Pride month falls in June every year and many organisations get involved to show their support for the LGBTQ+ community. Once 1st July rolls around though, how can you continue to be an ally all year round? Platypus Digital have set in motion one simple, free way to demonstrate their support as they encourage their team to add their pronouns to various platforms. Thanks so much to Matt Collins for guest writing for us on this subject!
Why we encourage our team to add their pronouns
Like a lot of organisations, we at Platypus Digital have started encouraging our team to add their pronouns to their email signatures and social media handles.
This simply means adding ways you’d like to be referred to in the third person after your name, depending on how you identify.
I’ve added ‘he / him’ to my LinkedIn profile, which is where most people will come across me professionally.
Doing something like this can feel like big time virtue signalling or bandwagon jumping. We understand those concerns.
Here’s why we at Platypus thought it was a good idea.
It shows potential employees that we’re an inclusive employer
Like all agencies, we need to have talented people want to work for us. It’s absolutely possible that someone with a non-binary gender identity could see our posts on social media and think ‘hey, that sounds like a place I’d feel included and welcomed.’
I bet there are plenty of workplaces where that’s not the case. So this move helps show that we’re a welcoming bunch, which will help us long term too.
We’re all about making a positive difference
We’re a digital marketing agency that only works for charities. Our first value is to ‘make a positive difference’.
This is a small, free way that we could show solidarity with people who struggle to be accepted because of who they are.
It shows current employees what we’re about
If you run your agency, your team will consciously or unconsciously look at what you do to find out what your workplace is all about.
Maybe your team have non-binary friends or family that they haven’t mentioned to you.
”I felt like not doing something was its own kind of action. So our team might not say it, but if we actively refused to allow such a move (or even just don’t actively encourage it), it sends a message about what kind of employer we are.
It would have been the wrong message, so we encouraged it.
It’s hard to know exactly what kind of impact adding pronouns to signatures has had – maybe it’s not a big one. But that’s fine, because it’s not a difficult thing to do.
It’s also completely optional – nobody has to do it. We just talked about what it is, why we encourage it and let people make their own decisions.
You don’t have to do it either. But we can’t think of any harm that could really come from doing it. We can only picture people getting a good impression of what kind of employer we are, and that has to be a good thing.

About Matt Collins and Platypus Digital
Matt Collins started Platypus Digital back in 2014. He’s worked in the charity sector for his whole career, regularly speaks at charity events and believes passionately in the power of the internet to connect people.
‘We’re a digital agency with heaps of experience delivering powerful messages online for a range of great causes. We’ve all spent years in charity roles, as well as agency and startup jobs. We’ve blended that experience of what gets results online to create a great service for charities.’