DE&I GUIDELINES 

DE&I GUIDELINES 

ACC Belgium 

Description 

When we anounced our new Board of Directors to the trade press last year, we anounced ‘The most diverse ACC Board ever’ (meaning as many women as men, young and experienced, from all disciplines). That came back to us as a Boomerang… So we decided to organize a series of workshops of our Board members and Allyens, an agency specialized in Inclusive marketing and communication. Out of those workshops, we distilled a paper Guidelines, which was endorsed by the main federations in the Belgian: Belgian Associationof Marketing, Creative Belgium, United Brands Association and United Media Association. 

What is innovative about this initiative? 

It gave us the opportunity to set create 1 standard for the Belgian communication sector and to act upon the DE&I Census which was led by the WFA and VoxComm/EACA. The guidelines provide insights on What exactly DE&I is, Why it is important for the communication sector and How every company can work on DE&I, based on a set of well illustrated premises, with extra sources of information via QR codes. We also provided a lexicon with the exact terminology, so that we alll speak the same language. 

Impact 

The fact that it was issued and supported by the 5 main trade associations (CreativeBelgium produced the campaign and the layout of the Guidelines), is a very important statement. the Guidelines were forwarded to all the members of the 5 federations and follow up was given by Allyens via ‘Brainer’-training sessions.