This campaign, run by COCEMFE and its movement of associations, is woven around the International Day of People with Disabilities (3 December), signalling the amendments required in the Commonhold Property Act to ensure that those with reduced mobility can leave home on their own. In Spain more than 1.8 million of them need help from someone else to leave home and roughly 100,000 are never able to at all because they lack this help.

It is exasperating for those with physical and organic disabilities to continue to have to demand their rights. The feeling of being trapped in their homes is so real and rings so true that it is hard to find an account that doesn’t use this comparison. We took this starting point from communication that they used some years ago with the intention of conserving its essence, highly interiorized by the “COCEMFE tribe”. We launched it this time with a new slant, but without losing sight of the demands for amending this Act and getting to the bottom of the issue.

#UnaCasaDeLaQuePoderSalir (#AHomeToLeave) is the concept that we rested the campaign on, and it worked as a message for a political demand to lawmakers. It was a collective concept that spoke in very plain language about accessibility.

In order to build our communication, we resorted to the lift, a symbol of accessibility in buildings. Installing a lift is usually the most necessary work that needs to be performed, but doesn’t get done because of budgetary obstacles, a lack of empathy or a lack of political will. Having a lift, a ramp, and other means of accessibility may make the difference between confinement and being able to leave and come back home, to lead a normal life full of plans and everyday activity.

We took to the streets and lobbies of apartment buildings with a COCEMFE communication team to take action in various condominiums in Madrid. We placed our own version of the well-known “lift out of order” signs and filmed the neighbours’ reactions. That video constituted the main piece and starting point of the campaign that ran the week prior to December the third.

The graphic campaign shows different people with different disabilities living their lives thanks to their lifts: a student in a wheel chair, a retiree taking a walk with his prothesis leg, and an office worker and her bottle of oxygen. These emotional pieces come hand in hand with others that addressed the amendments to the Act and proposals made by the organization while playing with the buttons on the lift.

Lastly, we involved COCEMFE’s movement of associations with a participative action on Instagram that leveraged the widespread habit of taking pictures in front of the mirror in the lift.

The campaign achieved good impact within the scope of its budget, and was our first project working with associations of the disabled.