Friendfactor is pleased to announce the results and winners of the first-ever MBA Ally Challenge, a year-long friendly competition among business schools to build the most powerful and impactful ally engagement initiatives among their student bodies.  Schools were challenged to build ally programs that were evaluated on three criteria:

1. Membership: The number of students inspired to participate in at least one ally activity
2. Activities: The number of ally-specific activities executed throughout the school year
3. Outcomes: The impact created, measured by pre and post surveys on LGBT awareness and inclusiveness of school culture

Six fantastic MBA programs participated in the challenge: Columbia, Duke, Yale, University of North Carolina, University of Virginia, and George Washington University. These participants activated a total of over 900 MBA students, completed 24 ally activities, improved LGBT issue awareness by 19%, and improved school culture by 24%, over the course of a mere seven months. Not a bad set of results!

The overall winner of the MBA Ally Challenge is Columbia Business School, which activated a massive 300 MBA students to take action to create an LGBT-inclusive culture on campus. Columbia’s student leaders, Glen Bartley and Helen Huey (pictured right), organized six major activities over the course of the year, including a multi-pronged “Ally Love Week” during October’s National Coming Out Day celebrations, and a social event in conjunction with their Military in Business Association that raised over $5000 for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and other charitable causes. Columbia snagged the #2 spot for overall culture with a 74% score, and saw a 27% lift in awareness about LGBT issues from 41% to 52% as a result of its year-long series of activities. Congratulations to Glen, Helen, and Columbia!

In 2^nd place is the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, which also snagged the Most Improved Award. Darden’s leaders Andrew Massaro and Clare Seekins engaged 200 MBA students in six activities, centered around its Love is Love week in conjunction with Valentine’s Day. Darden’s Most Improved score comes from the massive change in campus awareness and culture that these events created: awareness about LGBT issues increased from 35% to 55% between our pre and post surveys (a 55% lift, raising the school from #6 to #2 on awareness), and the cultural climate improved from a score of 27% to 42% (a 56% lift). Darden also scored the highest on our “cognizance” scale, a measure of how many students answer “Don’t Know” on our questions about culture. The percentage of “Don’t Know” responses decreased from 42% to 5% over the course of the year, a decline of 87%. The overall decline for all six schools was 60%.

Finally, the 3^rd place spot goes to Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Fuqua’s program leader JC Conover also engaged 200 students, with four activities over the course of the year, including innovative initiatives such as the distribution of “ally army” backpack patches. Fuqua saw an increase in awareness from 46% to 54% and a culture improvement from 67% to 74% over the year.

Congratulations to the winners of this year’s challenge, and to all of the schools that participated and contributed to a more LGBT-inclusive MBA community! The full results for each school are available below.

• Interested in getting your MBA program involved in next year’s competition?  Sign up here to lead your school’s program. We’ll be organizing a planning call over the summer to explain the details and share all the resources available to help you build a strong and impactful ally initiative.
• Are you a company or organization that wants to recruit stronger LGBT and ally MBA talent? Contact us to inquire about becoming a sponsor for the 2013-2014 MBA Ally Challenge.

Questions about the MBA Ally Challenge or how the scores were calculated? Send us a note.

A new guest blog from our friend Jamie Burke!

About the Author: Jamie Burke is an All-American women’s rugby player. She is the second most-capped women’s player in the country, and captained the USA National Team at the 2010 Women’s Rugby World Cup. She is also a PhD candidate in Education at the University of New Hampshire.

Growing up in the conservative South, knowing I was gay from a young age, and looking very androgynous for my entire life, I have endured my fair share of slurs, derogatory comments, and insults hurled my way.

I used to think to myself, ‘Maybe if I just grow out my hair, or try to be more feminine, or try not to be too loud, or stay in the closet, people will leave me alone’. But I didn’t sit quietly; I came out at 15; I cut my hair short; I lifted weights.  Because of those choices to be who I was, I came to expect a certain amount of hardship in my life. I developed a thick protective wall so that no one could hurt me with their thoughtless, callous words or sidelong glances. I came to expect insults, whether there was any threat or not, and always had my guard up to keep from feeling the sting of harsh words.

I took my thick skin to college where I avoided any situations in which there was a chance of getting the sideways glance. I knew where every single-stall unisex bathroom on my college campus was; I requested to live in a single-room to avoid any potential roommate issues; I wore baggy sweatshirts to hide my chest from strangers. I started to play rugby – a sport on the fringe, known for welcoming all types. I have played rugby for 15 years and through those 15 years, I have grown as a person and become more comfortable in my skin.  In many ways, those 15 years lulled me into a false sense of confidence that maybe I could finally be accepted in the world of women’s athletics.

A year ago, it was made abundantly clear that this was still not the case. I was playing in a "friendly" intercollegiate flag football game for my partner’s grad school when the opposing team’s fans started hollering everything from "can we get a cup check" and "get the man off the field with the women" to "watch out! the dyke's not just gonna go for your flag". It went on for several hours. I didn’t respond. I shrugged it off as no big deal because that’s ‘to be expected’. But internally, I knew that if I let myself truly feel their words, it would be the small chink in the armor I had so carefully cultivated over the past 15 years to protect myself.  I would be forced to feel the words of every soccer parent, every basketball opponent, every woman who had chased me out of a ladies’ room. It would be too much.

What I didn’t expect was the response that came from the ally community in answer to these events.

My partner's business school prides itself on its tolerance, acceptance, and ally involvement. In the past two years, as a pilot program for a nonprofit dedicated to empowering allies called Friendfactor, they have had numerous events to raise awareness and create ally engagement opportunities. So I knew they were supportive, but I didn’t know the scope of it, or the ferocity of their commitment until that day. They basically formed ranks around me as one of their own and sent the message that that behavior was unacceptable and wouldn’t be tolerated.

An open letter was sent to the other school expressing disappointment in the behavior of some of its members, but also seeking solutions to ensure this type of behavior doesn’t happen again.  Numerous students spoke to the fans at and after the events to express their disapproval.  But the most moving moment was at a social event in the evening, one that my partner and I didn’t want to go to, but felt we had to in order to show we wouldn’t be cowed into submission.  I walked in to the venue to see tons of my friends, my allies, wearing “Love = Love” shirts in solidarity with me.  The visual support - the wall of colorful shirts sending a message of love, tolerance, and acceptance - broke down the hardened walls I had built.

The fact that the community, MY community, was willing to stand up for me and let the rest of the world know that they would not tolerate that behavior, was incredible. I had never experienced that love and support from straight allies before. I had become programmed to believe that I have to deal with this type of thing by myself; that I was alone. This showed me that I wasn’t alone and didn’t have to be. I could rest in the knowledge that I was being taken care of, even when all I could do was try to keep myself safe.

This experience really showed me why strong vocal allies are so important in the fight for equality, compassion, and respect for the LGBT community.  The onus can’t be solely on us. I just did not have the energy to fight for myself. I was busy using all my energy protecting myself after years of abuse. Without those allies, that day would have just hardened me further. With them, however, I got to see love and compassion in action. I got to see people committed to the rights of others even when it has no direct bearing on them. I got to see progress. Most of all, as an LGBT person, I got to see hope.

Our New York City event was held at the offices of our wonderful long-time legal partners, Ropes and Gray. About 30 young professionals joined us for food, drinks, and conversation. We had the pleasure of hearing stories from two of our NYC pilot ally programs, which have been built over the past 9 months at Columbia Business School and Dash Design. Cecilia Hanover from Dash Design shared her personal motivation for becoming a leader in the ally movement, based on the discrimination she witnessed growing up in Mexico. She designed a set of desktop wallpaper and screensavers to enable allies at Dash Design to visibly show the inclusivity and openness of their workspace. Dyanna Salcedo from Columbia shared her experience of serving in the army under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and what a difference it made when she entered corporate America and was welcomed and accepted as an openly gay woman. She described Columbia’s 300-member ally initiative which hosted six educational and social events over the course of the 2012-2013 school year, achieving 1^st place in Friendfactor’s first annual MBA Ally Challenge. We then discussed how allies can share their own stories of standing up for what they believe in, bring these examples to their own communities, and host Friendfactor events or launch ally programs of their own. The evening wouldn’t have been possible without our spectacular NYC host committee of Brian Elliot, Sue Sena and Amy Mayes.

The following day, we held our first DC event at the Capitol Lounge. We were joined by 25 professionals, students and congressional staffers who enjoyed wings, beers, and a brief program of star speakers. Richard McPike from the office of LGBT Congressman Mark Takano shared the roots of his commitment to fostering ally activeness through the example of Barney Frank, an openly gay Congressman who advocated tirelessly for the rights of Japanese Americans. Beth Roberts, a retuned Peace Corps Volunteer from Mali, shared the work she has done to create support mechanisms for LGBT Peace Corps volunteers in the field by educating her fellow volunteers on LGBT issues. Ben de Guzman, the co-program director for the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance, explained how allies have been key throughout the stages of his career, and their particular importance in the Asian & Pacific Islander community. The amazing DC host committee of Laila Mohib, Kaitlin Inamasu, Luke Chesek and Becca Sharp, and the financial support of our partners at the Asian Pacific Islander Institute for Congressional Studies, enabled the event and the conversations about allyship that ensued.

So what’s next? We hope to host more events in each location quarterly, so if you’re in NYC or DC and you missed the first ones, don’t worry! We’re also launching event series this July and August in San Francisco, LA, Chicago and Boston (dates TBD).

If you’re in any of these cities or want to get the ally community together in your area, please join us! Here are some great ways to get involved:

• Join a local event host committee! Get some great networking opportunities and leadership experience by helping us plan our next event in your city.
• Get your company, school, or congregation involved! Your organization can participate by sponsoring, hosting, providing food & beverage, or supplying volunteers for our next local event. You’ll get some great brand exposure and an easy opportunity to engage your employees or students in something fun and impactful.
• Start an ally program of your own at your workplace, school, or congregation, to enable everyone around you who cares about LGBT equality to take part in building an inclusive community.

Email us at hi@friendfactor.org to get yourself or your organization involved, and sign up at www.friendfactor.org/join-us to get the updates on our upcoming events in your area.

Friendfactor's Re-Founder Joanne Sprague shares her personal story of what drives her to work for equality. Re-posted from our friends at dot429.

As a social entrepreneur, I’m often asked why I decided to do what I do. And as a straight woman, I’m often asked why I picked LGBT equality as my focus. The answer I give in cocktail conversations and grant applications is pretty simple and familiar.

I had been an MBA student for three weeks when a friend of 10 years came out to me, and shared her experience of coming out at our school. At a recent diversity training she had sat next to a classmate as he argued that LGBT folks should stay closeted at school and work, and not a single person in the room had spoken up in her defense.

I knew I didn’t want to spend two years at a school with such a culture of silence, so I joined the LGBT club and started campaigning to build a stronger straight ally presence. Our efforts quintupled club membership and created a visibly and actively inclusive campus culture in less than a year, and that’s where I learned the power of bringing allies into the movement.

It’s true that my MBA experience was the catalyst for re-founding Friendfactor. But the real story of why I do this, the one that keeps me going on Saturday nights and red-eye flights, is deeper than the elevator pitch. It goes back to grade school, when I first learned about slavery and the Holocaust. I remember being appalled that I was part of a human race capable of treating each other so horrifically, and I was adamant that if I had been around back then, I would have done something about it.

It may have been naïve – I couldn’t exactly have sauntered singlehandedly into Auschwitz and torn down the gates. But that determination stuck with me, especially when I learned that “back then” was actually in the present, just with different populations: the global poor, disabled communities, LGBT people, and a myriad of others.

That determination took me around the world, first manifesting itself in a drive to tackle socioeconomic inequality: I moved to Kenya and taught sex workers business skills to start small enterprises and pull themselves out of poverty. I moved to India and built a consulting practice to help non-profits and foundations ensure that the country’s skyrocketing growth was inclusive of its lowest income populations. I interned in Nicaragua and helped social entrepreneurs scale their impact at creating sustainable development in Central America.

When I finally decided it was time to address inequality back at home in the US, there was no question to me that LGBT issues were the most pressing equality violation of our time. I couldn’t imagine raising my future children in a country where discrimination was still acceptable, or where who they turned out to be might make them second class citizens. So I figured I better change that country.

I took everything I had learned fighting global poverty and applied it to the LGBT movement, because all of these equality issues are interconnected: they all boil down to our ability to dehumanize or “other” a community of people we see as different from us, and therefore to deny them the humanity and fairness that are intrinsic to our values.

That’s why Friendfactor is so focused on people who don’t identify as LGBT. As the majority, straight Americans hold substantial power to dictate public opinion and culture, just by sheer numbers. Thus we have an opportunity to discriminate, or to ensure equality and inclusion.

So the more people in the majority who identify with the LGBT movement – who see themselves as central and core to the march towards equality, both legislative and cultural – the more these lines between populations break down and we all see each other as fellow humans.

As Lilla Watson is credited with saying, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

We are all denied a bit of our humanity until every one of us is truly equal to the next, so it’s time we stopped drawing boundaries between each other and started working together to create a more equal world.

And that’s the “not-quite-light-enough-for-cocktail-parties” story of why I do what I do.

This phenomenon is not new.  It was first documented way back in 1948 when Alfred Kinsey published his findings on the “Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale,” better known as the Kinsey scale.  Yet 60 years later, society still works awfully hard to bucket us all into two or three boxes.
 
The trouble with boxes
 
Two particular problems in recognizing and describing our full sexual orientation can arise.  The first, familiar to all of us, is the societal pressure against same-sex attractions and behaviors.  Among many of the unfortunate consequences of such pressure is the squelching or suppression of normal and healthy same-sex dreams, fantasies, and attractions to such an extent that these often become unconscious or unrecognized by individuals.  We thus isolate an important part of our whole sexual being.  Similarly, the same-sex feelings, even when recognized, are often viewed as foreign, unacceptable, or even pathological, when again they are simply a normal and healthy part of our whole sexuality.
 
The second problem stems from what I perceive to be the creation of artificial categories or “dichotomies” of sexuality into gay/lesbian vs. straight, with that third category of “bisexual” for those who don’t fit neatly into the polar categories.  Although labels and neat categorizations can help us identify, simplify, and – to an extent – understand our world, labels can also create misleading stereotypes and blind us to the full spectrum of possibilities.  For sexual orientation, the gay/lesbian, bisexual, and straight categories can, and often do, result in people having to choose “sides” or “camps” into which they feel they best fit.  For some, this fit feels “close enough” that they may experience only minor discomfort or problems from living in a box that, although relatively comfortable, never quite feels like home.  For many others, however, the belief that there are only three distinct categories into which their sexuality must fall can lead to more serious psychological and social consequences, which can result from at least three situations:
 

1. A person feels predominately attracted to the opposite sex but recognizes and may even accept some same-sex attractions.  Feeling the need to select a “best-fit category,” they suppress or dismiss the same-sex feelings, choose the “straight” label, and live there despite it not being an ideal fit for their sexual orientation; this often leads the person to feel unfulfilled or incomplete, and not necessarily recognizing why.  A similar situation may arise for an individual who is predominantly attracted to the same sex but recognizes and accepts some opposite-sex attractions, yet chooses the gay/lesbian label.
2. A person has predominantly opposite-sex attractions, but feels that if they have any same-sex attractions at all then they must be gay/lesbian.  In an attempt to find empathic companionship, the person then labels themself as gay/lesbian, even when this means forcing one’s whole sexual identity far to the other side of the spectrum from where they may actually be.  Again, a similar situation can arise for someone who has predominantly same-sex attractions, but feels that if they have any opposite sex attractions, they must be “straight”; or perhaps more commonly in this situation, the person recognizes the predominantly same-sex orientation but finds it “safer” to choose the “straight” label because of social pressures against same-sex orientations.
3. A person recognizes and can accept attractions to both sexes, whether “50:50” or even “90:10,” and therefore feels compelled to chose the “bisexual” category, whether or not this feels completely congruent with their sexual orientation.

 
What height box do you fit in?
 
Categorizing sexual orientation into two poles and an “in-between” or “mixed” group is, to me, similar to declaring that for the biological characteristic of height, there are three types of people:  “tall people” (let’s say those who are six feet or taller), “short people” (those shorter than five feet), and “medium people” (those who are between five and six feet tall).  While there may be clear differences in self-perception and life experiences between people near the extremes (let’s say a 4’6” individual vs. a 6’6” individual), are there really differences between a “tall person” who is 6’1” and a “medium person” who is 5’11” tall that are as important as the distinct categories imply?  And are two “medium people” – one who is 5’10” tall and one who is 5’1” tall really more alike than a “medium person” who is 5’1” tall and a “short person” who is 4’11” tall?  If the example seems a bit silly, this is really my point:  Having broad and exclusive categories into which we place sexual orientation (and, therefore, encouraging individuals to do so themselves) is, for most people, a misrepresentation of reality that can lead to unjustified stereotyping and confusion, and as a result, potential individual and societal harm.
 
My sincere hope is that the day may soon come where all of us, individually and as a society, can accept our full sexuality, wherever it may fall on the biological spectrum, so that we can then live and love wholly, happily, and freely.

Dr. Jack Modell was trained as a psychiatrist and has worked in both university and corporate settings.  He worked at the Universities of Vermont, Michigan, and Alabama at Birmingham, taking care of patients, doing medical research, and teaching about human behavior.  More recently, Jack was a vice president for neuroscience research and development at a major pharmaceutical company, and he is currently helping others on various scientific and social issues.   Jack is a strong ally for LGBT issues and equality, believing that we must stand together in support of fair and equal human rights for us all.

Thanks to the folks at Lean Impact for providing a great new platform for dialogue on applying lean startup concepts to nonprofits! Here's a blog post we wrote about our experience bringing lean methodology to our recent merger decision (view the original post here).

When you run a startup in San Francisco, you constantly find yourself bumping up against lean startup concepts. Even when your startup is a non-tech, service-based, B2B nonprofit.

It’s great because lean startup principles are still highly applicable to this context, and let’s be honest, they’re just so hot right now. It’s also difficult.  You’re constantly working to apply language, frameworks, and technology for startups, to an organization that’s slightly different. If only there were a community of other mission-driven organizations applying lean startup principles to bounce ideas off and share best practices! (Thanks, Lean Impact!)

The nonprofit I run, Friendfactor, is building a network of programs that help straight people engage in the movement for LGBT equality. I got the idea while building a “straight ally” program at my business school that took off and radically changed the student culture. When I set out to research replicating that model in other schools and companies around the country, I assumed I would be starting from scratch. And that was exciting – it had always been a dream of mine to launch my own social enterprise.

Then I was introduced to the founder and executive director of Friendfactor, a young nonprofit that had spent the past two years building online advocacy tools to engage straight supporters to take action to pass pro-LGBT legislation. Despite a membership of 20,000 and a social media reach of 14M, they were struggling with scale, looking either for their next big play or a way to merge with another organization.

The idea of launching my vision under an existing brand, leveraging all the assets it owned and the infrastructure it had built, was sexy and exciting. It was also petrifying: would this mean giving up my dream of being a founder?

I decided to merge my vision with Friendfactor’s infrastructure.

Ultimately, the decision to merge with Friendfactor came down to a few lean principles:

• What would get me to an MVP most quickly?
• Would it be easier to leverage what already existed or reinvent the wheel?
• What path would enable me to most efficiently find my early adopters and start learning?

It was clear that launching by taking over Friendfactor, rather than building my own organization from the ground up, would allow me to get started in a matter of weeks rather than a matter of months. The merger also fell nicely into Eric Ries’ Vision-Strategy-Product pyramid.

We’ve continued to apply lean concepts ever since.

• We launched our MVP — a first pilot — a month after I started working on Friendfactor full-time, calling around to friends and directing them to a landing page that would make designers cringe.
• We got a few pilots going and have been hounding every participant (and non-participant) for feedback.
• Our next experiment built off the first pilot but tailored it to a specific community – MBA programs – and added a competition component, and so far it’s been a bit more successful.
• We have a list of 75 modules we want to build to help allies execute activities and build culture at their schools and companies, but we’ve decided to only on request, finding out what our clients want so that everything we create gets used and gives us an opportunity for learning.

Building with a lean methodology doesn’t always go smoothly. We’ve had some challenges applying several of the core principles to our context, and we’re working on smoothing them out. A few of the stickiest challenges we’ve had so far are:

1. The lifecycle on working with institutions, particularly well-meaning but risk-averse corporations, is long and arduous. The feedback we get perhaps most consistently is “these things just take time.” It’s also highly relationship based, not just a function of whether our product “works.” Given those circumstances, how do we determine the timeline on an experiment, when do we cut it off, and when do we know whether our learning is “this doesn’t work” or “this needs more time”? It’s hard to tell when a client who has committed to starting a program, but hasn’t actually executed or used our products yet, should be considered a win, a loss, or a wait-and-see.
2. Our clients (individual allies who are leading the programs) aren’t necessarily our payers (the corporations and universities where we build the programs, supplemented by foundations and donors). This is a typical nonprofit conundrum, and it’s no different when the nonprofit is a startup or is applying lean principles. It means we have to consider pivots on two fronts, the impact front and the revenue front. Ideally those pivot in tandem, but not always. For example, we learned in our first few months that companies and universities weren’t going to pay for our services off the bat, even if they had a need for them – we needed to prove that we were the right partner for the job, and show the impact a program could have on their culture (and their bottom line). So while our impact model remains intact, our funding model is pivoting to more traditional nonprofit means (foundations, donors, crowdfunding) in the short term.
3. Impact metrics are harder to define than financial ones, which means it’s harder to tell whether an experiment has “worked.” The results we get look less like “x number of people signed up” or “landing page A led to x% more conversions than landing page B,” and more like “this roundtable discussion got x% of attendees really excited and asking for a follow-up event.” Culture change and the feeling of safety and inclusion in a community are measurable to an extent, but there will always be intangibles that make it hard to compare the success of one program versus another.

In short, applying lean startup principles to Friendfactor has provided a great framework, but the devil is in the details. We haven’t been able to adapt every concept from the playbook, but so far it’s been a great tool to have in our toolbox. We look forward to learning from other nonprofits and social change organizations about how they have overcome the challenges we’ve faced to accelerate the process of learning and building sustainable mission-driven organizations.

For the whole history of how Friendfactor has evolved, check out the History page. The short version is that Friendfactor remains committed to empowering straight folks to take action to make the world a better place for our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender friends. In fact, our new vision statement encompasses this idea:

We envision a society where everyone who cares about LGBT equality, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, takes part in making it a reality.

How we’re doing that, however, has changed dramatically. We’re applying what Friendfactor has learned about motivating and empowering straight Americans over the past couple years, and we’ve also linked up with a new, community-based model that has already worked successfully in several communities. Here’s the idea:

Straight people who care about LGBT equality (or supporters of any progressive change movement, for that matter) face the same challenges that any individual must overcome to be motivated to take action: we need to understand that there is a problem, feel like we can make a difference, know what to do, see the impact of our actions, and be incentivized to continue taking action and prioritize this action above all the other demands in our lives. This is a big task, and it starts with seeing would-be allies as a community - with needs that are often different, but no less important, than those of our LGBT brothers and sisters. This recognition has led to our new mission: to help straight friends become visible, vocal, and active allies in their communities. We do this in three integrated ways:

1. We start with making the issue relevant to straight folks’ day to day lives. This means meeting people where they are: in the workplaces and school campuses we go to every day. These are the places where we can see small actions we take, like changing a few words in our vocabulary or putting a sticker on our laptop, make a huge, tangible impact. I know they did at my grad school: I worked on a basic little campaign to increase visibility and hand out ally buttons, and soon had friends banging down my door asking for ways to do more.
2. Second, we give allies a support structure. It can be lonely and isolating to be an active ally. It’s easy to be excluded from the rest of the non-LGBT community (for speaking up or appearing ‘oversensitive’) and we don’t quite fit neatly into the LGBTQ community (because we don’t share their experiences as directly). So we have to make being an ally a ‘thing’: come together, share our experiences, learn from each other, and support one another, both on the ground inside our communities and externally with other ally groups. The more we know and connect with other allies working towards the same goals, the less isolated we’ll feel and the less afraid we’ll be to speak up and be visible.
3. Third, we turn commitment into action. Never again should we have potential allies saying “I don’t’ know what I can do.” We need to pave a path to action for allies at all levels of commitment. And not just signing a pledge once or going to one training, but by participating continuously over time. Action comes in a few forms:
   1. Continuous education: learning about more and more in-depth issues, keeping up to date, and practicing how to start conversations and build awareness.
   2. Visibility: creating fresh physical and verbal cues that show the world we are supportive, not once, but over and over, with increasing visibility and pride with each step (say, from displaying a rainbow sticker in your cubicle to listing your ally activities on your resume).
   3. Showing up: going to events, organizing events, participating in our organizations’ Pride floats, maybe even getting political and knocking on some doors. Our presence and participation matter, and it’s amazing how quickly an organization’s culture can change just by getting allies more actively involved.

With these three tenants of our strategy, we present you with Friendfactor 2.0. We’re building ally programs at companies and universities that proactively ask people to get involved, show them what they can do, and hook them up with a support structure of other allies inside and outside of their organizations. And it’s working great so far: we’ve got 10 pilot programs going across the country, which have signed up over 500 members over just a few months. We host inspiring quarterly check-ins and regional events, provide a growing library of resources, and have lots of fun new campaigns coming up in 2013.

We’re growing fast and want to invite you to join the movement! If you’re interested in starting or joining a program, supporting a campaign as an individual or organization, or just learning more, we want to hear from you. Get in touch or sign up for a program and we’ll contact you with more info. Welcome to the ally revolution, and to Friendfactor 2.0!

Joanne Sprague

Re-Founder & CEO, Friendfactor

Join the Wait... What?! Campaign today, and stand up for equal rights!

Did you know your friends can be fired in 29 states, just for being gay? Surprised? So are lots of folks; equal rights are farther from reality than many of us would like to believe.

Join the Wait...What?! social media campaign to learn some surprising facts and let your friends know that you support them.

Through viral sharing on Facebook and Twitter, thousands of new voices will chime in to bring attention to equal rights issues like employment and housing discrimination. The movement has made great strides over the past year, year with the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the passing of the marriage equality bill in New York, but there's still much more to be done!

Friendfactor Founder Brian Elliot explains the campaign like this:

Not everyone realizes the full extent to which their gay friends are not equal: they can legally be fired and evicted in 29 states just for being gay. In 32 states, there’s zero protection from the law when gay friends are bullied. My straight friends are shocked when they learn these things, and we know other straight friends will be too. We believe there’s a tremendous opportunity to engage these friends and accelerate the pace of change for their gay friends.

Take Action: Join the campaign and share a surprising fact to stand up for your gay friends. The more eyes we can get on these facts, the faster we can fix what's broken.

Sarah Powers is a freelance writer and mom of two. She lives in Arizona and blogs at Powers of Mine.