Staying home provides a great opportunity to grow your skills, or refresh skills you haven’t used in a while. Members of the #GLAADInstitute team have got you covered. Take a look at some videos to get you and your media advocacy back on track:

How To Reach Your Target Audience

Everyone belongs to multiple communities in their life—from their hometown, to the jobs they’ve had, to their religion, and to their political ideology—and have power to understand how to communicate within their own communities to accelerate acceptance. Watch this video for some helpful tips on how to identify your audience and best connect to your core message of acceptance.

Movable Middle

When doing advocacy work, it can be tempting to overwork yourself trying to change the minds of resistors, who are actively opposed to your work, or to focus only on allies, who are already aligned with and supportive of your work. While this work is important, focusing on the Movable Middle, who want to be accepting but aren’t sure how, is one of the best ways to have your message of acceptance be heard and affect positive change.

Storytelling

Everyone has a lifetime of incredible stories, including you. Sharing your stories allows you to have an immediate emotional connection with your audience, and that is a great step towards accelerating acceptance. Take a look at this video for some ideas on how to tell your stories.

Interviewing

Interviews are a common format to tell your stories and share some facts about your advocacy. Even while staying home, you never know when an opportunity to be interviewed could arise. This video presents some best practices for interviews (remember to dress up, even from home!) and tactics to keep yourself on track.

For Spanish speakers, there is also a Spanish language version of this video:

Additionally, there is a video for best LGBTQ Terminology to use and define in Spanish:

The Vito Russo Test

Are you watching and streaming more TV and movies while you’re at home, and want to make sure that you’re watching the most inclusive content possible? The Vito Russo Test is a great way to evaluate the quality of LGBTQ representation—it’s actually how GLAAD assembles our Studio Responsibility Index and Where We Are On TV reports.

The GLAAD Media Institute will be offering virtual courses and workshops to activists and advocates around the country, and world, in the weeks to come. Click here to learn more about how to join a course or workshop and use your voice as a GLAAD Media Institute alum.