Rotary Club Ljubljana-Castle has launched a charity project this year called “Living with Dyslexia” in order to raise public awareness on dyslexia and its challenges. The Club invited other Slovenian Rotary, Rotaract and Interact clubs to participate, while our team has actively joined the project as a communication support. In the first phase, we have set up a Facebook page Living with Dyslexia (Življenje z disleksijo) raising awareness on a daily basis on this subject, publishing tips for easier everyday life, interesting facts and confessions of people from all over the world who are successfully facing dyslexia.

Inclusion of digital influencers
In parallel with the European Dyslexia Awareness Week in early October, we were looking for opportunities to further spread the word on this topic, and have developed the project “Now I Understand You, too!”,which is still on-going on social networks. We decided to invite various familiar faces and digital influencers from the world of media, politics, sports and other entertainment content to reach a wide range of followers from different target groups, ensure a personal touch and add credibility to the project. In short – activation on social networks with the help of ambassadors and digital influencers has helped us to spread the word about dyslexia among as many people as possible in a relaxed and effective way.

About our collaboration
In order to better understand the challenges people with dyslexia are facing on a daily basis, we challenged our familiar faces to sign themselves with their dominant hand first, and then with the non-dominant hand while replacing the vowels with predefined symbols. Since we wanted their content to be as authentic as possible, we gave them free hands in making posts, however ensured them with the content cues and adequate hashtags to follow the key messages easier.

What were the results?
In the first week, our project was successfully supported by the President of the Republic of Slovenia Borut Pahor, Slovenian alpine skier Ilka Štuhec, politician Matej Tonin, chef-judge Alma Rekić, Dunking Devils acrobats, journalists Suzana Perman and Nika Kunaver, PRO PLUS Programming Director Branko Čakarmiš, Rotaract Club Žalec members and Tomaž Rožen, Mayor of the Municipality of Ravne na Koroškem. Thanks to their contribution, the number of our “Living with Dyslexia” Facebook page views increased by 23% from the beginning until the end of October 2018, the number of followers increased by 32%, the reach increased by 96%, and the number of followers’ involvement by 109%. Due all of this, we have successfully contributed to the awareness on this topic.

All of you who want to contribute to the awareness on dyslexia are warmly welcome to participate in the project “Now I understand you, too!”.