A brief history of the BTU

September 2022

The story of this fan project begins here: US radio host Ethan Cole said something nice about Louis and someone tweeted "let's send Ethan some flowers, who's in?" Turns out, lots of people wanted to show appreciation. We ended up sending flowers and designing heartfelt cards for Ethan as well as Louis.

September 2022

The flower project quickly grew way out of proportion, as more and more people wanted to participate. Looking at that group chat of diverse, eclectic humans so full of love, generosity and kindness, one of our founding members suggested channelling this energy into a fundraiser for a good cause - something that's bigger than us. 

September 2022

Thus, the Bigger Than Us Charity Challenge was born. Our announcement tweet was shared enthusiastically, and we gained more than 1,000 followers in just a few days. It was very reassuring to see how strongly our idea spoke to the fandom. We began recruiting more volunteers and asked our followers to nominate charities that they wanted us to support.

October 2022

While we were waiting for nominations and researching the nominated charities, we started doing community activities, such as playing fandom bingo, hosting giveaways, promoting Louis' single "Out Of My System", and hosting a virtual scavenger hunt. Finally, we hosted Twitter spaces with representatives of our finalist charities, to introduce the charities to our community. 

October 2022

More than 1,200 people participated in the poll that determined our first focus charity to be The “It Gets Better” Project. Their mission is to uplift, empower, and connect LGBTQ+ youth around the globe with each other and with great educational resources. We love how “it gets better” is basically another way of saying “have faith in the future”! 

November 2022

When we opened our fundraising page and issued the first Charity Challenge, we asked: “Can we raise £280 for It Gets Better before Christmas?” and the fandom’s resounding answer was: Heck yes, we can! In the following weeks, you helped us tear down fundraising milestone after milestone (and yes, we made them £369, £777, etc).

November 2022

In the whole madness that was November 17th, we helped the fandom get Louis' album "Faith in the Future" to debut on #1 of the UK charts. As an incentive, we pledged to donate the price of one album towards our fundraiser, for every proof-of-purchase sent to us by fans. Together with countless other fan initiatives, our efforts were successful in the end!

November 2022

While our main platform is Twitter, we also started an Instagram account to help us spread the word of our mission of kindness. 

(Please note that the image shows the original account handle. Today you can find us at @btu_kindness!)

November 2022

To help uplift the spirits in the fandom, we started posting little challenges to the community. In these posts, we prompted you to reflect on your mental health, do something good for yourselves, focus on gratitude and friendship, and be kind to yourselves and each other.

November 2022

A major emotional milestone for us was the release of our first trailer video! A number of volunteers worked really hard at creating the video, and we're very proud of it - as it perfectly represents who we are, and what's our mission, as a fan project.

December 2022

To spread some holiday cheer, and rally more support for our fundraiser, we hosted a trivia quiz for the fandom community. The quiz consisted of (very fun! very challenging!) questions to test your fandom knowledge :)

December 2022

We are immensely proud of this achievement - our Christmas fundraiser resulted in more than £2000 for a charity that supports, educates and uplifts queer youth across the whole world. This was our Christmas / birthday gift to Louis, and we hope he heard of it!

January 2023

Louis kicked off the year with a bang on Twitter - and so did we. On January 7th, we announced our new mission, re-branding as the "Bigger Than Us Kindness Project". From now on, raising funds for charity is just one of the many ways in which we want to grow kindness in the fandom. Learn more about our mission here.

February 2023

During the week leading up to Valentine's Day, we held a fundraiser for our focus charity. Every donor could also send a Valentine's Day Card (designed by our volunteers) to a loved one. We raised more than £200 for charity and sent more than a dozen cards. We also highlighted a different kind of love every day (friendship, kindness, family, self love, loving an idol, love between moots, and of course romantic love).

February 2023

Third week in February was international "Random Acts of Kindness Week" and the BTU participated by sharing resources and suggestions for little random, free ways to be kind to strangers, friends, or oneself. 

On Feb 22nd (national "Chosen Family Day" in the US), we held a space with a representative from It Gets Better, for which more than 280 people tuned in.

March 2023

After Liam supported Louis at the London premiere of Louis' documentary "All of those voices", he posted an emotional and vulnerable letter to Instagram in which he opened up about his struggles with mental health. Alongside multiple projects by other fan groups, we started a petition to show him how loved he is (you can still sign it here).

April 2023

While we loved the original BTU rainbow-sparkle-design, it started to dawn on us that it didn't lend itself to creating a pleasant visual brand across our social channels. So after much deliberation, we came up with a new design that included checkers 🏁(for our origin in Louis' fandom), rainbow 🏳️‍🌈 (for the diverse spectrum of fans that make up the whole fandom), and watercolor (as a gentle, fluid medium to represent kindness)

April 2023

The more people know about us, the more we can have an impact for good! That's why our volunteers are wearing the BTU shirts and handing out thousands of info cards at the concerts they attend this summer. If you also want to help us spread kindness at concerts, please send us a dm on twitter or instagram! 

April 2023

A kind fan offering us their extra concert tickets grew into us hosting the #TicketKindnessProject, where people can either pledge tickets or apply to receive these tickets for free. The BTU is coordinating the project, while the ticket holders decide whom they give their tickets to. The project is ongoing throughout 2023. As of June we helped more than 50 fans see a show they couldn't have seen otherwise.

April 2023

To help fans find important infos about their shows, we started posting these info-tweets, attaching new information (travels, weather, regulations, situation at the venue) as a thread as we learn of it. We also encourage our followers to add helpful information to the threads themselves.

May 2023

On May 28th, we crossed the 2000 followers mark on Twitter! 

A big THANK YOU to every single one of you for helping us spread kindness throughout the fandom everyday!

June 2023

During June, which is internationally acknowledged as Pride Month, we're running a fundraiser for our focus charity It Gets Better. We want to help them in their super important mission to spread faith in the future to LGBTQ+ people around the globe ♥️

September 2023

We fell in love with the kindness behind Helene's mindfulness cards and reached out to her, asking if she'd help us spread love to those in the fandom who can't afford the cards. Being the wonderful soul that she is, Helene didn't hesitate to donate several packs to us, which we gave away among our followers this month. See some of their happy reactions here.

September 2023

Branching out to one more social media platform, we created an account on tumblr. We'll be sharing the same content there as on Twitter and Instagram, but as tumblr doesn't have any limits on text or images, we're able to serve it to you with much more detail :)

October 2023

Putting a stronger focus on serving our fandom community, we have started adding resources to our website. One of the things we're doing is making our Twitter Spaces more accessible to everyone, beginning with a written-out summary of the "Concert Tips & Resources" space. Polished versions of our other spaces (on chosen family and mental health) will be available for streaming & download soon, too.