As a place that fosters connection and conversation, OkCupid wanted to share its commitment to supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and help our users connect over their shared support during the largest civil rights movement of our time. Though our badges historically take 2-3 months of development between the marketing and product teams, the #BlackLivesMatter badge went from concept to launch in 72 hours.
To drive awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement among OkCupid’s tens of millions of daters around the world, we launched new product features, including a profile badge and in-app questions focused on racial equality and justice, leveraging CRM, earned media, owned media and social platforms to amplify the announcement.
We launched in-app matching questions* in markets around the world addressing racial inequality for users, which have been answered over 1,775,000 times and counting, including:
How will you address racial inequality?
Is it important that your date fights for racial justice?
Is it OK to silently support racial equality?
Do you protest to fight inequality?
Second, we rolled out the new #BlackLivesMatter profile badge in over a dozen countries where marches and protests were happening. OkCupid users were able to get the badge on their profile by answering “yes” to the question “Do you want to support the #BlackLivesMatter movement by adding a badge to your profile?”
We formally announced the new #BlackLivesMatter badge on OkCupid’s famous blog, sharing each component of the launch, which included:
Donating $1 million in advertising space on OkCupid to Black civil rights organizations. These amazing non-profits deserve a space to be heard, and if we can help in even a small way, we’re honored to do that. (The first recipient of this donation was the NAACP for its #WeAreDoneDying campaign.)
Donations to the ACLU, Black Girls CODE, Fair Fight Action, and the NAACP.
*OkCupid’s in-app matching questions power the algorithm in matching people we feel are compatible based on their responses to our questions (and other filters).
After the launch on June 11, more than 575,000 people opted to add the #BlackLivesMatter badge to their OkCupid profiles. Those who chose to publicly support the movement by adding the badge to their profiles were 2.5% more likely to receive a first message and received more likes than those without the badge. They are also 2x more likely to match with a person who also has the badge than someone who does not, and are 10% more active on OkCupid than those without the badge. Clearly, shared support of the movement is important to daters and they want to connect with fellow supporters!
The matching questions caused a huge spike in conversations on our platform around this movement. In fact, there was an increase in the amount of intro-messages once the badge went live. There were over 705,000 responses to our matching questions around the time of the badge launch and there’s been over a 900% increase in “Black Lives Matter” mentions on OkCupid profiles between May and June alone.
Press
We earned more 20 feature stories in leading publications including Ad Age, Adweek, Bustle, Campaign, Forbes, Fox Business, Mashable and New York Daily News
Social
Our Tweets addressing the Black Lives matter movement garnered over 250K impressions
Our Instagram posts addressing the Black Lives matter movement & announcement of the badge reached over 15K accounts (42% were not following OkCupid) and earned over 20,000 impressions
