What would draw enough attention to introduce, explain and establish Play Unified in one go? We decided to reach out to sports heroes of today. But we didn’t ask them for help or their money, we didn’t take a humble position against these ‘Giants’, or ask for their sympathy vote. On the contrary, we turned the roles upside down: we let six unknown athletes with a mental disability boldly challenge today’s 7 biggest Belgian athletes, still more, we implied they wouldn't dare to take on the challenges. In this way, these six mentally disabled athletes didn’t just challenge seven sport heroes, they challenged the way the world looks at them.

It all started with six challenges (outdoor and online) that the top athletes eagerly shared on their social media. The public was charmed by the boldness of the special athletes and pressured their heroes to participate. Within 24 hours all 7 athletes accepted the challenge and we had managed to explain the concept of #playunified to the Belgian sportive community. In the next months we kept the conversation going, by making a media highlight of every Unified Game. During the whole campaign we stunted to gain traffic to playunified.be. On September 30th, for example, national coach of the Red Devils called 8 extra players (special athletes) at the official press conference. With each game played, #playunified generated more content, more people were talking about it and got convinced to participate. Thanks to the social media reach of our sports heroes, everyone could experience what Playing Unified was really about.

What started with 6 challenges managed to create a dialogue between thousands of people, with a social reach of 28 million. Belgian television, national radio and every big national newspaper covered the remarkable challenges. In all, this led to 68 million impressions, leading up to 3.4 million earned media in the course of six months. We managed to get #playunified in the spotlight and keep it there for over six months. People didn’t see our message once or twice, but four or five times. But the biggest victory was when we got the attention of the national sports Federations (football, bowling, tennis, badminton). Thanks to these partnerships, we changed the course of #playunified in Belgium, and hundreds of clubs and thousands of athletes will discover the joy of Playing Unified. Thus achieving our most important victory: the one of social inclusion of mentally disabled athletes through sports.