Tips For a Successful Pride Campaign

Is your organisation looking to mark this year’s Pride season with intention, accountability, and authenticity? A successful Pride campaign can further your company’s progress both internally, and publicly. However, an unsuccessful Pride campaign can have an adverse effect, and result in accusations of ‘rainbow washing.’

Here are our key tips for you to ensure you are authentically supporting Pride this year.

1) Have Purpose

Accusations of ‘Rainbow Washing’ are often the first stumbling block for many brands come Pride season. From adapting your logo to the Pride colours, to creating short-term Pride themed merchandise, Rainbow Washing can take many forms, but all with the same outcome: the making of profit from queer people without doing anything to actively support the LGBT+ community.

There are many ways to demonstrate an authentic, purposeful campaign:

• Is your organisation LGBT+ inclusive in its policies and procedures?

• Is your company ensuring fair practices within recruitment?

• Does your organisation regularly run programmes, campaigns, or events to embed awareness around LGBT+ issues?

• Are your organisation’s services and products inclusive of LGBT+ customers or clients?

• Are you supporting the LGBT+ community beyond your organisation, e.g. through charity partnerships or community initiatives?

2) Host Events and Promote Storytelling

Our LGBT <25s Surveys have shown that negative lived experiences and discrimination cases were more acute within intersectional LGBT+ respondents, especially bisexual, trans and non-binary individuals. In these cases, lack of visibility in media, public, and at work, was given as reasons for this.

Make sure any panel events, campaigns and storytelling collateral are representative of all LGBT+ voices. It’s usually the under-represented segments of our community that are harder to find, but this type of visibility is vital.

3) Go Global, And Go Local!

It’s easy to gravitate to major cities for Pride Festivals, but it’s important to remember that struggles for equity and representation are often considerably harder in more rural areas of the UK. Our most recent Under 25 survey highlighted just this and it is in these areas that we must target our focus. Consider supporting these more localised Pride events.

Similarly, more global companies can look at how they support those in countries where it’s unfortunately still not OK to be LGBT+. If they have offices there, they can make sure their policies are LGBT+ inclusive, and if not, they can partner with charity organisations or NGOs that are making an impact.

4) Changing Your Logo

If you organisation decides to adapt its logo for Pride season, consider adopting the Progress Pride Flag colours specifically. 

This Progress Flag, first launched in 2018, placing intersectionality and purpose at the helm with the inclusion of the trans and non-binary colours. The most recent version is Valentino Vecchietti’s Intersex Progress Pride flag, which launched in 2021.

When opting for the new version, it is important that you can articulate the purpose behind it and ensure your organisation is reflective of inclusion in this space.

If you do decide to change your logo, then it is important you make this change across all areas of your business.  For example: don’t just use it in your London stores, make sure it’s also being changed in more local and rural locations, where representation is so desperately needed.

And remember…

To embed sustainable change, LGBT+ voices should be visible and present in your organisation all year round, not just during Pride.