New ways to support services working with disabled people

“Social Inclusion Marketing” is a project co-financed by the European Commission’s Erasmus + Programme (grant ID 2019-1-PT01-KA204-060716), Key Action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices. SIM’s mission is to strengthen the EU’s contribution in support of Member States’ commitments and efforts to promote the Social Inclusion and extending and developing competences of professionals. To this effect, SIM project tackles the challenge to improve the social inclusion of disadvantaged groups by developing social marketing pedagogical tools fully adapted for the professional’s social sector.   According to ESMA (associated partner): “Social marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behavior that benefits individuals and communities for the greater social good (French and Russell-Bennett, 2014.) Its goal is to develop new skills, competencies, training products & methodologies to enable the professionals of social area to innovate and adopt more effective interventions in their daily working life. Find out more about the project objectives. [Link to “project objectives” page]

Methodology  

SIM aims to create synergies between two disciplines together, in order to co-create innovations solutions that can help social’s professionals to face in a new way the problems that affect disabled people. In the project experts from two different disciplines (social marketing and social services) are willing to share their knowledge, skills and different perspectives to find innovative training solutions. The two participating disability organizations will propose real social challenges to the two universities to be resolved by using the social marketing techniques. The social theoretical framework is based on the “quality of life model” and “individualized support model” (social indicators). [Link to “project materials” page]

Social Workers

 

Professionals are the main target of the project. Since they work on the field on a daily basis, they are the ones that better know the issues that have to be addressed. Moreover, they are the ones that can better apply and value the efficacy of the innovative instruments developed by the project.

Project objectives

 

• To develop an innovative and useful social inclusion marketing training materials for social educators and training decision-takers.
• To develop and validate a new training methodology: SIM learning case study.
• To develop and validate a new SIM pedagogical strategy.
• To improve the competences of social services workforce in social inclusion marketing.
• To implement social marketing methodologies and techniques in social sector organizations.
• To improve the synergies between social marketing field and social services.
• To develop pedagogical materials to promote the transparency of the qualifications the in European Union.
• To show the social community good practices and examples of how to adapt marketing techniques and strategies into the social sector.
• To explore the options to integrate social marketing in the curricula of UV and other European Universities.

 

 

Project partners from four European countries – Bulgaria, Switzerland , Spain and Portugal- work together to exchange and analyse knowledge about new social marketing & social inclusion models to combine mixed-method approaches to address the problems of professionals faces in the labour area of disability. They meet regularly in order to discuss the project development, check the results and define the next steps to take.   “Social Inclusion Marketing” is about building sustainable and effective solutions for disabled people.