Youtube briefed us with their mission to ‘celebrate and donate’. They wanted to create content that would celebrate LGBTQIA+ culture during Pride month and drive a Gen Z audience to donate to their AKT charity partner. The brand wanted to find a way to acknowledge the challenges the LGBTQIA+ community have had through history and continue to endure, but also the hard-won ability to celebrate the progress made. Despite the fact that due to covid, the community weren’t able to be together, YouTube recognised that the need to celebrate was still crucial.
THE SOLUTION - SHARE THE PRIDE
Our creative concept, ‘Share the Pride’, saw us pair-up content creators from YouTube and TikTok in a series of YouTube-hosted live stream events. We created a series of four mini events that built up to YouTubes big virtual party at the end of the month featuring Elton John and Olly Alexander. The events were designed to connect with a Gen-Z audience to inspire them to get involved with the celebrations and ultimately donate to akt.
With TikTok dubbed the ‘soul of LGBTQIA+ internet’, we needed to draw the community back to YouTube and cement the platform as the home of Pride in the run up to the live shows. By pairing the creators, we were able to show the power of community in raising awareness and funds for akt, as well as tap into the existing and engaged LGBTQIA+ Gen-Z audiences on TikTok and bring them over to YouTube.
To create the best chance of driving donations it was important that the episodes were live streamed as we knew that our audience was more likely to donate when they could see the real-time impact of their donations. We worked with Tiltify, a tool that enabled us to display the live total of donations directly on the creator’s channels.
The Live Streams
Each hour-long stream was unique and completely driven by audience participation. They would start out with relatively straightforward challenges that increased in intensity as certain donation milestones were reached. Deaf creator Jessica Kelgren-Fozard and TikTok chef Poppy O’Toole baked personalised biscuits where bespoke orders were ‘unlocked’ as bigger donations were made, meanwhile Alex Elmslie and iNabber drew portraits of one another and allowed their audience to dictate how far they would go with their outfits for the evening. Lily Rose and Gary Thompson AKA Plastic Boy found themselves eating the world’s hottest chicken wings and applying one another’s makeup whilst blind creator Lucy Edwards paired up with Jamie and Shaaba to take part in a load of hilarious forfeits that included some misplaced peanut butter. The creators punctuated their challenges with serious messages highlighting the issues of homelessness within the LGBTQIA+ community and the fantastic work that akt does to combat it.
The Results
The four live stream events raised a total £8,531 for akt which was in addition to YouTube’s donation. This was almost double (+89%) the initial target. 90%+ of views and donations came from within the live stream itself, meaning people were engaged throughout and felt the content within the live streams was worth watching and donating for. As the livestreams started our creators were flooded with positive comments from the watching audience. Whilst many posted rainbow and heart emojis to show support, a significant volume also shared emotive messages on the challenges they had faced being part of the LGBTQIA+ community and recollected personal memories such as coming out to friends or family. To see such love shared between individuals online was an incredible reward for all involved.