Life Without Barriers understands the complexities of communications in a multi-service organisation and we make every effort to have two-way consistent, clear and broad-reaching communications both externally to support our clients in achieving their goals, and internally to support our program operations.
Internal and external stakeholder engagement is vital to achieve our purpose to partner with people and change lives for the better. We’re always looking for opportunities to promote our community services to potential partners who will support us to find new and innovative ways to improve the lives of the people we support. Through our stakeholder engagement we make sure we know our clients’ and stakeholder’s needs and have a good balance of support to ensure the validity of our work.
Managing our relationships with clients, employees, and external providers and funders is key to our sustainability in the sector. It keeps us on the front foot with developing issues, challenges, expectations and opportunities in the sector and enables us to continue on our journey to champion opportunity for all.
Sharing our stories
We aim always aim for our public media voice to be always in a respectful and appropriate manner regardless of the tone or style of media, public or political commentary, with the necessity to maintain confidentiality.
Social media is a growing force in Australia as people embrace the mobility of smart devices, and the opportunity to be both author and editor of their views and information.
To engage with our community, we need to be where they are. And that has meant joining the conversations on social media. During 2014 Life Without Barriers have significantly increased their use of Social Media platforms. In particular, Facebook has been a success story with our audience increasing from 1200 to almost 5000. This has now become a platform for us to highlight relevant events, services, resources and engage with our audience. It has become a useful tool for us to listen and respond to others knowledge and opinions in regards to our key services.
In the last 3 months Facebook has also been useful as a tool for recruiting new foster carers, this type of promoted posting and campaign style will continue to build brand awareness for us and help us engage with potential employees and clients.
LWB joined Twitter in November 2013 and we now have almost 400 followers. Our followers are very active and join our conversation frequently with retweets and hashtags. Our National Carer Awards are a good example of the power of social media to engage a wide audience with a specific purpose. The hashtag carerawards2014 was utilised on our Twitter and Facebook account as a conversation tool for these awards and has worked well in keeping our followers and interested parties informed and engaged.
Of course, we also manage our own online communication. In alignment with the look and feel inspired by our new brand we launched a new website. However, it isn’t only how it looks, but how we explain our work, service opportunities and activities that has changed. The information on the website has been re-organised to make the visitor experience more interesting, informative and as simple as possible for visitors. Our increased online presence has also made it easier to share video case studies of the work we do in partnership with our clients, and to explore new ways of engaging people in what we do; and this online annual report is on such example.
We also created a new all-purpose contact number 1800 WE LIVE (1800 935 483), and in March 2014 released our staff and stakeholder newsletter, We Live Life, in both a print and online version.
Public Policy
Life Without Barriers continues to contribute to the public policy space and represent the views of our clients, and the experience and knowledge of our staff, by responding to calls for submissions by various agencies.
In the past year in the disability sector we responded to the Australian Law Reform Commission Issues Paper, Equality, Capacity and Disability in Commonwealth Laws. We provided feedback to the NSW Department of Family and Community Services, Ageing, Disability and Home Care regarding the Disability Inclusion Bill 2014, and feedback to National Disability Services (NDS) in relation to the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) Draft 2013-16 Strategic Plan. We also responded to the Parliament of Victoria Family and Community Development Committee in relation to the Inquiry into Social Inclusion and Victorians with a Disability. We also provided feedback to the Government of South Australia regarding Building a Stronger Society, a Discussion Paper on Social Impact Investment.
The Australian Human Rights Commission National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention 2014 was a very good opportunity to convey the voices of the children in our SRAS program in a respectful and confidential way. All clients who experienced held detention as a child were invited to share their detention stories by commenting on postcards designed by our clients in the SRAS Program. The postcard has been developed as a tool for collecting feedback from minors throughout the SRAS Program, not just for the submission.
Conferences- Speakers- Events
Some of the events and conferences where Life Without Barriers shared its activities and practices with our sectors included:
- Association of Children’s Welfare Agencies
- Australian Society of Intellectual Disability
- CREATE Foundation Conference
- Youth Advocate Program event with Macquarie Group/Foundation
- National Disability Services events across the country.
Reporting
In April 2014, Life Without Barriers was named as the ‘Best First Time Entrant’ in the 2013 Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) Transparency Awards held in Sydney. The awards recognise not-for-profit organisations with the most rigorous and transparent reporting on strategy, services, financials and governance; and we were a Silver Award Recipient in the Australasian Reporting Awards for excellence in reporting for our 2013 Annual Report.