Inside Inevitable’s Multi-Faceted Approach to Advocacy: “We Are Everywhere That You Are”

The organization’s head of public affairs and communications associate unpack an evolving and expanding strategy around the nonprofit’s billboard, social media and open letter campaigns for Greenlight Disability, Hire Disabled Writers, and Disability is Diversity.

Credit: Inevitable Foundation

By Abbey White

After nearly a year and a half of taking big swings, Inevitable Foundation had been looking to get Hollywood’s attention and generate meaningful action on disability inclusion. To capture the collective attention of disabled creatives and Hollywood executives, the nonprofit took an initial step into the mass advertising space, engaging the idea of social and audio advertising possibilities. But then they hit a wall. 

“We wanted to reach beyond our existing audience, but as a small nonprofit we didn’t have the budget for paid social media advertising. Unfortunately, we also found pro-bono advertising doesn’t hold the same opportunity on social media, because the corporations in the space are very separate from their philanthropic giving arms,” explains Saga Darnell, Inevitable Foundation’s head of research and public affairs.

That’s when they realized all they had to do was look up. “Driving past the Fox, Paramount and 20th Century Fox lots, we kept noticing there are massive billboards outside of these places,” they recall.

Billboards offered the nonprofit a way to reach an audience that digital marketing wasn’t getting to. “We were finding with social advertising customization that it was really hard to reach certain demographics, including, specifically, the entertainment executive,” says Darnell, who also serves as the foundation’s lead strategist for advocacy initiatives. “So we could try to get ads on the LinkedIn pages of the people we want to talk to, but the messaging might be more effective and unavoidable if we put billboards outside of their offices that they have to look at all day.”

From this concept the organization’s very first national advocacy campaign, Disability is Diversity, was born. Spanning 16 U.S. cities, it was created by an all-disabled team who helped power the creative vision and production of the billboards and, later, the social media campaign. Following a thorough research process, which involved evaluating other out-of-home campaigns based on their reach, effectiveness and accessibility, the organization began working with Ravi Vasavan, who executed its design. 

The nonprofit eventually recorded audio spot versions of the ads for Spotify, aiding in the broader accessibility of the campaign. The foundation has since produced two more billboard campaigns — Hire Disabled Writers and Greenlight Disability — using the same approach, while expanding its efforts via corresponding open letters to Hollywood, research reports, and suites of practical resources.

Traversing the Out-of-Home Advertising Landscape 

Like any competitive market, billboard companies want their assets to appear in high demand, which means seeing less empty boards containing those “Your Ad Here" messages. To address this, the companies offer pro-bono advertising on assets without currently sold placements, which PSA campaigns can then use to share their messages.

Through this offering, Inevitable Foundation built relationships with several billboard companies, before the organization identified the ideal locations to place their message — something that mattered just as much, perhaps even more, than simply securing billboard space. “The idea was to surround all of the studios and fill the neighborhoods where Hollywood executives live with this messaging so that they can’t escape it,” says Darnell.

For Disability Is Diversity and the two campaigns that followed, placements prioritized where the industry predominantly resides: New York and Los Angeles. But the organization didn’t just accept anywhere in those two cities — or the other 14 major locations their message appeared. 

Credit: Inevitable Foundation

“Our placements were very specifically informed by where people who work in film and television live and spend their recreation time,” Inevitable Foundation’s head of research says. “We secured a number of billboards around studio lots, and then we went more granular, literally, ‘What roads are these people taking to go to work?’”

Locations like The Grove, Calabasas, Pasadena and Hollywood Boulevard were priority targets due to their relationship to executives' daily lives. “You're seeing a billboard on your commute to work. You're seeing a billboard out your office window. You're picking up your kids and going to get dinner with them, and you're seeing a billboard there. You're going to a conference and you're seeing the billboard graphic on the credit card machine when you check into the hotel,” Darnell explains.

Other placements outside the coastal bubbles were just as strategic, with Darnell noting that cities like Detroit, Chicago and Atlanta represent secondary industry hubs where Inevitable Foundation could organically reach extensions of Hollywood and their respective decision makers.

“We decided early on to be incredibly flexible about the timing, length, and duration of placements, making our primary focus location,” Darnell says. “That granularity really served us because what we heard back from the industry was, 'You're the billboard people. You're everywhere.’ And we're not, actually, but the important thing is you feel like we are. We're everywhere that we’re supposed to be because we are everywhere that you are.”

Going Beyond Billboards 

While the initial intention was to target film and TV executives, the campaigns have positively resonated with a much larger audience within the disability and entertainment communities, and that feedback is only growing online. 

“We regularly get messages from disabled people who may know nothing about us or have nothing to do with the entertainment industry, but feel that the billboards are for them, and that's awesome — they are,” Darnell explains. “But the online sphere of the campaigns mirrors the work of the physical campaigns in a wider reaching capacity that’s more accessible for some audiences.”

Leveraging digital spaces as a secondary market is helping expand the reach of Disability is Diversity, Hired Disabled Writers and, now, Greenlight Disability. “Instagram and Twitter are our platforms with the most engagement, and we use them to highlight pictures of the billboards at busy intersections or on the sides of buildings,” says Ali Abbas, communications associate at Inevitable Foundation. “On social media, when you see these images, your mind is connecting those dots and seeing it as bigger than just that isolated billboard placement.”

“It’s not important that everyone knows about it. It's important that it feels big to a very particular group of people,” adds Darnell. “Even if the billboard campaign is up for two weeks in Times Square, it's up [online] for five years in terms of how we talk about it.”

The organization is also increasingly exploring opportunities to elevate their campaigns with the support of the disability community and its allies in Hollywood.

For Disability Is Diversity, Inevitable Foundation encouraged people to find billboards, take photos with them and send in those photos. “The social strategy was a lot about sharing submissions of the billboards in the wild, and integrating them into what became a movement,” notes Darnell. 

Credit: Inevitable Foundation

It’s a strategy that acts as a megaphone for the campaign’s messaging, just like the open letters to Hollywood that accompanied both Hired Disabled Writers and Greenlight Disability. Signed by major actors, writers, producers and directors, these calls to action garnered key placement in major trades that see daily engagement from industry executives. Those letters are then amplified on social media by signees, who share it with their millions of followers. 

“When we integrated celebrities, it changed the structure [of our campaigns] and allowed us to reach some places that we couldn't have reached otherwise,” says Darnell. “Having them talking on social media connected us to other disability advocacy organizations, celebrities who do or don't talk about their disabilities, and disabled content creators or influencers.”

An Evolving Call to Action

With Greenlight Disability, the foundation launched its first advocacy campaign, accompanied by a report offering tangible data on audience preferences through a survey of 1,100 disabled and non-disabled viewers. Among the report’s major takeaways was that 66% of all audiences (disabled and non-disabled) are unsatisfied with disability and mental health representation on-screen. It’s the message now at the center of the Billboard campaign, which launched in New York and L.A. in August. 

“This campaign isn't just saying we surveyed 1,100 people who are telling us something,” says Darnell, pointing to the organization’s use of billboards, a survey and social video. “It’s actually that there's more than 1,100 people here. This is how big this network goes.”

For the nonprofit “in the business of eliminating industry excuses,” according to the head of research and public affairs, Greenlight Disability also marks the first time Inevitable has used audience data to do so. It helps illustrate that consumers know what they want and disabled creatives are ready to make those stories. 

“Disability Is Diversity was the introduction and then Hire Disabled Writers was asking people to put their money where their mouth is. But [the industry] integrated disabled people, and then didn’t pay them equitably or provide healthcare benefits,” they note. “So now Greenlight Disability is saying, get disabled creatives in positions of power, let them produce stories and get it all the way to screen. We're tapping into our audience to show how big the group of people that want this content is and that somebody just has to say yes.”

Ultimately, the latest billboard campaign is just the next chapter in an ongoing and interconnected series of messages designed to move Hollywood into an era where disabled creatives and disability narratives abound.

“We’ve identified the areas we need to put more pressure on or build a new campaign around — to keep pushing the edges of people's understanding and moving the industry toward widespread equity for disabled people,” the strategist says.