralympians literally smashing through their own “Day 1”.

Every asset was inclusive - videos featured subtitles, sign-language & audio guide functionality, training plans were optimised for screen readers, and the calendar-sync tool included transcriptions for those with hearing impairments.

Our open-source Production Blueprint to educate our industry in how to provide a more inclusive environment for disabled creative talent was promoted with a Behind the Scenes video to tell the story of how we can prepare for a better future for disabled young people if we include them in our filmmaking process.

Our primary goal was to have supplied our audience with the guidance to complete a workout.

- 6MM viewers completed the whole 5 minute workout video

- A further 600k people downloaded the pdf training plans

Awareness of the campaign

- With only £320k media spend, across Australia, UK, Ireland, US, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, the campaign drove

- 163MM video views

- 536MM impressions

Brand positivity

The resulting impact on the Allianz brand was overwhelmingly positive:

- Amongst those who saw our work Allianz became the second most well known partner of the IPC (in front of Coke/ Visa and other better known brand partners)

- Amongst those who saw our work Allianz saw significant improvements in positivity (between 15-17% across each of the following: likability/ purchase consideration/ repurchase/ attractiveness as a potential employer)