Amplifying voices in the disability community during COVID-19

Association of University Centers on Disabilities

A young man smiles as he restocks items on the shelves in a grocery store.

One aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic that has been widely overlooked is its impact on the disability community. As COVID has spread, it has revealed that people with disabilities face significant disparities in accessing the education, health care, and home- and community-based services they need to survive and to maintain their quality of life. Throughout the pandemic, the Association of University Centers on Disabilities (AUCD) has been a leader in efforts to achieve equity for the disability community.

SERVICES

research
PR
outreach
branding
design
messaging
collateral
program management

THE CLIENT

AUCD is a leading resource for local, state, national, and international agencies, organizations, and policy makers concerned about people living with developmental and other disabilities and their families.

 

The organization supports a nationwide network of 155 university-based disability research programs. These programs serve as a bridge connecting the university and the community and bring together the resources of both to achieve meaningful change.

 

AUCD supports this national network through a variety of activities, including providing leadership on major social problems affecting the disability community, advocating with Congress and government agencies that fund and regulate programs for people with disabilities, and collecting, organizing, and disseminating data on the network’s research activities and achievements.

THE PROBLEM

During the pandemic, AUCD undertook an array of projects related to the impact of the pandemic on persons with disabilities. These projects generated massive amounts of data, and the organization wanted to use the data to inform their key audiences about its impact.

 

The challenge for All Things Creative was to present this data in a form that that would be easy to access and would tell the story of AUCD’s impact in ways that would resonate with their key audiences.

THE SOLUTION

All Things Creative developed a new website dedicated specifically to showcasing AUCD’s projects and achievements to support the disability during COVID-19.

THE APPROACH

We facilitated several working sessions with AUCD’s program teams and helped them structure the goals, priorities, key messages, and content for specific audiences, including donors, congressional staffers, and AUCD members. In addition to creating the new website, we redesigned their 2020 annual report, migrated it to the new website, and linked information and data between the new website and AUDC’s main website.

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