Two campaigns use impactful messaging of inclusion for people with disabilities
Marketing and public relations agency UpHouse continues its reputation for creating award-winning, purpose-driven work with two Anthem Awards wins. The agency’s marketing campaigns Let’s Grow to Work and Barrier Town were Bronze Anthem Winners in the Hiring Initiative and Local Community Engagement categories, respectively.
This year’s Anthem Award Winners were selected from a pool of over 2,000 submissions from 44 countries by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Anthem judges are intellectually diverse leaders from across the impact industry with expertise that spans across the Anthem cause areas.
“It’s an incredible honour to be named winners at the Anthem Awards. We appreciate being recognized for the work we do at UpHouse—but having real impact with these campaigns and getting to work with the kinds of clients we do is our true motivation,” said Brenlee Coates, Creative Director for both campaigns. “Wins like these show the power of inclusive, diverse and equitable marketing, and we’re excited to attract more projects like these in the future.”
Let’s Grow to Work for Direct Support Profession Manitoba was created to increase recruitment of support workers for people with disabilities. Direct support professionals (DSPs) support people with disabilities to live the lives they want — in work, at home and in the community. The campaign message emphasized the relationship between DSPs and the person they support, showing them growing together and the positive impact being a DSP has in someone’s life. The results included over 10,000 visits to Direct Support Profession Manitoba’s website during the campaign period.
Barrier Town for Abilities Manitoba used satirical humour to display the challenges people with disabilities face when interacting with businesses. Working with folks with lived experiences, Coates and the UpHouse creative team built a set with three scenarios that illustrated some of the common barriers people with disabilities face. This showed some of the ways organizations put up barriers in their business—making it so obvious, it’s almost farcical.
“One of our goals when starting UpHouse was to use marketing as a tool to make the change we want to see in the world, and it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come doing just that,” said Alex Varricchio, Co-Owner of UpHouse. “As creatives who put work out with the intention of having millions of people see it, we know we have a responsibility to represent all groups of people. When organizations trust us with projects like these ones, it feels really special.”
