For years, Walgreens has been dedicated to actively recruiting and hiring people in the disability community. As a healthcare company, inclusion for people with disabilities is woven into our fabric. And with 42.5 million Americans identifying as having a disability, the disability community is a large, diverse population. Yet too often their stories don’t make it to the spotlight. When people talk about disability, they talk about a condition as if it’s an abstract concept. What we rarely do is listen to the stories of people with disabilities.
July’s Disability Pride Month gives everyone—whether you live with a disability or not—an opportunity to celebrate the disability community. For this series of short documentaries, Walgreens wanted to hand the mic to our team members with disabilities, and let them share their whole stories.
So we launched a series of short docs to highlight the full humanity of our team members, how their disabilities have impacted their lives, and how their unique perspectives have brought value to their colleagues and communities. We wanted to represent a diversity of disability across a diversity of job responsibilities, and show that people with disabilities make the workforce stronger. By showcasing people with a broad range of disabilities, and sharing their stories across YouTube and social media, we wanted our audience to connect with our team and reflect on their stories.
We planned a series of four short documentaries to release on Walgreens owned social channels once a week throughout July Disability Pride Month. To complement the films, our communications team built out a disability inclusion landing page, featuring the videos and disability resources at the company. Working closely with the Walgreens Disability Alliance business resource group, we reached out to field representatives across the country to connect with team members in our retail stores, our warehouses and our support center. The BRG was instrumental in helping us craft our message to ensure we were speaking with respect and using preferred language, as well as introducing us to dozens of team members in the disability community.
It was important that we not impose a story or a framework on the films from the outside. We wanted the subjects of each film to tell us their story, and then explore common threads and themes. We conducted preliminary interviews with volunteers interested in being featured, and what emerged was a unifying element of empathy. Each team member brought exceptional empathy to their work — whether it took the form of advocacy for others with disabilities, a commitment to creating safe and healthy environments for their co-workers, or forging deeper connections with patients. We also learned volumes about the way some disabilities are visible while others are “invisible,” meaning one wouldn’t recognize a person’s disability upon meeting them. Whether visible or invisible, both presented their own challenges, and informed how each subject moved through the world.
Each episode found a distinct tone, based on the people featured:
We wanted to honor these team members by producing high-quality short documentaries, to distinguish them from the millions of phone-filmed videos that flood social media. And because our goal was to feature employees in different roles and with different disabilities, it meant we had to travel across the country to film the interviews.
We chose to foreground the people and push the brand to the background, being sensitive to the inglorious modern tradition of “pridewashing,” where brands “celebrate” a pride month through one-off social media posts or changing the color of their logos. One interesting hurdle for these films was the subjects’ enthusiasm for discussing the accessibility and accommodations at Walgreens. Finding the middle ground, where the team members could celebrate their accomplishments with work in an authentic way, allowed us to showcase their full lives.
The success of the Disability Pride Month series could be seen both in the volume of traffic it achieved on our social platforms, particularly Facebook, and the conversation it generated in the comments, as well as within the organization. All four videos performed well above benchmarks on our platforms. On Facebook, for instance, our video on Johnathan Cooper received 22,000 views, about 280% above our benchmarks. And Angela Mackey’s story received nearly 30,000 views, about 400% above our benchmarks.
Thanks to the timelessness of these stories, the films have continued to generate views, shares and discussion long after they were posted. And even after the dust has settled, we will be able to bring them back to the fore in October to observe National Disability Employment Awareness Month. The series has also ignited a deeper commitment within our organization to uplift and celebrate our team members in the disability community. And it has inspired a renewed focus on sharing more of these stories, amplifying the voices of our colleagues, and fostering a culture of support and understanding.
