This article is the third and last in our series on how public campaigning helped win a victory for trans rights in Spain.
The first two articles detailed how the campaign team prepared the messaging strategy through in-depth research. This article now focuses on the campaign’s implementation.
Flowers of gratitude
Based on their research, the campaign team decided to focus the narrative strategy on the idea of gratitude: giving thanks for the support, empathy, learning opportunities, and enrichment that diversity brings. The messaging drew on happy, hopeful, or successful stories, which inspire and show how we can offer support. The strategy valued relationships between cis, trans, and non-binary people, making cis allies visible to encourage other cis people to identify with them.
The campaign took the name of “Hydrangea Project” (“Proyecto Hortensia”), a flower whose shades from blue to pink are not determined by genetics.
The campaign was articulated along three core streams:
This resulted in moving testimonies, as this one from a Trans girl to her mother.
The strategy also invited “unusual messengers,” including a doctor thanking a patient or a teacher thanking a student for exposing them to trans realities.
In addition, the campaign developed a series of three podcasts, in which trans comedian Elsa Ruiz interviews a mother and a father, an educator and a friend of trans people.
A collective “distributed” strategy
At odds with traditional campaign organizing modes, which rely on a “central command” function, this campaign relied on a distributed action mode. It developed a campaign without a brand (logos) and offers space for any person or organisation to contribute.
The campaign created profiles for Proyecto Hortensia on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok and a web portal so that content could be shared from them. However, it also invited supporters to create their own messages.
| “We activated the collaboration of different collectives, organisations, activists, content creators, etc. This strategy is based on the trust relationship generated when we share the results of our research, give workshops, meet with organisations, and take care of the Laintersección.net community.
There will be people who have a lot of time and want to create their own content, while others will only have a minute to click. With all of them, we must share clear instructions and all resources needed (documents, folders with materials, technical instructions, etc.).” |
We can take away a critical lesson from this: if a campaign wants content to be shared through accounts of people or other third parties, it has to make them part of the process. If they have created the content themselves or taken part in strategic decisions, they are more likely to be involved in its communication, and the content will be more appropriate for their followers.
