Dwindling Corporate Support for Pride Month Is Only Part of the Story: What Is Our Role as Communicators in 2025?

One of the principal stories of Pride Month in 2025 has been the dwindling corporate support for Pride celebrations and LGBTQ organizations and what that means for broader acceptance of and engagement with our community.

But that is only part of the story; Pride Month has become a key indicator of an organization’s commitment to communicating its values and protecting its reputation. Communicators should take note. In 2025, the question for communicators is: Are we following our clients or leading them?

Yes, major corporations have pulled back on their LGTBQ support. Pride organizations in major cities across the US have suffered significant losses in fundraising as once-stalwart corporate supporters have reduced or eliminated funding.

WorldPride DC 2025, which was held in my hometown of Washington, D.C., this year, was a more muted event than the community had hoped due to the oppressive and regressive national political climate and the resulting abandonment of LGBTQ community support from corporate supporters and reduced media coverage.

Corporate support of Pride has been controversial, with some in the LGBTQ community who say it is only performative and does nothing but “buy” our attention with no real benefits. The charge is that much of the corporate support of our community was intended to make companies look good when support for our community was perceived as a good thing.

Now that support for our community is perceived as a bad thing by much of our elected political leadership, corporations are showing their true colors and abandoning us. To some extent, that is true. We should also note who those companies are and judge them accordingly.

However, it’s also important to acknowledge the continued importance of corporate support and what we, as communicators, need to do to buttress it. We should understand the role of dwindling corporate and organizational support for Pride as a signal of a broader pullback on long-held values by many companies and institutions. If your clients will abandon us, who else and what else will they abandon? It’s LGBTQ people this month, but who is next?

Remaining true to our values

This task is a responsibility for all of us in the PR profession, not just for the LGBTQ community and LGBTQ communications professionals. Regardless of our location, business specialty or the audiences we reach, our mission as PR professionals is to provide our clients with the best counsel possible.

And the best counsel always includes advising clients to remain true to their values. In 2025, this means advising clients who have long stood with the LGBTQ community that now is the time to double down on that support, not abandon it. And for those companies that have already pulled back, our job is to advise those clients on how to recommit to their principles and repair the reputational damage caused by their actions.

Lest you think you’ll be alone in your support for LGBTQ people this year, there are signs of continued fortitude in the face of growing fear. More than a dozen stock exchanges in Europe and elsewhere have been “ringing the bell for LGBTQI+ equality” over the past month in a first-ever show of global support for the economic inclusion of gay people. (Full disclosure: our client Koppa is a sponsor of this campaign.)

In addition, several leading companies have remained steadfast in their engagement with us: I attended a “Love Travels” WorldPride event sponsored by Marriott Bonvoy in Washington this month that proved that point, and I saw several leading companies participate in the WorldPride DC 2025 parade as well. (Hello United Airlines, Hilton, Hyatt, Four Seasons Washington, Giant, Wegmans, Lidl, Kaiser Permanente, CareFirst and others.)

Pride isn’t just a “gay cause,” it’s a human cause. And it should be a permanent part of the communicators’ vernacular. I’m gay 365 days a year, not just in June. And I’m a consumer and a committed citizen 365 days a year, not just sometimes. Support for LGBTQ people is not political; it’s practical. And always advocating for all is not activism; it’s appropriate.

As we consider what to say to our clients about Pride this year, let’s consider the price of not speaking out and the reputational cost of a lack of commitment to the LGBTQ community now and others in the future.

Ben Finzel is president of RENEWPR in Washington, D.C., an NGLCC-certified LGBT Business Enterprise. In 2003, he co-founded FH Out Front, the first global LGBTQ communications practice at an international PR firm (FleishmanHillard). In 2019, he co-founded The Change Agencies, the national inclusive communications agencies network. He was inducted into the PRSA National Capital Chapter Hall of Fame in 2021 and was chair of the 2024 PRSA Counselors Academy Spring Conference.

 Photo credit: 9parusnikov

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