In June, the QuickBooks Content Marketing team put together a digital Pride toolkit for small business owners looking to celebrate Pride in their own communities. Our hope is that with this collection of resources, we can help small business owners make diversity, equity, and inclusion a part of their business models, and be stronger allies to the community. It was heavily inspired by an internal toolkit that the Intuit Pride Network’s Executive Steering Committee made for office site leaders and adapted to fit the needs of our customers.
Cross-collaboration was the key to success in this project. There’s a difference between truly showing up for the community and simply signaling allyship for profit, so creating an informative and authentic resource was the most important aspect of this project. We did business interviews, used our internal Pride Employee Resource Group, and benchmarked with outside resources to ensure we were creating inclusive content to truly empower and power prosperity.
The Pride toolkit was adapted from an internal toolkit that was developed by Intuit’s Pride Network to provide guidance to Pride Network leaders across 14 active sites globally during their planning for Pride Month and beyond. The internal toolkit featured best practices around topics such as greener, more inclusive swag practices, ways to support local LGBTQIA+-owned businesses, and how to partner with NPOs furthering LGBTQIA+ causes, to name a few.
The QuickBooks Content Marketing team used this as a framework to inspire a customer-facing version of the toolkit that hit the same points in education, but also addressed the unique needs of small business owners like hiring diverse talent, ensuring your small business is a safer place for LGBTQIA+ employees, and resources for getting involved in local community events.
From a marketing perspective, our hope is to meet users at the top of the funnel with inspirational, educational content that positions QuickBooks as a thought leader in creating a more diverse small business community. We also know that many of our prospects choose brands they trust and are relatable to them. For us, that means showing up as a brand with purpose.
The internal toolkit published by our Pride Network was a first-of-its-kind document in Intuit’s ERG system, the scope of which continued to grow as feedback was actively solicited from global and site Pride Network leaders at all stages of development. When adapting and expanding upon it for LGBTQIA+-owner small businesses, We wanted to develop an engaging content experience that included reported articles, downloadable graphics, a marketplace, and infographics. The mix of storytelling formats is what makes the toolkit engaging and impactful.
For example, we created an easy-to-follow infographic with an accompanying worksheet to help small business owners select the right non-profit partners for Pride. Presenting this information in a customizable way gives the content more utility for our customers. A shoppable “swag marketplace” also breaks up the content experience by offering real LGBTQIA+ small businesses that can provide Pride merchandise to any business looking to celebrate.
This project was developed with a very limited budget, and the internal Pride Network toolkit drew inspiration from and was designed by a single volunteer, as is the case with many Employee Resource Group initiatives. As such, the toolkit was a tremendous cross-functional effort that spanned across multiple Intuit brands and teams. We worked together to create this almost entirely in-house — from writing articles and sourcing content from other Intuit brands like Mailchimp, to designing the landing page and sourcing LGBTQIA+ small businesses for our swag marketplace.
The Pride toolkit was one of most visited pages in the month of June and was met with great enthusiasm and positive feedback from our internal Pride Network community. Users also spent an above average amount of time on the page, which shows that our mix of content was engaging enough to keep users exploring. The toolkit was a labor of love in perfect alignment with the Intuit Pride Network’s mission of empowering LGBTQIA+ lives, opportunities, and experiences for communities, customers, and workers around the world through celebration, advocacy, and activism. Pride is not necessarily a priority moment for Intuit marketing teams (which typically focus on audience segments like Early Starts, Entrepreneurs, Employer Firms, etc) and our teams still wanted to work together to build something impactful for the small business owner audience and help our customers be stronger allies.
