Late last year I made a post about #safespace hashtags. I’ve been diligently and carefully marking places in my own community which I knew were always safe, but I am not enough in this cause on my own. Pride Month brought up so many important issues, the importance of safe spaces among them, and I reached out to friends in hopes of finding a few places to add to my own lists.
Today, while looking at the attributes options in the Google Business interface I saw the image above. These options are always expanding. But in this case, which I am so happy to bring up here - LGBTQ Friendly and Transgender safe space are both options for attribute selection from the business side. A bit of research shows that this option has been active for over a year - but I have never once seen it auto-populate as a suggestion before today.
That auto-populate is everything. That auto-populate is acceptance. It is a suggestion. It is a statement of what is anticipated.
This changes so much. This is another, deeply important reason for businesses to claim their business listing and interact with Local Guides. The ability to ensure that they are quietly, but definitively listed as a safe space, and searchable as such, means that locations which are really serious about providing safety and acceptance can now do so with minimal effort and maximum impact.
I haven’t ever seen this option from the LG side, but maybe I simply have not come across it. I can see many reasons for limiting this declaration to the business side of the interface only, and of course there are reasons to continue being intelligent when considering information within maps, but this is a crucial step in a very important direction, and I am so glad to see that it has been taken.
If there is ever an LG education, I will absolutely be pushing for use of attributes like this to be part of the earliest content!