8. Create inclusive content
For consideration
Welcoming your audience through content and images representative of them can be a powerful way of increasing content engagement.
At its core, creating inclusive content is about:
- Writing in a clear, easy-to-understand way that
- Avoiding potentially harmful or exclusionary language
- Being considerate of the diversity of our audience and representing that audience in our words and images.
Language considerations
There are two critical aspects of writing for diversity and representation:
- Avoiding using exclusionary language
- Including representative language and examples
1. Avoiding using exclusionary language
These are terms, phrases, examples, or narratives that may be offensive or traumatic to any part of your audience.
For example, some common exclusionary issues could be words or phrasing that make light of mental health issues, phrases, or examples that are not inclusive of people of different identities (such as gender, race, and sexuality).
This includes avoiding stereotypes and biases that we tend to default to based on our lived experience while considering how different audiences may perceive our words.
2. Including representative language and examples
Beyond avoiding exclusionary examples, serving and engaging with diverse audiences also involves representing the diversity of our audience in stories and examples and in establishing tone and intention.
We must explore a diversity of personal, cultural, and lived experience considerations when crafting examples, suggesting behaviour or recommendations, and throughout subsequent content development.
Representative imagery
The imagery we use is critical as well.
If our content uses images of people, they should reflect the full range of diversity across our audience.
Diversity also applies to examples we may describe, photos or illustrations and includes people who may feature as part of a video, podcast, or even the content writing team.
Diverse image resources
Images and representation: creating more inclusive content highlights stock photography and illustration resources (many are free) to help inspire and source images for future content updates.
Bringing intention to our words and images will help people feel more welcome when engaging with our content.
It is an evolving practice to consider the nuance of language and imagery that best serves our audience.
Our writing guidelines expand on these objectives with more detail and examples of writing considerate of lived experience, representation, and understanding.