Fighting for Marriage Equality Through Personal Storytelling and Social Media

8.8 million Americans identify themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered. Every day, these American are impacted negatively by discrimination because of their sexual orientation, including those who are afraid to come out and those who are comfortable with who they are but still face harsh criticism from those around them. Though an increasing number of states in recent years have passed legislation legalizing gay marriage, and we saw the national repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) this past December, the national sentiment is still not healthy or supportive as a whole.

In May 2009, Maine became one of the first states in the nation to pass a marriage equality bill into legislation. In Maine, citizens are seen as an equal branch of government and can bring forth a "People’s Veto" of legislation as long as they can gather 60,000+ signatures within 90 days. By December, a repeal by voters was passed to block the marriage equality law. As a result, two key organizations teamed up to utilize technology to bring about change through raising awareness and winning support for "the way life should be" in Maine – equal rights for all residents of Maine despite their sexual orientation.

Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) and EqualityMaine knew that the best way to touch the hearts and change the minds of those they needed to gain support from is through the telling of personal stories from Mainers affected by discrimination and injustice against themselves, and their family, friends, and coworkers. The organizations decided the best way to do this would be to create a website to gather and share these stories of inequality in order to educate Maine residents of the impact the People’s Veto is having on other residents and bring about systemic change in the state of Maine.

GLAD and EqualityMaine have collected many stories from constituents over the years, but these stories were never organized in a centralized place. They needed a story depository, as well as a way to easily turn these stories into a tool for public education and fuel to drive public debate. As Ryan Brown of GLAD describes, "Over the past two decades, there has been an incredible amount of work done relative to LGBT equality in Maine, conducted by many organizations, activists, and supporters. Through the years, a multitude of stories and experiences have been recorded – though in many different formats and stored in many different places." But never before had one system been created to store, track and analyze these efforts. GLAD knew they would need a robust system that could both handle submission and had a high quality tracking mechanism so they could review these stories and track how they are being used.

These organizations partnered with our team at Social Contxt to create an interactive database where visitors could leave their stories of inequality and discrimination. They deemed the site, mainethewaylifeshouldbe.org.

By utilizing Activ8, our custom distribution of Drupal, we created a platform where stories could be left in text, video, or image form and later accessed by the community, key stakeholders, the press, and GLAD to be used for marketing, PR, and public education campaigns. We built workflow and tracking features into the backend administrative interface so that GLAD employees could easily review and edit user submissions, as well as track where and how the stories were being used.

On the submissions section of the website, we designed a custom, multi-step interface for adding stories. Our focus was on usability – remove the clutter that may intimidate the user from submitting stories and present them with just the fields they need. Users are able to upload multimedia content – videos and images – to support their stories. We also incorporated an accordion-style FAQ section to allow GLAD to place key information in front of story submitters so they wouldn’t need to click around to find information.

Stories, once approved and published to the website, are then displayed on the homepage and in the story directory, which allows users to search through content and filter by county so users can find stories that really hit close to home. A quote and images are put in front of the reader first, to give a more personal feel to the story. We created custom icons to graphically illustrate which county in Maine the story submitter lives in.

GLAD was delighted with the results, and recently wrote, "The final product was better than we ever thought it would be, and impressed the entire marriage coalition."

After launching the site this February, GLAD then launched a web campaign to generate traffic to the site, encourage residents of Maine to leave their stories, and then to share those stories with their family and friends. Within three days, one story was shared over 300 times. Within two weeks they saw an over 50% response rate to user’s share requests, meaning that of all the stories shared, over half visited the site and browsed the stories.

Throughout history, this type of personal storytelling has been an effective tactic to affect attitudes and change in social movements. New technologies, especially social media, make sharing such stories easier and faster, as well as enabling people to more effectively measure that reach and subsequent impact.

Any organization with a cause can benefit from these tools. The National Health Council has launched a story sharing campaign for people with chronic diseases and disabilities, as have LiveStrong and the National Parks Association. Could your nonprofit or cause-based organization use the same? Tap into the stories of the community you support or who supports you and you while likely find a multitude of passionate tales of change.

If you live in the state of Maine and either personally are affected by LGBT discrimination, or have seen someone you love be affected, head on over to mainethewaylifeshouldbe.org and leave your story today!

Don’t live in Maine? Check out the moving tales that have been left already and share your favorite story on Facebook, Twitter or a variety of other social networks. You can help make Maine, and the nation, the way it should be – a more equal and just nation.