Part of Something Better

One of the things I have always admired about Christian is his commitment to volunteering. Pretty much since I’ve known him, he’s always been involved in some kind of efforts that benefits someone outside of him and his work. This came pretty directly from his mom, who taught him from early on that this type of involvement was important, and Christian has made very good on it, from his involvement with Make a Wish to more recently the Point Foundation.

For some reason, I missed this lesson when I was younger. Its not that my parents aren’t civic-minded (my Mom’s month in New Orleans after the Katrina disaster is a good illustration of that), but for one reason or another, it just never really came up when we were kids. So when I became a grown-up and married Christian, I always admired his conviction with volunteering, but struggled with how to get do something myself.

I’m proud to say I’ve found something pretty cool. I wrote earlier about Yahoo! Pride, an employee group that caters to the LGBT (that’s lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender for the folks at home) audience, and how I helped to program the a new music station called Gay Club Mix. That was neat, but my involvement was pretty minimal. After that launched, Brady, the leader of the group, Brian, a fabulous MBA intern who helped prove the worth of the GLBT audience to Yahoo! during his internship and will be joining Yahoo! this fall, and I wondered how we could really get Yahoo! to get behind the community in a much more visible way. We ended up with the idea of a promotional page for Gay Pride, and I’m proud to say that it launched today. I provided the conceptual design and wireframes, basically figuring out what was going to go on the page and where. From there, I handed my design off to Brian and Ernie, a set of 2 amazingly talented guys who provided the visual design (the color, fonts, and images) and the web development (actually building the whole thing), and I continued to act as the art director. I’m immensely proud of the result, and you can see it at http://events.yahoo.com/pride06/.

Brian, Brady and I agreed from the start that we would try and leverage as many of the community elements as possible from across Yahoo! and to design it in a way that would be relatively easy to implement. After all, this was a volunteer effort for the 3 of us and anone else who would get involved, above and beyond our normal daily responsibilities! Highlights include exposing community pictures of Pride from Flickr, the wildly popular photo sharing site Yahoo! acquired last summer and Pride events from upcoming.org, where users can share events with the community. Brian’s visual design, with the avatars in the header and the use of playful color throughout the page is really fantastic, and it’s all built in the latest coding technology, meaning its very light and flexible. When we found out that Travelocity was going to be a sponsor, it was icing on the cake.

So it launched early this morning and we're getting a lot of positive feedback internally, from people as high as the Chief Marketing Officer. It's a great feeling to combine two thing I love-- design and the gay community-- with something I've been wanting to do-- volunteering. We hope this is just the start of marketing to the LGBT community at Y! and I can't wait to find something like this again.