Inequality has no place in our world and at Audiense this is at the core of our values. The last few weeks have made us reflect on these values and question whether we have been upholding these to the best of our ability.
Audiense values:
🏋️♀️ Strive for awesomeness = Excellence
✅ Do what I say I will do, in the right way = Integrity
✋ Take ownership = Accountability
🤜🤛 Best as a team = Collaboration
👂 Everyone's voice is valued = Inclusion
We need to take ownership and acknowledge we haven’t been striving for awesomeness when it comes to inequality. We need to open ourselves up to the honest reality that we have made huge mistakes. Before we can act, we need to acknowledge that we have not always seen (or wanted to see) prejudices and micro-aggressions happening within our organisation and within our industry. We have not fully addressed situations that were easier for us to ignore, we remained silent and therefore we remained complicit. That is not okay and we are truly sorry.
With this in mind, we have been taking the extra time to reflect on how we can truly make a difference both internally and externally to black lives and other marginalised groups. There is a lot of work our industry needs to do to tackle systemic racism as well as other forms of discrimination.
We may be small but we want to make sure we do our part to leave this world in a better place. Below is part of our initial plan to help tackle discrimination and inequality and ensure we are a more inclusive community, we have touched on 4 initial initiatives below. (There will be more as we continue to work on our strategy)
Amplify Black voices
We want to make a commitment to amplify black voices within our thought leadership pieces. We work with some amazing people when collaborating on content on our blog but we want to make sure we are representing everyone. We can’t wait to continue to share more awesome content with you :) If you would like to collaborate with us OR you know someone who would please email: marketingteam@audiense.com.
In the meantime, we invite you to diversify your own Twitter feed by following some of these amazing accounts:
Equity not equality
We (a start-up company ourselves) understand starting a new business is hard enough, but studies show that marginalised groups do face a harder time (particularly financially). We want to make things easier for these business owners to market themselves on Twitter and to extend free access to Audiense connect for startups led by women and black entrepreneurs. If that applies to you, please email us on carlos.serra@audiense.com.
Internal education & inclusion training
We promise to continually educate our staff on Racism (Overt vs Covert), systemic racism, racial bias, discrimination, and inequality. This document contains a useful repository of resources we’ve shared with our team, we invite you to learn with us and also share with your team: bit.ly/ANTIRACISMRESOURCES.
Zero tolerance
This should go without saying, but we have a zero-tolerance to racism and discrimination from our staff and our customers.
Inequality has no place in this world and we want to be thoughtful and we want our changes to be long-lasting. Over the next few weeks, we will be building out this strategy and continuing to set out a plan that will help tackle inequality in our organisation and in our industry in the long term. If you’re interested in understanding more about how we plan to do please let us know and we can keep you up to date with all initiatives as we roll them out.
Thank you x
Photo by Jiroe on Unsplash.
