Goals
We met Jen Grosshandler, founder of The GenderCool Project, at the Gender Odyssey conference in 2017. At the time, she was in the early stages of planning a new kind of outreach and information campaign to help spread understanding about the lives of transgender children, and to celebrate who they are as extraordinary people.
Jen’s idea was to create a video-based social media campaign around six “Champions”—amazing kids with stories to tell. She asked us to create an easy-to-edit website with an associated easy-to-manage video hosting solution. GenderCool also needed to take donations and, hopefully, begin forming partnerships with corporate sponsors to widen their reach. To this end, the final site needed to be sleek, professional, secure, and readily updatable, as well as consistent with their branding and image.
Proposed Solution
Identify and customize a WordPress template to coordinate with GenderCool’s branding, create a system to add new Champions, recommend and integrate with a full-featured donation solution, integrate with a video hosting solution, and provide areas for corporate partnerships to see the impact of their work.
Result
Two years after the new site design, The GenderCool Project is thriving, with 14 Champions, and an ever-expanding reach. For National Coming Out Day in 2018, they hosted a Talk Tour across Chicago with Conagra Brands, Citibank and Allstate. At each company, their Champions conducted a high energy, fireside chat in front of live (and virtual) employees from around the world, sharing their stories, points of views and answering questions in real-time. Other partners include Nike, Intuit, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Bank of America.
The site integrates with custom Vimeo channels and the full-featured donation solution Charitable. It provides custom portfolio functionality to easily add new Champions, and uses the Yoast SEO plugin to make sure the site remains as visible as possible. It also integrates with their Facebook and Instagram pages.