How your marketing skills can prevent the bullying of disabled children

Prevent the bullying of disabled children

Sky Badger builds bridges between disabled children and the charities and services available to help. They find everything from disabled sports clubs to sibling groups to ‘make a wish’ charities and tell families about them though their website, social media platforms, videos, information packs and e-helpdesk.

Through Pimp My Cause, earlier this year Sky Badger was matched up with the team at #ogilvychange to explore how behavioural insight can be creatively applied to improve children’s behaviour towards classmates and other children affected by disabilities.

Amid their broader portfolio of activities, Sky Badger has developed a twenty-lesson primary school programme to help other children respond better to people affected by disabilities, including not just highly visible physical disabilities but also conditions that are less easy for children to immediately understand such as autism.

The programme will play a nationally significant role in tackling a major problem: bullying. Mencap found that 82% of children with learning disabilities reported being bullied. And The UK Annual Bullying Report found that 63% of respondents with a physical disability were bullied, and were extremely socially excluded.

The #ogilvychange team has helped Sky Badger identify why lasting change has not been achieved through disability awareness programmes in the past and how they can overcome these barriers to change. The barriers identified include children not understanding how disabilities really affect a normal life, children being afraid of the unfamiliar and the need to reinforce a message in order for behaviour change to last.

#ogilvychange created a system for children, along with their teacher, to set goals and work through Sky Badger’s twenty lessons to achieve their goals and get rewards. The students will need to take responsibility for reaching their goals and will get the chance to build a real sense of ownership of the programme.

The initiative has been made easy for teachers and schools to buy into because the lessons are designed to fit with the new national curriculum, so by teaching the Sky Badger lessons teachers will be meeting their existing targets and at the same time giving their pupils a valuable life-changing experience.

The programme will be unlike anything that has come in the past in that it will focus on the abilities of disabled people rather than what they can’t do. Some of the programme’s highlights will include classes meeting with paralympians and a food allergy-free baking competition with prizes sponsored by Silverspoon.

Sky Badger has high ambitions for this programme with a target of engaging 300 to 400 schools in their first year. They will be spending the next few months signing teachers and schools up for the programme, with the lessons beginning to roll out to classrooms in January 2015.

Your marketing expertise could be the key to helping Sky Badger reach their goal to stop the bullying to disabled children.

Sky Badger will be writing to teachers and schools about their new programme individually, but they also plan to build momentum and engagement through social media. They would love to get your support with developing their social media engagement strategy to help parents, students, the concerned public and hopefully some celebrities to put added pressure on schools to join in.

Sky Badger also knows that getting good national and local press coverage will be crucial to successfully launching the programme and to helping it scale in year two. They would love to have your help with developing their communications materials and a PR plan to ensure the programme’s success.

Could your marketing play a part in the next chapter of Sky Badger’s adventure?


Please email Anna Mullenneaux ([email protected]), chief match maker at Pimp My Cause, if you are interested in supporting Sky Badger with your marketing expertise.

Read more from Pimp My Cause in our Clubhouse.

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