Launching the world’s first social media platform for LGBTQIA+ youth
We helped the world’s oldest LGBTQIA+ non-profit organisation, COC NL, and a pro bono team of the leading queer marketers in the Netherlands with a PR strategy and a media outreach plan to relaunch Jong&Out: the world’s first social app for queer youth.
With LGBTQIA+ youth twice as likely to face mental health issues, and 4.5 times more likely than their heterosexual and cisgender peers to commit suicide, Jong&Out is inspired by statistics showing that the best way to combat these issues is to put young queer people in contact with like-minded others – making it a mental health lifeline as well as a social network.
Against a backdrop of continued violence against the LGBTQIA+ community, the relaunch campaign focused on celebrating all aspects of queer joy instead – positioning the app as a fun, safe space that young LGBTQIA+ people can own and define for themselves.
To create meaningful exposure around the Jong&Out app and the people supporting it, we worked closely with Bernadette who is a Dutch media specialist and together we secured in-depth interviews and articles in some leading Dutch news, lifestyle and LGBTQIA+ publications including Cosmopolitan and WINQ, as well as coverage in top advertising and creative industry titles around the globe - reaching an estimated audience of 43 million.
But most importantly, the campaign also generated 700 new sign-ups to the Jong&Out app - each representing a queer kid now connected to a mental health lifeline.
Find out more about the campaign in our own Q&A with star strategist and STUDIO WORROM founder Steph Morrow.
With tokenism still rife in agencies, we wanted to emphasise the story of the queer creatives behind the campaign – who came together from across the ad industry as a pro-bono team in the ultimate embodiment of using skills and knowledge for good. United by a common cause - to support a resource they wished they had had access to as teenagers – they created a genuinely authentic and accessible campaign - one that reflected the different facets of the queer experience with a deep understanding of queer cultural references across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, rather than from a single vantage point.
The creative project was led by the indomitable Steph Morrow, founder of Studio Worrom - and we specifically wanted to shine a light on her work and her values. As a queer female-led company, she explicitly centres intersectional perspectives and narratives and donates her time expertise to projects like this.
