Editor’s note: Snap CEO, Evan Spiegel sent the following memo to all Snap team members on 17 May.
Team,
Today we’re releasing our second annual CitizenSnap report. The report outlines our Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) efforts, which focus on running our business in a responsible way for our team, our Snapchat community, our partners and the broader world we are part of.
This is important work for Snap. We believe it’s a moral imperative for businesses to work towards creating a healthy and safe society, and we know it matters to the hundreds of millions of Snapchatters who use our services every day.
Our CitizenSnap report offers a comprehensive overview of the work we did throughout 2020 to support our communities and our partners, including efforts to inform and educate Snapchatters during the global pandemic, empower them to make their voices heard through voting and highlight diverse voices and stories. We did this while deepening our commitment to building privacy, safety and ethics in our products and platform and continuing to work towards becoming a more diverse, inclusive and anti-racist company.
Our report also introduces an ambitious three-part climate strategy, to do our part to take action at the pace and scale that is needed. We are proud to share that we have now become a carbon-neutral company, past, present and future. We have adopted science-based emissions reduction targets and had them approved by the organisation that leads that initiative globally, making us one of the few companies in our space to have done so. And we have committed to purchasing 100% renewable electricity for our facilities globally. These commitments are only the beginning. We will keep evolving our climate programmes to keep up with best practices, and we are starting the process of making a Net Zero commitment within the next year.
To complement our report, today we’re also introducing a revamped Code of Conduct, [ADD LINK]. The new Code offers our team members an ethical decision-making framework designed to help us think broadly about what it means to do the right thing, for all our stakeholders, in an international business. The framework is based around our company value of kindness. To conduct business with kindness means that we have the courage to hear and speak the truth, use empathy to understand the impact of our actions and choose actions that instil trust with our stakeholders. The Code helps us not only avoid misconduct but find ways to promote the well-being of our stakeholders as part of what it means to run a responsible business.
Last year, we wrote that our CitizenSnap report was a “rough draft”, reflective of our desire to learn, grow and iterate. That’s still true, and it always will be. From our earliest days, we have made very different choices about how to build our platform and run our business. We have been and remain focused on the long game. As we look to the future, we will continue to be transparent about what we’ve achieved ands where we’ve fallen short. And we will continue to make decisions that focus on earning the trust of the communities we serve.
Our CitizenSnap report is a reflection of the hard work and passion of so many teams across this company, during an especially trying year. I am so grateful to all of you for how far we have come – and energised by the work that lies ahead.
Evan