Brand By Wellcome Trust
We worked with Wellcome to help make their communications more inclusive to embed equity into their work, supporting better health outcomes for all.
Summary
Wellcome is a global charitable foundation that wants everyone to benefit from science’s potential to improve health and save lives. To help ensure their work really does benefit everyone, Wellcome made being ‘inclusive’ one of their four core values. Wellcome defines inclusive as respecting people and valuing difference by proactively seeking to create opportunities and remove barriers, enabling anyone to contribute to and benefit from their work. They apply this value to their funding, engagement advocacy and as an employer. To do this in practice, they knew they needed support to understand and address how to be more inclusive head-on. We worked with Wellcome to figure out where they stood and how to kick off this epic journey. The process was not linear, but together, over the course of 3 years we uncovered where they could make a real difference, turning their equity goals on their website into real, tangible outcomes.
Who Led The Project
Collette
Ettie
Sulaiman
Category
Consulting
Training
Follow us
Audit
Wellcome recognised that you can't make change if you don't know where the gaps are. So, we began the project by talking with Wellcome’s own staff networks to see how they experienced Wellcome. We also reviewed how Wellcome communicates to explore how well its communications included minoritised communities. This highlighted the need to
focus on Disability representation and moving away from colonial narratives in communications. The practical insights really helped the team start to understand where change would be needed.
Explore
In our group workshops, we discussed the different ways that oppression can appear in Wellcome’s communications. We considered everything from the language Wellcome uses to how we partner with lived experience experts. We helped them to live our mantra, ‘progression over perfection’ - a vital outlook for an organisation founded on academia and precision.
Embed
Together with their Brand team, we co-created clear inclusion principles and an action plan with the knowledge gained from the audit. We thought about how an equitable
approach could benefit everyone—from the communications strategists to the content team. It was all about ensuring the whole team was on board, turning ideas into everyday actions. While impatient for systemic change, we all learned that this happens when everyone takes responsibility for unlearning inequity and embedding new ways of being and working. We also ran a year-long training programme and accountability sessions so that teams were able to unpick blockers and risks, but also continue to learn about systems of oppression in a safe and actionable space.
Evaluate
The whole project prompted Wellcome to reflect on its approach, often starting with the end of being truly inclusive in mind. Brand by Me helped Wellcome teams to speak up constructively about things that aren’t working and embrace the power of imperfect action.
OUR insight
“When you’re doing equity work, it’s really important that you understand the culture of the organisation so you know where things will align and can be prepared for when the
natural ebbs and flows of enthusiasm might get in the way. This project was a great example and reminder of why we tailor our approach to accommodate different learning
styles.”
Collette
“I feel like there's been a certain visible camaraderie throughout this Inclusive Comms process and I think we’ve helped teams become a support system for each other so they're learning from each other and leaning on each other too”.
Ettie
“Holding space for relationships with individual teams and the trust to be able to have conversations on a 121 basis as well as also take the learnings into a group setting was so vital. It is so important to be able to build community in this work and that’s what we did throughout this project.”
Sulaiman
“We couldn't be more grateful that we found Brand By Me. In 2020, we were looking to make our organisation inclusive – and wanted to learn and unlearn how to do this in practice. Brand by Me are a group of passionate and knowledgeable experts who focus on accessibility, anti-ableism, anti-racism, inclusive language and much, much more.
They are brave. They create safe spaces. They challenge in a warm way. And they have helped us to make our ‘inclusive’ value a reality at Wellcome. We're very grateful for all the work that they do.”
Hannah Skilton, Brand Marketing Lead, Wellcome Trust.
Recognising and addressing how your brand upholds systems of oppression helps drive social justice. We can show you how.
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