With over 41 million native speakers, Spanish is the 2nd most common language in the US. During the recent election races, Duolingo witnessed politicians attempting to speak Spanish to garner the support of Spanish-speaking voters and then stop once the campaigning was over. As the world's #1 language learning App, Duolingo wanted to be in that conversation, so we decided to give politicians a push. As newly-elected officials gathered in D.C. to begin their time in office, we directly sent them a message of encouragement via The Washington Post’s Capitol Hill edition exclusively delivered to the Senate and House offices. The same message was printed on a bus that drove around Capitol Hill. We also partnered with Voto Latino Foundation, an organization empowering the next generation of Latinx voters, to make sure the politicians’ efforts to learn Spanish continued after the election was over in order to form deeper connections with their Spanish-speaking constituents.

Luis Von Ahn, Duolingo's founder, and a Latino himself, also sent letters to some of the constituents asking for their commitment to learning the language to keep building connections with their voters.


This project is:
Client-commissioned

Agency
Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam

Client URL
www.duolingo.com

My Role in This Project
I was the copywriter and lead creative in this project together with my partner Emma Mällinen.

This one was a labor of love and a true team effort since the insight came from the digital strategy team and the end result was crafted with the help of lots of folk from the agency network. Being a native Spanish speaker, my knowledge of the language helped explore the writing around the campaign, and bring a bit of a sense of humor through the bilingual touches.

Since only a few members of our team were part of the Latinx community, we reached out to W+K's Latinx affinity group and to the American NGO Voto Latino to make sure the tone and the message were right, and we weren't misrepresenting a group of people for the sake of putting out an ad.