PFLAG Canada
Destination Pride

The Goal

Draw attention to global inequalities – and help a community navigate them. As with many marginalized groups, the global LGBTQ+ community has been engaged in an ongoing struggle for equality. That struggle plays out across a country’s laws, rights, and cultural landscape. Marriage equality, adoption, blood donation, military service rights, even the rules surrounding gender assignment on government documentation – each can have a profound impact on a person’s life. And each are governed by specific public policies and laws. It’s a lot of data. And navigating it creates ongoing complexity.

The Objectives

Shine a light on global LGBTQ+ inequalities.
Engage global LGBTQ+ travellers.
Bring scale to PFLAG Canada’s mandate.

The Target

Primary: LGBTQ+ travellers and their allies.
Secondary: Global activists.
Tertiary: Global partners with a vision for equality.

Insights and strategy

As often as laws are tools of protection, they can also be tools of oppression – with marginalized communities being especially vulnerable. The sheer volume and decentralized nature of legal data on LGBTQ+ issues is a barrier to access and, fundamentally, a barrier to progress. From its work as a peer-to-peer not-for-profit supporting the LGBTQ+ community, PFLAG Canada knew that inequalities are both widespread and vary widely depending on where you are.

The Plan

To launch a global platform called Destination Pride – a data-driven search platform that reimagines the Pride flag as a dynamic bar graph, then uses it to visualize the world’s LGBTQ+ laws, rights and social sentiment. For the launch, the agency created more than 100 geographically individualized Facebook Ad campaigns targeting people who were interested in LGBTQ+ topics, groups and events, and who showed an interest in travel. Ads ran in local languages, and were contextual to local news events, such as the cancellation of the Pride parade in Uganda. In total, the team created more than 100 unique campaigns, running in 92 countries and 46 languages. On reaching the site, users could search any town, city, province, state or country on earth. The website’s algorithm automatically calculates six key measures of acceptance. It then generates a Pride flag visualization based on the data. Each visualization provides a quick snapshot and point of comparison for how far a destination is on its journey to LGBTQ+ acceptance. The team made sharing easy through our “Raise the flag” call to action.

Technology and tools

While building the platform, the team started by identifying six key areas of focus:
1. Marriage equality
2. Sexual activity law
3. Gender identity protections
4. Anti-discrimination laws
5. Civil rights and liberties
6. Social media sentiment

The website’s algorithm gathers the country, state and city-level laws that govern those areas from the LGBTQ+ knowledge base Equaldex. Next, it validates and gap-fills with data from Wikipedia. Finally, it pulls real-time social media sentiment from the social analytics tool Netbase. Each bar is assigned a value, then averaged to an overall numerical score.

By combining hard legal data with soft social sentiment data, the platform seeks to provide a fuller picture of on-the-ground conditions for both local LGBTQ+ communities and travellers.

User Experience

DestinationPride.org has been in development for 18 months, and was market-tested across three distinct prototypes:

June 2017 – Beta.
January 2018 – Version 1.0 + launch.
April 2018 – Version 2.0.

Between major releases, the team implemented a series of updates and patches – each designed to address user feedback, tweak the algorithm for accuracy, and improve the user experience. The innovative visualization, combined with a refined user interface, contribute to a powerful experience. Creating a quick and emotional reaction to the work. “What!? I thought San Francisco would be higher.”

Supporting channels

Facebook, Twitter, Digital OOH, Olympic microsite.

The Results

The brand and the agency were able to make breakthrough creative, engaging users from 156 of the world’s 195 countries. It saw over 85,000 destinations searched and flags generated and more than 135 pieces of media coverage. There was a 1,226% increase in social mentions of PFLAG Canada. The campaign drew partnership interests from major global travel and LGBTQ+ community brands. Pride flag visualizations have been included in the London Design Museum’s retrospective on graphic design and political messaging. The show, called, “Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008-18” runs until August 12, 2018.

Supplementary Information

Destination Pride has become one of the most awarded campaigns in Canadian history:
13 Cannes Lions (three Golds), four One Show Pencils, three ADC Awards, Graphite D&AD Pencil, People’s Voice at Webby’s and Gold for Idea at 2018 Andy Awards.