For a challenge that impacts so many young lives around the world, a short-term awareness campaign wouldn’t do it justice. We needed something that could deliver a powerful global message for years to come. We concluded that a product would have much greater impact than a conventional campaign.

We took a close look at the rituals hockey players engage in—and nothing was more personal than taping their stick. Looking through NHL regulations, we discovered that unlike most equipment, players are free to tape their sticks as they please. From there, the idea of Pride Tape was born.

Pride Tape is custom-designed rainbow coloured hockey tape. When used by minor league and recreational teams, it’s a badge of support amongst players and coaches. On the sticks of professional players, it becomes an even more powerful symbol of inclusivity—one that can reach LGBTQ players and young people around the world.

The campaign was a quick success. The Kickstarter campaign (and accompanying traditional and social media campaign) took off and within 2 months raised $76,147 – a full $22,147 beyond the campaign’s goal. Funds came from 1,147 backers, many from outside of Canada, generated from a total of 39,405 unique site visits (converting 2.9% of all website visitors into backers). The project was even listed as Kickstarter’s “Project of the Day” on January 11, truly giving Pride Tape a populist underpinning.

Within a month of launching the campaign, we were approached by the Edmonton Oilers to use Pride Tape in their annual skills competition – putting Pride Tape on professional ice for the first time. Combined with the Kickstarter backers, this gave us the ambassadors we needed and set off a new round of national and international coverage, laying the groundwork for even greater NHL involvement and global interest.

MEDIA OUTPUTS:

Our media coverage trajectory started locally, quickly reached a national audience, then international media. It then began to receive regular local-level coverage across North America once NHL teams began to use the tape in their inclusion-themed nights and pride parades. Coverage included Upworthy, USA Today, FOX Sports, Yahoo Sports, the Huffington Post, every major daily Canadian newspaper and a host of LGBTQ publications. The campaign was even featured in a segment on Hockey Night in Canada and covered in The Guardian. The tone and message of all coverage was celebratory, either for Pride Tape as a product, or for its use by major NHL teams. Many outlets even used our exact “badge of support for LGBTQ youth” language.

TARGET AUDIENCE OUTCOMES:

While we generated higher than anticipated awareness and enthusiasm from LBGTQ allies and progressive hockey fans (as evidenced by our Kickstarter results), the incredible impact on the NHL was unexpected. From a league that has no publicly gay players and only recently started punishing on-ice homophobic slurs, Pride Tape was used by 21 of the 30 NHL teams in February 2017 as the focus of their “Hockey is for Everyone” inclusion nights, with the tape available for sale on NHL.com. Pride Tape’s impact on the hockey world has been recognized with a permanent exhibition in the Hockey Hall of Fame. Perhaps most importantly, Pride Tape has been enthusiastically used in communities around the world, from the US and Europe to high in the Himalayas of India.