Tinder is known for changing the way people meet by making connections all across the globe. The team at Tinder wanted to take that mission of inclusiveness a step further by making keyboards everywhere more inclusive.

As the dating app with the largest and most diverse user base on a global scale, Tinder was uniquely positioned to be a voice for interracial couples. Even before petitioning Unicode to add interracial couple emojis to the official consortium (and to keyboards everywhere), Tinder was committed to championing representation of its diverse user base. For example, Tinder was the first dating app to unveil “more genders” which provides users with 30+ ways to identify.

With emojis for everything from showing emotions to what we eat, interracial couples are left out. Tinder took on this challenge head-on to create a campaign and petitioned Unicode to recognize interracial couples in our universal language of emojis

The team at Tinder wanted to depict the diverse (but underrepresented) range of interracial couples in our visual language. Knowing that Tinder users are digital natives who express themselves online, the highly sharable #RepresentLove campaign was born. The team created a compelling video to champion the cause and drive people to sign the petition on change.org to join Tinder in making interracial couple emojis a reality.

The creative depicted undeniable true love in the form of a variety of interracial couples with the heart-warming appeal to help make them feel seen. The video was supplemented with bespoke interracial couple emojis for influencers and real people, done in the style of what actual emojis would look like, making it easy for people to visualize.

Tinder’s audience is mainly comprised of young singles, aged 18-25 and they are digital natives who are engaging with social media and visual language (e.g., emojis, GIFs, etc.) every day. They are passionate about social justice and want to make an impact in their community even if they don’t have the financial means to do so.

Our strategy was to appeal to this young generation and underscore Tinder’s commitment to fostering diversity and inclusion on the app, using our petition and Unicode proposal as the latest proofpoint, while sparking a strong call-to-action for signing the change.org petition. We leveraged a global study on consumer attitudes around their openness to interracial dating to prove that Tinder users were among the most open-minded of the online dating set, and to further validate the need for emojis that represent the full spectrum of our users.

Tinder teamed up with Emojination to draft a formal proposal to Unicode petitioning for interracial couple emojis to be included on every keyboard. Tinder also posted a #RepresentLove anthem video on YouTube and shared with earned media outlets, and the change.org petion quickly amassed more than 50,000 signatures.

In February 2019, Unicode announced that the #RepresentLove petition was accepted and that interracial couple emojis will be a part of iOS and Android keyboards beginning in the fall of 2019. To amplify the news, Tinder honored the supporters of the petition with a full-page ad in the New York Times. We supplemented with outreach to national media outlets, generating 386M+ impressions and 60+ stories, along with creating a conversation via social media.

Overall, the campaign was a huge success as the Unicode consortium accepted the petition and interracial couple emojis will be on iOS and Android keyboards this fall.

During tentpole moments throughout the course of the campaign, we saw a rise in engagement on Tinder, including an average increase of 5% in app downloads and 9% in sign-ups across the U.S. and Western Europe. And considering Tinder has experienced more than 300MM downloads to date ... that's a lot.

Leveraging a global study on attitudes of online/offline daters, we garnered 419 stories across the globe and over 2.4 billion impressions. In addition to earned media, Tinder experienced more than 800K impressions across owned social channels and nearly 400K likes across social influencer channels along with 5.2M YouTube views.