¿Cuáles son las mejores formas de hacer que tu proyecto de innovación social sea inclusivo y accesible?

One thing I’ve found helpful is studying existing social innovation models and creating a graded hierarchy of their pros and cons. This can inform the secondary research, desk research you then do to identify gaps your project can fill.

Disability is a natural human variation. Therefore, inclusion and accessibility are designed for all types of human variation. Not common types or the ones we understand, but all of them. Knowing your audience in a way you can use to make a social innovation program inclusive and accessible requires - desktop research of minimum standards and common expectations eg WCAG standards, and Plain English standards - identifying useful edge cases that will scale back into the mainstream eg cognitive impairment, helps ensure content is truly simple and easy to use While the methods listed in this article are helpful, you can take some of the heavy lifting off customer interviews with the above. They likely expect you to meet WCAG standards.

Conduct thorough research: Before starting your project, conduct comprehensive research to understand the needs, challenges, and aspirations of the target community or population. Engage in consultations, interviews, and surveys to ensure that the project addresses their specific requirements.

You should not start with the solution. You should start by better understanding the problem through consulting people. If you start with the solution you risk all kinds of cognitive bias such as confirmation bias, affirmation bias etc. As well as potentially alienating and upsetting key groups of stakeholders without having properly understood the problem.

Do a comprehensive stakeholder mapping. I divide stakeholders in three categories: 1. Key Stakeholders: who are directly impacted by the project and are involved throughout 2. Primary Stakeholders: those who play an active role in conception of the project and networking and 3. Secondary Stakeholders: who play an active role in disseminating the project to the target audience.

Stakeholder involvement is crucial to develop your social impact projects, and include others. Engage with your stakeholder at different levels, including: - Customers - Partners - Shareholders - Sponsors - Community members Listen to the feedback they provide on the projects you have planned, and ask them for their involvement in future planning. This will hopefully create more engagement and enthusiasm from the involved parties for your projects.

Co-design from conceptualisation to end with people who have disabilities. This will allow authentic inclusion based on lived experience. Also keep an intersectional informed design with factors like income, age, geography in mind.

Involve all stakeholders in the design process. Ask for feedback and advice from people from diverse backgrounds, including different age groups, people with disabilities, locations, and different cultural origins, to name a few. Doing this, different groups will feel more included in the design process, and you also make it accessible for all.

Remove barriers to participation: Identify and address any barriers that may prevent individuals from participating in the project. This could include physical, financial, cultural, or language barriers. Provide accommodations, such as accessible venues, translation services, or financial support, if needed, to ensure equal participation. It is crucial to promote diversity and representation: Ensure that the project team and leadership reflect the diversity of the target community or population. Embrace inclusivity in decision-making processes and seek diverse perspectives to avoid bias and promote a broader understanding of the community's needs.

Logic models and theories of change all introduce reductive cognitive biases into the process. From complexity science we know that we should test multiple small scale solutions in parrallel to one another. This allows us to understand from practice what solution works best. What are the tradeoffs, and whether different solutions work better for different people. People are not one thing they are multiple.

Collect users stories and those of staff alongside the data to give it meaning. What Nora Bateson calls 'warm data'. By understanding the impact of the project from multiple perspectives we can create much richer information.