Detroit Motor City Pride 2022

Motor City Pride is Michigan’s largest pride celebration, with over 40,000 participants that attend Detroit’s

pride celebration year-over-year. It is a volunteer-run organization with a mission of spreading

awareness through pride.

Overview

With the second year of working with Motor City Pride, this year’s festival and parade brought over 55,000 participants over the two-day celebration.

This year’s Motor City Pride festival and the parade were unique because they celebrated the 50th year since Detroit’s first LGBTQ march in 1972. It was also the largest Motor City Pride festival since the inaugural celebration and surpassed expectations.

Project Goals

Raise awareness about Motor City Pride and the 50-year commemoration of Detroit’s Pride Parade.
Promot artists that were performing during the two-day festival.
Encourage attendance.
Monitor social media for issues, attendee questions, etc.

What We Did

The Brown-Smith Agency provided Motor City Pride with social media management and crisis communication support services.

Raised awareness about the two-day celebration.

The Brown-Smith Agency worked with Pride Coordinators and Artist Management to develop promotional materials for each artist performing at the 2-day festival.
Posted promotional materials on the client’s Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, account to raise awareness about the festival and parade.
Monitored social media, accounted for direct messages and comments, and answered any questions from Pride goers. If similar questions were common, they would then be added to the posting schedule so that other pride goers could access the same information.
Motor City Pride already has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and all channels have good engagement; however, there was an opportunity to reach new audiences. Therefore, we developed a TikTok account to reach a younger demographic that potentially doesn’t engage on other platforms. We also developed promotional graphics to help build the channel’s audience using existing audiences.

Provided on-site social media coverage to engage with individuals in-person and online.

Managed a team of five to provide live social media coverage to engage individuals in person and at home. We obtained still imagery and videos to develop stories, reels, and carousel posts.
During this year’s Pride festival, the attendance was more significant than what could have been expected, likely because individuals were not able to celebrate Pride for the past two years. The unexpected attendance created a situation where wait times were longer than expected, and some Pride goers were not allowed admittance. Pride goers then took to social media to get answers. Unfortunately, the channel became overrun with negative sentiment and comments while posting content. We immediately switched from posting to monitoring to answer questions from Pride goers and got organizers involved to respond to incoming messages appropriately. Additionally, we developed messaging to let Pride goers know that Motor City Pride understood and appreciated everyone’s feedback and apologized for any inconvenience caused.

Highlights from Motor City Pride 2022

Due to our focus on monitoring and crisis communication during the two-day event, post-promotion activities comprised developing content that promoted the two-day event. Additionally, we continued to monitor and provide crisis communication support and produced a final report.

Results

Between May 1 and July 1, 2022, we achieved the following:

Facebook
- 1,351 new followers, raising the follower count to 18.5K
- 27K clicks to the motorcitypride.org website
- Reached a total of 415,411 people with rich content
- 368K 1-minute video views and 17.1K 3-second video views
Twitter