George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others... There are no words we can say to express how wrong their deaths are. What we can say is that their unjust sacrifice has sparked an American, worldwide, and online change towards a higher standard of racial equity in our society. Ripl is committed to contributing to this change.
As a company, Ripl stands for social justice, equal and protected civil and human rights, and basic principles of respect, humility and compassion towards everyone. These are not political principles, they are human rights and equality principles, and they are aligned with the values of our company. We stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
I want to share what we are doing right now to be a greater part of this necessary societal and economic change.
First, I am making a pledge to all of our Ripl customers—and most especially, a commitment to our BIPOC customers—that we will be more proactive in reflecting the full diversity of our small business customer base in Ripl marketing, ads, success stories, and other communications. These stories remind us that the full-spectrum diversity of small business leaders is a key part of what inspires so many others in America and around the world with a dream of economic independence.
Second, Ripl will continue to provide relevant, timely, and representative social media content recommendations and templates to our customers. It is our main goal to help you spread your unique message on social media, whatever that may be. This week, we added new Black Lives Matter and equality themed post templates to the Ripl app. These templates make it easy for you to express your own social media messages of equality and solidarity, if you wish. Moving forward, we commit to staying intentional with the representation of Ripl content templates and post recommendations which are relevant to our BIPOC customers and communities.
Third, I personally re-commit that as a company we will do more work towards facilitating open communication about racism and diversity, and towards recruiting and hiring practices that continually strive to improve our team diversity. We commit to doing the work towards anti-racism and allyship internally, as well as externally in the ways outlined above.
Finally, we want to hear your stories of BIPOC-led and -focused small business resilience during these times. We want to highlight as many of them as possible to inspire others in the days and weeks ahead. To that end, if you are a Ripl customer past or present willing to share a story you feel deserves attention, please feel free to share it with us via any of our Ripl-account based social media accounts or with an email message to “feedback@ripl.com”.
Thank you for listening.
Clay McDaniel CEO Ripl Inc.
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