Campaign objective:
As a long-time supporter of inclusivity in the workplace and Pride parades throughout the USA, T-Mobile wanted to bring a unique experience to Millennials & Gen Z around the history of Pride. They turned to Wattpad for its active LGBTQ+ community to share their stories while also gain perspective on the importance of this year’s Pride given the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
Goals
The specific goals of this campaign were to drive the following among Wattpad’s Millennial and Gen Z audiences:
In order to achieve these goals, the campaign set out to generate 10,000 stories tagged #UnlimitedPride. T-Mobile wanted to invite the community to rally together towards the goal of a $10,000 donation to GLSEN, an organization working to prompt LGBTQ+ inclusion and awareness in schools, by having their story contribute $1 to the cause. It became a true crowd-sourced effort to drive donations and conversation around the acceptance of everyone regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Insights and overview
The LGBTQ+ community on Wattpad has always been very active, and stories across the LGBTQ+ spectrum saw continued growth in 2018 when our community created exciting new narratives dedicated to people who identify as #Transgender, #Agender, #Genderfluid, and #Nonbinary. Reading time for stories with these tags saw an increase of 18 percent over the previous year to 32 million minutes for the year. Based on these insights that our community loves to read and write about LGBTQ+ characters and issues, T-Mobile turned to stories as a powerful tool to shape perceptions and enact change.
T-Mobile and Wattpad launched the #UnlimitedPride write-a-thon during Pride month 2019 where we challenged the community to share authentic stories around a moment that changed their life as a member or ally of the LGBTQ+ community. With the goal of generating 10,000 write-a-thon entries, we committed to donate $1 to GLSEN, up to $10,000, for every story tagged #UnlimitedPride.
Profile takeover
The LGBTQ+ profile on Wattpad is one of the most popular on the platform, with over 300K engaged followers. During Pride month it was fully rebranded with T-Mobile #UnlimitedPride and became the destination to connect over all write-a-thon content, including the campaign prompt and deeply powerful videos that inspired and educated our community about the Stonewall Riots, and how these events shaped the history of Pride.
Wattpad native media and social media
Wattpad’s suite of native media drove awareness of the write-a-thon and was further promoted to Wattpad’s millions of social media followers across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Influencer seeded entries:
Furthermore, 4 of Wattpad’s top LGBTQ+ influencers shared their own inspiring personal stories to further encourage the community. The influencers also promoted the write-a-thon off Wattpad on other social platforms.
The campaign was a huge success in using the power of storytelling to increase awareness of the history of Pride and drive donations for inclusion among LGBTQ+ youth.
The Wattpad community was thrilled with the campaign; more than 14,066 unique voices submitted an entry, surpassing the goal by more than 40%, and achieving the donation goal of $10,000 to GLSEN! This gave T-Mobile a force of thousands of ambassadors who shared important tales of what Pride means to them and who educated the community on the history of Pride.
In addition, the campaign generated:
The brand study results conducted by Interpret in July 2019 revealed that the campaign yielded:
