Inclusion

ActionRocket

ActionRocket are a specialist studio for all things email and CRM. As a boutique team of passionate marketers, designers and coders, their skills lead them to create award-winning marketing campaigns. They focus on strategic thinking, creative ideas and customer journeys.

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We were approached by ActionRocket, one of our longstanding clients, to put together some training and facilitated discussion drawing on our expertise of Inclusion, Diversity and People Strategies. The team at ActionRocket had already started internal conversations about the Black Lives Matter movement but wanted to go further with their thinking as a team.

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We devised a three-month long programme with the aim of developing a shared understanding of what thinking with an Inclusive perspective would mean for the team themselves and for their relationship with clients. The sessions were all delivered virtually and were interactive in style.

The focus was on the team discovering answers for themselves through facilitated discussions along with specialised input from an Inclusion and Diversity practitioner. The virtual sessions were further enhanced by participants accessing specially selected “drop-in learning” materials comprising of articles, excerpts and talks, which deepened the learning experience and conversations.

We know from experience that learning is greatly enhanced through putting concepts and ideas into practice.  A pivotal part of the programme was the team’s own work developed through an internal “Design Challenge”.  Working in small groups the team tested themselves to create solutions for specific issues or to revisit previous design briefs, in both cases looking with a fresh perspective through the lens of Inclusion.

Here is one example of a Design Challenge brief – Take an everyday task you do in the outside world, look at how this could be a challenge for people who are different from you, and design a communication piece for the community or product to help and support them with this challenge.

The programme focussed on taking specific action, large or small, either from a personal perspective or from an organisation point of view.  As a result the team have committed to creating “Inclusion Champions” to continue to work on specific areas of the business with the aim of embedding the ethos and values of “Difference Matters”.

“Inclusion thinking” is now set to continue in the organisation supported by an ongoing dialogue across the team. Initial projects will focus on new approaches to recruitment, creating a new onboarding process and handbook and continued support for work on personal development for individual team members.

The material used during the programme and “drop-in learning” are kept as a reference point for further conversations and as part of the onboarding for new members of the team.