Cynthia Fortlage describes pitching a Pride Month campaign that leadership rejected, choosing a generic message instead. They feared backlash and reputational risk, lacked context around Pride, and worried about getting the language right.
So at this last company, I did the whole campaign. I got everyone together. We had comms silos in different countries, got them all together. Yeah, great campaign. It went to leadership and they said, no, we're not ready for this. Strip it back completely. We're just going to send a generic message. If all of the comms silos want to do their own thing around Pride, go for it. And then I thought, this can't be right. We're so far ahead. Pride Month is not something that's new. It's something that's been going on for decades now. And I just felt that one, there was a few pain points here. One, the business didn't feel comfortable talking about something that maybe they could get backlash about in the way that they say it. I think that was one of the things. I think a lot of people now, if they have a bad experience with a company, they're very quick to go on LinkedIn and say, had a bad So it's a reputation. So secondly, there's no education around it. Why are we doing this? What's the context? Second, lack of resource, internal comms. We sometimes as well maybe hesitate to say, am I saying this in the right way? Is it inclusive? Is it bias-free? Am I using the right language? So there's a few pain points here. And again,
