How Grindr and Headcount Voted With Pride in 2020

As the dust from Election Day settles and we welcome Joe Biden as our new President-elect, we wanted to share some highlights from our partnership with Headcount for their 2020 Vote With Pride initiative. The stakes for our community were higher than ever in this year’s election—with COVID-19 still ravaging the country, police brutality and racial justice taking a national spotlight, and a new Supreme Court appointee casting uncertainty on recent gains for LGBTQ+ rights, it was more important than ever to make sure our users had the resources they needed to register, vote safely, and make their voices heard.

We focused our efforts on several key phases in the lead-up to the election. For National Voter Registration Day on September 22, we launched a messaging campaign to our U.S. users connecting them with Headcount’s voter registration and verification portal. By early October, as some registration deadlines began to pass, we switched our focus to state-specific campaigns providing people with info on how to vote early and by mail in their state. In the final run-up to the election, we added voting reminders and links to Headcount’s LGBTQ+ Voting Resources to the profile menu for all of our U.S. users.

By Election Day, we had connected tens of thousands of Grindr users with crucial early and mail-in voting info for their states. That’s a fraction of the more than 1 million people who log in to the app each day in the U.S., but enough to make us Headcount’s most successful Vote with Pride partner for the 2020 campaign.

And we weren’t the only ones getting out the vote on Grindr—our users also made headlines by using the app to conduct voter outreach of their own, in what some called operation #DateSaveAmerica. Several beloved LGBTQ+ personalities also lent their time and talent to Grindr’s get out the vote efforts, including Latrice Royale, who shared how she was voting for the first time in two decades due to a former felony conviction that stripped her voting rights. And our Voting Is Sexy PSA, featured below with cameos by Boomer Banks, Aquaria, Chase Icon and more, proved once and for all that democracy, when exercised properly, is the ultimate turn-on.

With so much on the line, it was inspiring to see our users and the LGTBQ+ community at large come together to make sure their voices—and their votes—were heard this election.