Rainbows Don’t Help: Pride Campaigns Are Made By The Community For The Community
Representation matters. Pride campaigns and communication from brands always need to be made by a team of LGBTQ+ comms specialists.
This blog has been published before on:
Horizont.net 🇩🇪
MarketingTribune 🇳🇱
Let’s not beat around the proverbial bush: Pride is not for the promotion of your brand. Pride is a place, a moment, an event to advocate for the LGBTQ+ communities. Communication, content, marketing, and advertising can contribute to Pride, but have to be developed and executed by a team that properly understands and represents the communities. This goes for all agencies, consultants, brands and content-creating teams.
Can educated non-community members also create a meaningful campaign? Yes.
But there will always be personal distance and lack of experience. As the comprehension is so closely related to your experience as a queer person, it becomes vital to ones understanding. For many it’s a daily challenge: Not being able to be your true self, coming out, discrimination, and even abuse. This is why representation in your team matters.
It’s immediately visible when a non-inclusive team has worked on a campaign — representation matters! Yes I’m talking about you, rainbownized logos for the sake of Pride. Brands have tremendous impact on culture, society, and individuals. Using this influence to contribute to change has unlimited potential. Among the best practices are campaigns that advocate, represent, educate, that run 365 days a year, and don’t commercialise the LGBTQ+ communities for the brand’s own profits. This, in fact, fits exactly to the spirit and purpose of Pride. It’s not just about the most visible aspect: the party. During the season, many events focus on education, awareness and inclusion.
So, how do you ensure proper representation in your team?
Experts vs. Part of the community
First, and foremost we are communication / marketing specialists, not just people part of the community. Exactly like we do in our day jobs, we are experts working on content with a goal. The risk of speaking up about Pride, is to be labelled as the queer activist, often associated with many stereotypes. Personally, when arguing for the community, I’ve been dismissed in different ways. My views were too “progressive”, “personal”, and even “too gay”. All are dismissive, and the exact opposite of what Pride stands for.
Take us seriously as experts in our field.
Exclusion vs. Representation
A sensitive topic: Can non-LGBTQ+ communication specialists work on Pride campaigns? Yes. But, make sure the team properly represents the community. And I mean representation in the broader sense of the word. Especially with a focus on already underrepresented communities. Represent all skin colors, genders, backgrounds, religions, disabilities, sexual orientations, and other. It’s almost impossible to accurately represent the entire community, but by trying you’ll get very far. The point is to not exclude anybody and exclude or discredit your LGBTQ+ employees, in any way.
Even in recent years I’ve tried to support + help Pride campaigns (yes, featuring rainbownized products), suggesting actual ways to support the community. Only to be pushed out of the projects as my views were too “extreme”, or that “client wasn’t ready for this”, or the worst “this is not about you”. Exactly the situations to avoid, make progress, not regress.
Tokenization vs. Initiative
Don’t assume that all experts in the field that identify as LGBTQ+ actually want to work on Pride campaigns. Definitely not everyone wants to work on it, for personal or professional motivations. By assigning the rainbow campaigns to the one out & proud specialist in the social media team, you are singling them out for their identity. You are tokenising them. Just because somebody is part of the community, does not mean they want to work on Pride projects. And remember, every reason is a valid reason. Instead of tokenizing, promote a culture of initiative, where your team feels responsible and free to advocate for the things important to them. Enable and incentivise doing Good, which ultimately rubs the magic off on your company.
As said above, at work, we are experts first, community-members second. This distinction is very important in creating a culture of initiative.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions or for clarification, it’s not an easy subject. There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. Everybody should feel safe enough to ask questions and discuss. If a situation occurs where things are said that might be counterproductive (e.g. marginalize, hurtful, or offensive), call for a short time-out during a meeting and take some time for an explanation. That way you pause the subject, clarify and continue in an informed way. Conversation contributes to progress.
The bottom line
It should be clear by now that before you start any rainbow projects, you should assemble a team diverse enough to ensure proper impact. A big part of that is having a diverse and inclusive culture. Safe and free enough for people to speak up, ask questions, and make mistakes. Always think back to the core of Pride: human rights.
Everyone is allowed to make mistakes. But after reading this, you’ll hopefully not make the same mistake (again) — Let’s hear it for more representation of experts during Pride.
