Making Equality Go Viral

There’s no question Latin American countries are well on their way to recognize and celebrate LGBT equality. Fundación Igualitxs was founded in 2016 with the intent to educate and fight for equal rights in Central America. I have been fortunate enough to consult in social media and branding strategies for this important work.

The foundation has achieved important legal milestones, including a constitutional lawsuit filed in Supreme Courts across Central America. However, their education initiatives are slowly raising awareness and opening hearts and minds.

Costa Rica held its presidential election on February 4, 2018. However, since neither candidate achieved 50% of the vote, a second round was called for April 1st. LGBTI issues quickly became the main issue on a campaign between a pro-LGBTI center left candidate and a conservative Evangelical preacher.

On March 2018, Igualitos launched a video campaign titled “¿Quién es el Oscar en tu Familia?” (“Who’s the Oscar in your family”). The video showcases a family’s path to loving, accepting and embracing Oscar, the brother, son, uncle who happens to be gay. The goal of the campaign was to humanize LGBTI issues for Costa Ricans through the relatable video.

Using some of my video optimization techniques, Fundación Igualitos managed to create a video that hooked viewers, generated high levels of positive sentiment and achieved significant viral reach. Later, I helped Igualitxs pour fire on that gasoline through smart budgeting and retargeting. The results? Increased watch time and video completion, and insane reach: almost 500,000 Costa Ricans (10% of the population!) have seen the video on their Facebook Feeds.

On April 1st, Costa Ricans went to the polls and elected the center-left candidate, ensuring that marriage equality would be implemented in the country. The Oscar campaign managed to not just move hearts and minds, but popular opinion as well.

Two key takeaways from this campaign:

• Don’t create just one version of your video. Igualitxs created videos with different hooks up front, eventually striking gold with a variant that started with an emotional bang as opposed to a slow but steady setup.
• Virality is organic, but smart marketers can help foster it. We maximized the promotional budget by creating smart audiences that targeted the video to people likely to watch or share it.