Queer Joy Campaign

Hopelab celebrated Pride Month 2021 a little differently by reflecting on the concept of joy and what it means for the LGBTQ+ community. Pride is defined as a feeling of satisfaction derived from one’s own achievement or the achievements of those with whom one is closely associated. Celebrating joy takes pride to the next level—to pure happiness and elation. During Pride Month (and beyond) we celebrate all of the accomplishments and triumphs of the LGBTQ+ community. We acknowledge the equity journey has been hard and is not without pain, still continues, and we have a lot of work to do. And on that journey are amazing moments of joy that we need to acknowledge and celebrate.

STRATEGY & TACTICS 

We asked LGBTQ+ youth (ages 13-26) as well as other members of the LGBTQ+ community (LGBTQ+ people aged 26+, partners working in the LGBTQ+ space with us, community allies, parents and caregivers, co-workers, and anyone who has celebrated a moment of Queer Joy) to contribute to the campaign by sharing a moment of #QueerJoy. 

With a modest ad spend, only $200, we set out with ambitious plans to curate a month's worth of joy-filled queer content that would uplift the LGBTQ+ community and take Pride to the next level. We utilized tools like typeform to make it easy for people to submit their entries, complete submissions, contribute to captions, and sign media release forms. 

Pre-promotional activities included personalized outreach to our partners at CenterLink and the It Gets Better Project as well as eye-catching in-feed and story posts on our Instagram feed announcing the Queer Joy campaign. In addition to thinking about joy, we planned for crisis mitigation efforts including a response to hate speech (in any of the comments on our posts of those of the collaborators). As a team, we agreed on using the term "queer" and had a response for why we choose to use that language.

We designed our campaign assets with accessibility in mind, using colors and fonts that were readable and re-stating the ask in the caption.

RESULTS 

With a modest budget, our campaign resulted in great success. We were able to uplift the voices of LGBTQ+ contributors and allies and share their stories of what Queer Joy looks like as well as increasing engagement and diverse demographics within our following. 

The campaign ran on Hopelab’s Instagram channel during the month of June. The hashtag #QueerJoy collected a total of  3,751 impressions, 417 likes, 26 comments, 42 link clicks and increased our engagement by 533.8% on Instagram. Post-campaign, 12% of our total Instagram following are individuals that identify as nonbinary.