No Facts Refused Infodump: Grindr’s Response to Mpox & the Role of Product Design in Public He
The article is from our special issue on Mpox. You can access the full issue here.
Whether you’re a power-bottom, power-top, or a power user of dating and hookup apps, you’ve probably seen ads for all sorts of things—underwear, parties, supplements—while logging on in search of your next tryst (or coffee date, we don’t judge). In the years since 2020, you may have seen a new type of ad popping up: the epidemic awareness campaign.
Since the AIDS crisis, queer folks have been particularly sensitive to highly communicable diseases, and 2022’s mpox outbreak was no exception. But in the heat of an outbreak, someone needs to spread the word. In 2022, one of those “someones” was former Grindr Product Program Manager, Marielle Rodriguez, who, alongside her colleagues at Grindr for Equality, led the charge on Grindr’s mpox response.
The initial idea for a mpox awareness campaign more or less fell into Marielle’s lap, as she and her team were handed the task of “doing something about mpox” in March of 2022.
“There was no price tag on this, so it was framed as a task rather than a project. We treated it like a project,” said Marielle of the team’s approach to the task. “We established a goal: to provide education and awareness and to make it safe. We wanted to make sure people knew where to find information.”
One of Marielle’s top concerns was balancing mpox messaging with the core utility of the app. “People come to this app to date and many other things. We had to take into consideration the effect of having users launch [Grindr] and immediately see this messaging.” When you’re logging on to get your rocks off, get rocked, or just rock out with your [genitalia of choice] out, a big pop-up about a sexually transmitted disease can be a major vibe-killer. “We had a goal for everyone who comes on the platform to be educated on what is and how to seek preventative measures.”
Marielle’s team wanted an intentional “disconnect” between the campaign and the app’s primary functions. “We had a lot of discussion around ‘are we treating the platform now like a help resource center,’ and we didn’t want people to get confused about that,” Marielle said. “We wanted to create resources inside the app for people to get help. We wanted to redirect out to a website, so people could read what they wanted to on the site, keep the app in its integrity of dating, tapping, keeping that all in line with what you need.” In this way, the team decoupled awareness and education. Users were served initial pop-ups to increase awareness, but they could read more deeply if they wanted to. The results were promising, and the team was able to complete their work within two months (May, 2022).
In a world where pandemics and epidemics will become more frequent, companies whose services and products may play a role in the communication of disease should be actively engaged in similar efforts. “We shouldn’t be reactive to [outbreaks]—we should fall into a ‘this is how we handle it.” While businesses will always prioritize projects which bring in revenue, Marielle and her team found greater buy-in as they able to align the mpox project with Grindr’s overall concept: “We kept it in the context of sexuality. Grindr’s brand is anything sexual, not just dating, so you had alignment there.” It may take some extra work on the back-end, but when your business is built around a specific community, you can do your part to ensure your audience stays happy, healthy, and informed.
The article is from our special issue on Mpox. You can access the full issue here.
