On the evening of March 8, an insensitive push notification stating “All Waves Matter” was delivered to members of the Jack’d community in North America. We want to unconditionally apologize to our members for this push notification.
The writing process for marketing communications at Jack’d involves brainstorming, workshopping, and approval before messages are sent. In the case of this notification, a brainstorming session, which included Black and POC team members, was held several weeks prior with the intent of coming up with messages that celebrated a sociopolitical movement we value within our community, Black Lives Matter, that was inclusive of all Black lives. This draft should have been disqualified during this session, but was mistakenly added to a list of approved messages.
On March 8, this message was prepared and delivered, which went out starting at 9:30pm EST. Once our team recognized the error in its inclusion and delivery, we stopped any further notifications from delivery at approximately 12:30am EST.
Jack’d is an international platform that serves millions of members from diverse backgrounds across the globe. In instances like this, though everyone on our team shares the goal of service to our community, we don’t all share a similar understanding of cultural references, and good intent alone is not enough. The team at Perry Street understands the seriousness of this issue. We are retooling our approval process for marketing communication, and will hold company-wide diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to raise awareness in this team and across our organization. Moving forward, we are working to ensure that our entire team has a common understanding of the sociopolitical issues affecting all of our global members.
In Solidarity,
The Jack’d Team