(images and film courtesy of LDV United)Every athlete wants to win, but what happens when they’re not invited to play?
Special Olympics Belgium set out to create greater opportunities for athletes with intellectual disabilities to join sports clubs, federations and leagues in Belgium, while fostering a culture that supports inclusive sports.
With agency partner, LDV United, Special Olympics Belgium launched a dedicated campaign for “Play Unified” to challenge sports fans, club players and organizers alike to support its mission of opening doors to athletes with intellectual disabilities, and to also change behavior and advance the public’s attitude towards sports players with perceived limitations.
Six special athletes in Belgium changed the game by taking control of the message and publicly challenging six professional athletes to compete in their respective sports. All six professional athletes accepted the challenge within 48 hours and sports fans were watching. With a big idea, targeted PR approach, bold creative strategy and no media spend, the “Play Unified” campaign captured the attention of sports fans, national clubs and local government.
“Play Unified” was a hugely successful effort, earning Special Olympics Belgium and LDV United a Gold Effie at the 2017 Effie Belgium Gala. We asked Tomas Sweertvaegher, Strategy Director at LDV United for insight into his team’s uplifting and effective campaign.
Read on to learn more about the strategy behind the team’s big idea, and how “Play Unified” resonated so deeply that the availability of clubs was outpacing the number of players at the time their case study was submitted, paving the way for new athletes.
Tomas, tell us a bit about your Effie-winning effort, “Play Unified.” What were your objectives for the campaign?
TS: In Belgium, there are 165,000 people with intellectual disabilities. For them, life has a lot of obstacles and barriers in store. And yet, the biggest obstacle in these people’s lives is not their mental constraint, but the social exclusion they face every day. Research shows that sports is one of the most effective ways to promote social inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities.The best results happen when able players and those with mental disabilities play together as one team and train together, creating inclusive sports.
Special Olympics Belgium wanted to introduce Play Unified in Belgium. Special Olympics Belgium set out the target that by year 2020, 20,000 special athletes need to have the chance to sport together with able athletes. To reach this goal, there was an acute need for clubs to open their doors and for able athletes to open their hearts for athletes with a mental disability.
In short: we not only needed to inform people about Play Unified, but also convince them to go and play their first unified game, not out of pity, but out of mutual love for the game.
What was your big idea? What was the insight that led to it?
TS: The idea? Become stronger by facing the strongest.
Instead of choosing the ‘pity’ approach, we decided to go for the bold approach. We decided to let 6 special athletes challenge 6 famous Belgian top athletes.
And the insight? We speak in the language of athletes, not in the language of non-profits. We acted on the one universal law of sports: every athlete wants to win. So, we stayed away from pity. We show each athlete, including those with intellectual disabilities, as an equal opponent.
How did you bring the idea to life?
TS: Six athletes. Six challenges. Lots more attention.
“Do you dare to play?”
The campaign centered on challenges. Not one, but six. Six unknown athletes with mental disabilities challenged Belgian athletes to play a match.
The unknowns had spunk and humor, that’s how we reversed the roles. The special athletes were the formidable ones for once. They determined the rules of the game, they chose the teams. In this way, these six athletes with a mental disability didn’t just challenge six sport heroes, they challenged the way the world looks at them.
Of course, bringing the idea to life was about so much more than only these six challenges. There were other key strategic decisions that were as important:
– We used the power of humor to win the hearts of the top athletes and those of their fans.
– We activated not only top athletes, but also other important online influencers, fellow top athletes and the public, the result was that Play Unified became a trending topic on the day of the launch.
– We used repetition. We went for more than one challenge with one athlete. We challenged athletes from all corners of the sports world.
– We made sure that every challenge became a much-anticipated event that people could attend live, or follow via social media.
– During the whole course of the campaign, we stunted to gain traffic to playunified.be. On September 30th, for example, the national coach of the Red Devils called in 8 extra players, unknown to the public and press, at the official press conference (these players were special athletes).
That’s how we managed to get Play Unified in the spotlight and keep it there for over two months. People didn’t see our message once or twice, but five or six times.
“Play Unified” tapped into some of Belgium’s biggest influencers in the sports world in a unique way, and on a relatively limited budget. Can you share some insight into the strategy behind this?
TS: We know the words ‘without any media budget’ are quite popular in our field. But the fact that there was no media budget was not the main challenge for us, nor the reason why we worked with some of Belgium’s biggest sports influencers. Engaging these top athletes was above all necessary to give ‘Play Unified’ the credit it deserves in the world of sports and to bring about behavioral change among the public.
And when it comes to sports, top athletes are the influencers for supporters and other leisure or amateur athletes. Professionals are “the Big Ones,” the heroes. Not only do they affect the preference for particular sports brands or products, but they can also bring about social behavioral change, especially when the link with sports is relevant.
By working with professional athletes, we could highlight the challenging, unique aspect of Play Unified. We earned credibility by demonstrating that these games are not for “the weak,” it’s a game with its own rules and challenges. The participation of these top athletes proves that.
Moreover, the impact of top athletes goes beyond their role as influencers: they are also powerful communication channels on their own. Through their individual social media accounts, we could reach their fans—our target audience. That’s why we built our entire campaign on their participation, however risky that was (more on that below.)
What was your biggest challenge in bringing your idea to life? How were you able to overcome that challenge?
TS: There were a lot of different challenges. It’s difficult to name the ‘biggest’, also because a lot of these challenges were intertwined.
We would say that the biggest challenge was to go from awareness to results. In the world of non-profit, it’s easy to get awareness and attention. But changing people’s behavior and getting business results is a whole other thing. The key to this challenge was to convince clubs to open their doors and fields for inclusive sporting. However, clubs are impenetrable forts.
Before the campaign, Special Olympics Belgium visited each club to set up inclusive sporting. The response from the club-side was very mild, to say the least. And the larger sporting federations kept their doors closed too. We realized that clubs will only consider changing course if they feel that the push comes from their members and the sports world at large.
Which brought us to the next challenge: we needed to convince every Belgian sports club member, so that they could put pressure on the clubs to put Play Unified on the agenda. However, most Belgians carry bias and prejudices towards people with a constraint — we feel sorry for them and don’t know how to approach people with a mental disability and thus we avoid direct contact altogether.
Changing the general public’s attitude towards sport players with limitations could change the course of Play Unified. Which is the exact reason why the participation of these famous top athletes was so important: they could activate people, who would in their turn push the clubs to open their doors.
What was the biggest risk you took throughout the process of planning and launching “Play Unified?”
TS: As we already said, we built our entire campaign on the participation of top athletes. Of course there was a serious risk to bet on the live collaboration of top athletes. The whole campaign depended on the athletes accepting our challenges. At the same time: we knew it was the only way to reach and convince all Belgians to Play Unified.
How did we deal with this risk?
The question was: how can we make sure these Sports Heroes want to participate? How can we make sure they accept our challenge fast?
We needed to touch their soft spot. That is where our insight came into play. We decided to act on the one universal law of sports: every athlete wants to win. We challenged the sports heroes and play against their competitive edge.
Next, we put a lot of time and effort in preparing the way we challenged them. We made it almost impossible not to answer. We surprised each athlete, by reaching them on their turf. We surprised them with huge banners on the tennis court, in the swimming pool (during their training session). And we surprised them with the unexpected boldness and likable humor in the messages of our special athletes.
Moreover, we didn’t put all our eggs in one basket. We used a media strategy that channeled several challenges at once. If one of them accepted the challenge the other ones would be pushed to do the same. And we used other influencers (such as Kim Clijsters and Kevin De Bruyne in tennis and football; Michael Phelps for swimming) and a targeted PR approach to raise the pressure.
Last but not least, the hours of script preparation and a real-time war room allowed us to keep an eye on what needed to be adjusted and engage the media with new updates.
In one day, we launched the entirety of the challenges. Then we needed to wait: for the public to notice the challenges and for the athletes to accept them. The result? Within 48 hours, all challenges were accepted. And thanks to their (social) media channels (i.e. Greg Van Avermaet for cycling and Dembélé in football), we soon had a huge audience range and gained momentum which in turn transformed into a mass media campaign.
What is the biggest learning you’ve taken away from this effort?
TS: Never underestimate the amount of attention and respect you get by daring to do something that people don’t expect.
Is there anything else we should know about “Play Unified?”
TS: The increase in the number of new clubs offering inclusive sports grew dramatically: an increase of 36% in six months. Finally, the campaign also had a top-down effect. It not only cracked open the doors of the federations, but blew them wide open. After six months there are not only four (the goal) but nine Play Unified cooperation agreements.
Which all lead to 3,098 special new athletes with an intellectual challenge that were able to play in inclusive sports, which meant an increase of 22.3% new sports players after six months.
An unforeseen success. Even better, not only federations, but cities, asked to take part in the cooperative agreements. Currently there are 10 “Play Unified” cities.
