She & HER → Atlanta Black Pride
Your countdown is broken.
So is the one benefit you promise every sponsor who pays you. I'd rather show you than tell you, so everything on this page is built and running, not described.
until Atlanta Black Pride 2026 — Labor Day weekend, September 2–7. Dates per Atlanta Pride, IGLTA and Discover Atlanta. Your own site doesn't publish them.
Your header shortcode, printing as literal text on every page — then the same widget, working. That's not a sales clock. It's your thing, fixed.
Terence — Desirée Mayon, founder of She & HER. We haven't met, so I'll skip the windup.
My team spent this week inside your site the way a sponsor's marketing lead would — clicking every logo, checking every page. I want the Presenting sponsorship, and I want to pay for it in work rather than cash. But I'd rather not spend a page telling you we're good at this. Everything from here down is something we built for you this week.
First: the page you're selling
Your sponsorship sheet promises “Logo and Link to sponsor website” on all seven tiers, from Community Partner at $750 up to Presenting at $35,000. Here's that page as it stands, and here it is rebuilt.
Hover any logo — then switch to Rebuilt and hover again.
Yours: 36 logos, none hyperlinked, empty alt on all 36, no tier grouping — a $35,000 sponsor and a $750 sponsor render identically. Rebuilt: grouped, named, linked, UTM-tagged. Tier assignments are illustrative; you'd confirm who sits where, which is rather the point.
That's a contractual deliverable on every tier, and it isn't reaching anyone. Their agencies can't report a single click back to the brand that wrote you the check.
Second: the report they've never received
Every benefit on your sheet is exposure — logo placement, social, print, verbal recognition five times hourly, vendor space. All real. None of it producing a number a sponsor's CMO can put in a deck. So here's the artifact that would land in their inbox two weeks after the festival.
Structure only — the numbers stay blank because you don't collect them yet. That's the whole point.
Four figures and one chart per sponsor, per tier. Today not one of these values exists anywhere in your organization.
Here's the arithmetic I keep coming back to. Three decades, a weekend the city's own tourism board promotes, what's widely described as the largest Black Pride celebration in the country — and the top of your rate card is $35,000.
That's not a pricing mistake. It's an evidence gap. You can't charge what you can't prove, and nobody has ever built you the instrument that proves it.
While I was in there
Nine findings, each reproduced on the live site this week. Six are same-day fixes. Filter them, or click any row to open it.
A·01No sponsor logo is hyperlinkedPage rebuild
36 logos on /sponsors, zero hyperlinked — there is no <a> element anywhere in the page's main content.
A benefit sold on all seven tiers is not reaching a single sponsor.
A·02No tier differentiationPage rebuild
One undifferentiated grid — no headings, no text nodes, no grouping.
It removes the visible reason to buy up. Your $35,000 tier looks exactly like your $750 tier.
A·03Empty alt attributes on all 36 imagesPage rebuild
Every <img> carries alt="", and no sponsor is named in text anywhere on the page.
Sponsors get no search value from the placement, and the page is silent to a screen reader.
A·04Countdown shortcode prints as raw textSame-day fix
[ycd_countdown id=3329] renders literally instead of as a countdown.
Twice on every page — desktop header and mobile menu, homepage included. It's in the shared header template.
A·05Invalid ZIP in the global footerSame-day fix
“1530 Dekalb Ave NE Atlanta, GA 303037” — six digits, on every page.
It weakens local search signals and reads as unmaintained.
A·06The sponsorship page still sells the 25th AnnualSame-day fix
It also prints the top tier as “$35,00”.
Your own October 2021 release marks the 25th. A prospective Presenting sponsor is reading a five-year-old rate card with a typo in the price — and every logo on that page was uploaded in August 2021.
A·07No 2026 dates published anywhereSame-day fix
Atlanta Pride, IGLTA and Discover Atlanta all list your weekend. Your own domain doesn't.
Every search for your dates lands somewhere that isn't you.
A·08Nothing published since February 2026Content
Press releases stop in June 2025. The calendar widget's only link points to February, because that's your most recent month with posts.
A·09atlantablackprideweekend.org is parkedAdvisory
It resolves to a GoDaddy parking lander, not to you.
Flagging, not quoting. If that domain is or was yours, it's worth recovering. If it isn't, it's worth knowing what's sitting on it.
What I want for it
The Presenting sponsorship, paid in work rather than cash — scoped at what we'd actually invoice, with no inflated in-kind math. And if Presenting is spoken for, switch phases off and watch where it lands. We'll shape it to whatever tier is open.
Now the part about us
She & HER exists to give sapphics somewhere to belong. Community first, then self, then someone — that's the arc, and the platform is how it scales. It's sapphic-led, and it's built on the premise that safety is a product decision you can design, measure and prove.
I'm a data scientist. I spent my career building product at Google, and before that Microsoft, Etsy and Nordstrom. I read at Cambridge. I'm a Black sapphic woman from Houston who sat on the board of Pride Houston. The reason you're getting this from a founder instead of a sales rep is that I'm the person who clicked all 36 logos.
We were an official sponsor of NYC Pride 2026, where we ran The Powder Room in the VIP area and managed the influencer pit. We're a partner at AfroTech 2026 in Houston this November, and we're backed by Google for Startups and NVIDIA Inception.
And here's the piece most Pride organizations don't have access to. We built our own marketing agency in-house — a full GoHighLevel stack: CRM, pipelines, email and SMS sequences, landing pages, forms, attribution, reporting. Not a generic one. We built it for the sapphic and broader LGBTQ+ world specifically, because we got tired of running our community's audience through tooling designed for somebody else's. That's what turns this from a website fix into an outreach engine — every QR scan, every sponsor click, every survey response lands somewhere we already work every day.
The research arm is real too. The She & HER Research Institute is a 501(c)(3) public charity founded in May 2026, classified for social science research, running a credit-bearing graduate practicum:
Attendee spend behavior, and what actually moves a festival-goer from the hotel to the vendor tent.
Instrumentation, attribution modeling, and the pipeline that turns event data into a sponsor-facing number.
Turning reach, impact and community value into models that hold up to a corporate partner's scrutiny.
What your tiers should cost once the impact figure exists, and how to take that to a national brand.
Atlanta Black Pride would be a named research site — published under a nonprofit's name rather than a vendor's, which opens a grant pathway a Pride organization usually can't reach alone. I'll be straight about where it stands: the charter, the determination and the board are done, and the founding cohort is being placed now. I'd rather tell you that in August than have you find it out in November.
And I'll say the obvious thing out loud, because it matters to me. We're a sapphic platform asking for a seat at a Black Pride table. Queer is a word we got by banding together — all of us, the whole community — and Atlanta Black Pride has always been for all of us. Showing up for each other is the oldest thing we do.
