BLK Launches New Homecoming Feature to Support HBCUs
Contributed by: kellyseal on Friday, November 18 2022 @ 10:12 am
Last modified on Friday, November 18 2022 @ 10:48 am
BLK, the dating app for black singles, has announced a new feature to help alumni and students who attended HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) connect with each other.
Homecoming Mode lets users add a sticker of their HBCU, allowing them to discover others who attended their college and show their school pride, according to Afro.com. BLK created the feature as a way of creating more ways for singles to strike up conversations, as communities are a big focus of the app. The goal is also to encourage each other to make plans as homecoming season is around the corner.
The stickers are available now, and so far, the company says that the top three stickers that users are adding include Florida A&M University, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and Howard University. Currently, BLK offers 15 stickers for HBCUs but plans to expand to include more in the future.
According to Afro.com[*1] , digital illustrator and founder of Dame Design Sabine Quetant, designed the HBCU stickers for Homecoming Mode. She drew inspiration from perusing the schools’ websites, particularly athletic and student pages.
“I really wanted to capture the essence of the schools,” said Quetant. “For me, the biggest thing was I wanted someone who went to the school to look at it and recognize and connect to it immediately.”
Most recently, BLK also joined forces with Michelle Obama’s non-profit “When We All Vote” to help drive people to register and vote ahead of the midterm elections, and created an in-app Election Center. The app found that while 80 percent of its users were registered to vote, almost 60 percent of young people didn’t know when the elections were, so the app intended to change that.
BLK has 8.5 million users who have downloaded the app, and the majority of users (69 percent) feel the app is uniquely designed for them. In fact, BLK will introduce chat rooms based on interests in 2023, so users can join communities that care about the same things they do.
“BLK is a safe space, it’s an inclusive space, it’s a supportive space but it’s a space where you can be your authentic self unapologetically, and we want to keep building that environment,” said Jonathan Kirkland, head of branding and marketing for BLK.
“Honing in on that energy and excitement that’s within the community and bringing that in the app in an experience where it still allows people to make those meaningful connections around homecoming,” added Kirkland.