WeHo Pride 2024 celebrated West Hollywood’s long-standing commitment to LGBTQ+ advocacy and its role as a champion of equality and inclusion. Our goal was to bring the community together for a month-long celebration that highlighted the ongoing importance of the fight for equality.
As recent political efforts have sought to undermine the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals, including attempts to ban drag performances and restrict gender expression, this year’s WeHo Pride was more important than ever. We sought to highlight the city’s unwavering support for LGBTQ+ rights and reinforce the message that West Hollywood is a safe and inclusive space for all.
Our specific goals were to elevate LGBTQ+ voices, create an engaging and inclusive environment for the community and allies, and promote ongoing advocacy for issues such as transgender rights, reproductive freedom, and the fight against homophobia. We aimed to engage not only the local community but also inspire national and international audiences by providing a platform that fused celebration with activism. WeHo Pride was not just a festival—it was a statement of resilience and solidarity in the face of adversity.
The City of West Hollywood has a legacy of supporting marginalized communities, from being the first city with a majority openly LGBTQ+ elected body to its declaration as a sanctuary city for transgender individuals. WeHo Pride 2024 was designed to honor that legacy while continuing to fight for equality at all levels of government.
WeHo Pride 2024 was brought to life through a meticulously planned and executed multi-channel strategy that intertwined celebration with advocacy. Every program, event, and digital initiative was designed to highlight the ongoing struggles and achievements of the LGBTQ+ community while reinforcing West Hollywood’s legacy as a champion of equality. Our approach leveraged a combination of traditional practices, digital media, partnerships, and in-person engagement to amplify our message.
We launched an integrated marketing campaign that capitalized on our enhanced digital presence, including a transformative redesign of wehopride.com that significantly improved the user experience with a cleaner interface, cohesive branding, better navigation, and increased accessibility.
Our marketing efforts also spanned email and text campaigns, digital and print advertisements, outdoor signage, and social media. We leveraged text messaging to communicate directly with subscribers, providing them with real-time updates about event details and reminders. Our influencer and celebrity partnerships, including collaborations with Gigi Gorgeous (@gigigorgeous), Michelle Visage (@michellevisage), Ruba (@rubasworld), Denver Sean (@just.denver), and Alyx Liu (@alyxliu) helped to drive significant engagement across social platforms, reaching millions of impressions with fun, engaging content that highlighted WeHo Pride.
We utilized a network of approximately two dozen digital kiosks and transit shelters in high-traffic areas to promote WeHo Pride 2024. This effort was complemented by street pole banners and digital billboards, ensuring that the city was saturated with visible reminders of WeHo Pride.
A robust communications and marketing effort spanning nine months resulted in the highest attendance in WeHo Pride’s history. With a network of digital displays, transit shelters, street pole banners, and billboards, we reached approximately 1.3 million impressions, ensuring widespread visibility throughout the city. Our influencer-driven content reached 497,098 views, making it the most successful WeHo Pride digital campaign to date. Our Instagram following doubled, from 9.5K to 20K, and our strategic reduction in post volume led to a 120.6% increase in impressions and a 3.1% engagement rate. These results outpaced typical engagement rates for government-run accounts, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in engaging our audience.
Wehopride.com saw a 52% increase in views, jumping from 1.2 million in 2023 to 1.6 million in 2024. Our search impressions also reached 715k, and the average session duration increased from 48 seconds to a minute, indicating that users were not only visiting the site but spending more time engaging with the content. The success of this digital push was underscored by SEO improvements, which, for the first time, ranked WeHo Pride above other regional Pride celebrations in Google searches.
The campaign garnered extensive media coverage, with features in outlets such as Rolling Stone, People, Variety, ABC7, KTLA5, and more. Over WeHo Pride weekend alone, our media efforts resulted in 2.13 billion views, 15.5 million unique viewers, and a publicity value of $7.1 million. Finally, our text messaging campaign proved to be invaluable for communicating directly with attendees, allowing us to send real-time updates.
