A common question across Mailchimp is, “What are you reading?” This comes up in AMAs, town halls, or even casual walks in the hallway (back when we were casually walking hallways!).
Starting with Coffee Hour and Lunch & Learn, and more recently with the Mailchimp Speaker Series, hosting authors to challenge and inspire our employees has always been a big part of Mailchimp’s culture. And the Employee Experience team loves doing book giveaways to celebrate author appearances and support their work. We’ve always given physical copies to employees but over the years, they’ve asked us about providing audiobooks to make the content more accessible. We listened, and we’re excited to let you know about our new partnership with the audiobook platform Libro.fm.
We’re so pumped to be partnering with Libro.fm. They’re a small but mighty company from Seattle. They offer monthly memberships and a la carte purchasing options on a vast array of audiobooks, and every purchase helps local bookstores.
A small business helping other small businesses—could it get any better? Well, yeah: Libro has been a Mailchimp customer since 2013.
Throughout the year, we’ll select a new bookstore to support through the platform. First up was Mahogany Books, a Black-owned bookstore (and Mailchimp customer!) in Washington, D.C. Next in line is Loyalty Bookstores, another Black-owned shop in the D.C. area.
So far, all our 2020 Mailchimp Speaker Series books are available: Why Are We Yelling by Buster Benson, The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal, Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, How to Be an Antiracist by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, Weird Parenting Wins by Hillary Frank, and The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky. Going forward, anytime the Employee Experience team does a book giveaway, the audiobook version will be free to all Mailchimp employees via the Mailchimp Libro.fm account.
In addition to audiobooks by authors from our Speaker Series, we’ve also created the “Leadership Library,” where employees can download audiobooks recommended by Mailchimp’s leaders. Knowing the books that inspire our founders and top execs makes for great conversation starters, plus these books can help us become stronger leaders, thinkers, and doers ourselves.