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InVision adding client emails to their Marketing list – alternative?

over 6 years ago from Dan Wilkinson, Web Designer

  • Stephen OlmsteadStephen Olmstead, over 6 years ago (edited over 6 years ago )

    Hey folks, Stephen from InVision here- thanks for lifting this up. Was shocked to see this- doesn't sound right at all. I'm circling with our team RIGHT now and will get y'all an updated response ASAP. Suffice to say- subscribing someone to emails without their express permission is not something we support in the slightest. Swift action to this and update coming from our end very soon.

    UPDATE - 12/7/16 @ 3:00 PT

    Hey everyone- after deep review with the team, we located the issue going on here. Thanks for your patience. Here’s the details:

    What happened?

    Stakeholders without an InVision account who added their name and email to InVision in order to comment on a prototype were having their emails unintentionally (more on this in a sec) added to broader InVision marketing email list.

    How/Why did this happen?

    We use Hubspot as a central ‘bucket’ for our marketing pushes (such as our weekly email newsletter). There are several sources that feed into this system; one of those is Segment.io (a data piping infrastructure). Key point here- this service is not touched by our marketing team. Unfortunately when this was implemented, a bug caused the wrong parameter to pass over to Hubspot which in turn would mark the ‘email list’ flag for these non-registered users. This was in no way a nefarious email grab (which would be silly since that ultimately just leads to user frustration, unsubscribes, and spam complaints anyway). And while this was an honest mistake on the implementation side of things, we bear the responsibility here and apologize for any resulting frustration.

    What we’ve done and what we’re doing?

    Effective today we’ve pushed a fix that resolves this issue with Segment and ceases the behavior immediately. Furthermore, we are putting in place better internal measures to insure all sources feeding directly into our Hubspot account are audited and vetted for compliance on this issue.

    We are profusely sorry for this unintentional misstep. We appreciate everyone’s collective passion and patience today during the correction of this issue. Much love.

    48 points
    • Philip WeberPhilip Weber, over 6 years ago

      I'd be most interested to know how it happened in the first place. Almost every designer I've ever known would be outraged if the company they worked for made a decision like that. It looks like you feel the same way. This decision was likely made without designers being involved.

      4 points
      • Stephen OlmsteadStephen Olmstead, over 6 years ago (edited over 6 years ago )

        Hey sir 100% agree. Plain and simple, this just shouldn't happen. Furthermore I'm not aware of any individual at our org who would endorse such a behavior willingly- its a 'no no' of the highest order that we take deadly serious.

        Total transparency and update: Initial investigation seems to indicate that this may not be occurring when external stakeholder comment for the first time as originally indicated, but rather a bug occurring when those first time users get @mentioned by another user in a comment. Currently the @mention is the top suspected culprit that we believe may be causing the subscribe flag to get accidentally thrown on a limited number of accounts. Thats the primary suspect as of right now. Still investigating to 100% rule out anything else here before I give the deeper dive report and all clear.

        Will continue to post updates here as I have them from the team so that y'all have complete visibility here.

        Again totally not intentional... and totally not excusable. Deeply sorry for this. Humble pie is a dish we're eating today. Thank you truly to the entire community for keeping us accountable and pushing on us here. More to come...

        UPDATE: Please see my topmost post on this. The issue ended up not being the @mentioning culprit as initially surmised, but rather a bug in the way Segment was passing data to our Hubspot system. Lots more details there. Thanks for your patience!

        12 points
      • Sacha GreifSacha Greif, over 6 years ago

        This comment strikes me as a bit condescending, as if "designers" were some kind of morally superior uber-humans.

        Designers make bad decisions all the time. I don't think it projects a very good image of designers as a profession when the first reaction to somebody screwing up is “surely it couldn't have been a designer!”.

        8 points
    • Dirk HCM van BoxtelDirk HCM van Boxtel, over 6 years ago (edited over 6 years ago )

      BAM. Negative into a positive. I salute you for the balls to speak up in such fashion... even though it should be commonplace to do so amongst any organisation, anywhere.

      Thanks for being awesome.

      .edit: please don't add me to your email list just because I respond to your comment.

      13 points
    • Ollie BarkerOllie Barker, over 6 years ago

      Thank you for being so up-front about this. It's really good you all took this seriously, kept us informed and gave us a detailed response.

      3 points