A deep dive into our charity video production work with Contact, the charity for families with disabled children. A series of animated explainers tackling health, benefits and education, translated for the UK's most diverse families.
A series of charity animated explainers for Contact, tackling Strep A, RSV and Disability Living Allowance, written in plain English for stretched parents and re-versioned in Arabic, Polish and Somali to reach the families Contact supports.
Contact came to us with a problem every charity faces but few solve well: how do you communicate genuinely complicated information, Strep A symptoms, RSV in young children, the rules around Disability Living Allowance, to families who are already stretched, often exhausted, and whose first language might not be English? The films had to be unmistakably warm, plain in their language, and accessible to families navigating life with a disabled child for the first time.
We chose animation because it could carry warmth and clarity at the same time, and because it gave us a single visual world that could be re-versioned for every audience without another shoot. We worked closely with Contact's specialists to make sure every fact was right and every line was as plain as it could be without being patronising. Then, with the master English versions in hand, we re-recorded narration in Arabic, Polish and Somali and re-cut each film for those audiences, keeping the visual language identical so the story landed the same way every time.
The films landed, and they kept landing. Contact's first animation in the series clocked over 14,000 plays in its first few months alone, and the series has since become a permanent part of how the charity reaches the families it supports, shared through the helpline, embedded across the website, played at community events, and re-shared every year as new families come into Contact's care. The translated editions opened doors with audiences other formats couldn't reach, and the charity has continued to commission new topics from the same template ever since.
