We are Choosing Diversity
We listen to marginalized voices
We celebrate diversity
We strive for inclusivity
As students in the Communication Media and Culture department and in the framework of the “Introduction of Advertising and Public Relations” “ course, we were inspired to build a start-up company that reflects our ambitions through the company’s mission.
It has been critical for us to build a start-up that addresses social matters and fills the void that the department of marketing has regarding advocacy through business. Our goal is to be able to structure a company that will become a solution to many pathogeneses connected to the market. It is well known that the field of marketing is negatively perceived as many companies have been functioning in a self-centred and for-profit way. We realised that choosing diversity is an attempt to inspire and reform the market to a DEI model and in the long run be a milestone of a process that suggests rethinking the role of a brand.
Choosing Diversity stems from a combination of our values, ethics and skills. We strung our communication and creativity together and we realised that our mission is to promote diversity and inclusion through innovative services and products. In a world where the voices of “the few” now begin to be heard and respected, we are looking forward to contributing to this attempt through experimental learning and consulting. we aim to optimise our work, values and behaviours through tailored training. Our training specifically aims to showcase how we can benefit from diversity and promote our vision through practical market policy models.
Our vision to radically reform the world to an inclusive and diverse setting, where everyone is equally heard, respected and celebrate led us to decide that the core of our services. Consulting, building workshops and research assistance are our main services and the field that we have expertise in is that of the DEI marketing model.
Through a semester of constant project development and brainstorming, we managed to approach possible clients and provide them with several of our products. It has been a great opportunity for us to work alongside Novibet and build a campaign for their latest project GiANTheart.
Furthermore, it has been an amazing experience for us to collaborate with the Greek NGO AMAKA and design the“Gender Identities Workshop”; an activity that required research and constant feedback from the organisation’s members. The result of the workshop as long as the communication strategy plan that we provided them with, is an outcome that required continuous evolvement and critical thinking. We were able to produce and present our work through Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard platform that enabled us to build graphs engagingly. Both our workshop and communication strategy plan was demonstrated through Miro. We are very pleased that AMAKA’s requirements were met with our work and the outcome was celebrated by both of us.
All these projects and their demanding execution made us realise that when we have a vision that is combined with strong social awareness, the result needs to be vocal, sustainable and clear. We found ourselves revisiting our work to be able to listen to and prioritise the social events while providing important material for the market.
Equally important was the strategy that our start-up decided to follow. Diversity and inclusion constitute the base of our vision and our work evolves in the context of transforming the market into a more inclusive model. We communicate and interact with society to always be aware of their needs whilst we aim to make a global impact based on social awareness and high-quality services. What describes best our policy as a business is that we listen actively. We are constantly connected with our customers and welcome their thoughts, opinions and most importantly, their feedback. A human-centric and sustainable approach is what we believe will make the desired impact and make our suggestions unique. Finally, collaboration is what makes us dream further and reach our goals. We believe in an interdisciplinary approach when we engage with social matters. We aim to offer services with a holistic impact and a point of view that comes from various environments. Our ambition gets enriched through dialogue and involvement
Crucial to this project has been the use of social media platforms to promote our work and progress. The platforms that we chose to use as a promotional tool are wisely chosen as we believe that our content fits better in certain platform policies. Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin are the ones that we selected. Since we created all our mass networking platforms, we have made clear the character of Choosing Diversity, the values and the vision that govern it. We publish every collaboration and new part of our work in a way that is comprehensive and to the point. These publications are direct so that there is identification in the content while avoiding the disorientation of the user.
We view Linkedin as a bridge to our possible collaborators and clients. We built a profile in order to present our work in a professional space in order to affect other individuals in certain workspaces and o be inspired by relevant endeavours. Among the social media platforms we used is Twitter, a platform that has great engagement and provides us to be globally seen through the use of a Hashtag. We reproduced all our work there; our identity, goals mission and vision. We shared our projects with our followers and created our Hashtag, #ChoosingDiversity. Finally, Instagram has been the platform that we noticed the highest engagement; we posted on daily basis parts of our research, collaborations and goals in a way that reflects our creative skills and aesthetics. It is very important to mention that we provided alt texts to our posts to be inclusive to anyone with Vision impairment.
Our website has been constantly updated and evolving accordingly to our collaborations and actions. We used Tilda, a tool that enabled us to design a website without code and to share our progress through high-quality templates and formats. We used our website to present our vision for a world with diverse settings while clarifying what Diversity and Inclusion mean to us. In addition, since, especially nowadays, sustainability is extremely important, we also refer to how our services promote it as we believe that these are major points to construct our homepage. The website consists of essential material; our services, collaborations, team and contact information.
To sum up, Choosing Diversity is a project that reflects all of our ambitions for a better, sustainable and inclusive future and it has been a brilliant experience being able to understand that marketing and the market, generally, can be part of the solution, without bearing old biases and stereotypes.
Maria Agiovlasiti, Christina Giannopoulou, Betty Tsakarestou
