Blueboard was an "employee experiences" program. The idea behind employee experience programs are essentially that your employee picks an "experience" they want to have, they go out and have that experience, it engenders good feelings about the company. "Non-traditional" rewards, as opposed to something like a cash bonus. Essentially (in my opinion) the idea is to try and reward employees non-monetarily, with a side-benefit of generating free word-of-mouth and goodwill for companies (both Blueboard and the client company).

Purportedly the experiences included things like Disneyland and Dubai ziplining, according to their YouTube and now-defunct site... but all I ever saw were some wine-and-cheese pairing classes.

On March 12th, 2024, Blueboard shut down abruptly -- laying everyone off and apparently leaving all outstanding experiences unfulfilled. Their lender, Triple Point Capital, forced the closure and seized all of the company's assets, including the money in the bank.

Shutdown relevant things were handled poorly. Blueboard emailed the employees of client companies with pending experiences, bypassing the HR of their employing companies The companies who had outstanding rewards or money in the program has seemingly lost their money. Everyone working for Blueboard was zero-severance let go, as well.

Funny and Random Stuff

• Their YouTube ghost-posted some presumably scheduled uploads a few times after their official shutdown.
• Their entire site was still visible via un-hiding two CSS classes. They'd used display: none to hide all the information on their site when they shut down. Which, of course, just visually hides the content and doesn't remove it.

Actually Informative Stuff

• Blueboard apparently did not do WARN compliance. My layman, non-lawyer interpretation of the WARN act is that it requires employers to provide advance notice of mass layoffs. It's a $500/day fine if you don't warn people at least 60 days out OR give them 60 days severance, it looks like.
• A pretty informative reddit thread in /r/humanresources (archived copy)
• A slightly shorter HackerNews thread.
• Apparently, there was a post from the Blueboard CFO, Scott Broomfield, on LinkedIn, but it's been taken down. Copied text below:

I'm very sad and disappointed to inform you that we have had to shut our doors today.

Our secured lender foreclosed on their assets and swept all our bank accounts. While this was unexpected, they were within their legal rights. We wish they would have informed us so we could have worked out a cooperative restructuring agreement. We are currently working on an emergency acquisition, but unfortunately, we do not have an answer yet. Tonight, the board resolved to hire an assignee for the Assignment for the Benefit of the Creditors (ABC).

If you have any questions, please reach out to me here on LinkedIn and we will get you in contact with our Assignee. I must express my sincerest apologies for any negative impact this has had on our employees, customers, recipients, and vendors. At Blueboard, we have strived to deliver unique experiences to our customers, and we are proud to have delivered experiences to over 175,000 people over the past 9 years. I would like to extend a special thanks to all the wonderful people at Blueboard. Your dedication to the idea that experiences create memories and memories create bonds is something that will not be forgotten.

I wish you all the best and wish you all success in your future endeavors.

Sincerely, Scott

• There were a couple instances of competitors to Blueboard (i.e., other employee experiences companies) such as Salt Labs and Advantage Club starting programs to help companies recoup losses (and get those companies to sign up with a new service). This includes a less-deft, more-clumsy example from Vantage Circle posting marketing bullshit to HackerNews (good luck with that!). So many vultures circling the corpse of Blueboard, hoping to pick off some scraps (Cynicism, me? No...).
• Real humans got shafted, too. Apparently, in some instances, the Blueboard rewards were reported on your W2 as a taxable benefit and had to be rescinded. Here's a good one where someone lost an entire trip to Italy. A slightly more juicy example, which may or may not be connected to actual Blueboard and might just be someone trying to capitalize on the closure, is this human (archived copy) purportedly receiving scam gift cards from Blueboard.

Personal Opinion

Broadly, I am not a fan of experience programs as employee benefits.

I've had discount program employee benefits previously. Those discount programs were quite alright; I had one in particular save me a fair amount of money on pet insurance. It was often possible to get cheaper, off-brand, and secondhand items for far less than the discount program, granted -- but they were a neat perk now and again.

I've also had benefits such as remote stipends for office equipment, and professional development budgets. I do like the latter two -- stipends have encouraged me to purchase some equipment I might not have otherwise gotten, such as a good chair, a great keyboard, etc. Professional development budgets are also pretty sweet for continued education, conferences, and -- my personal favorite -- books. There are definitely some darker takes on all of those, too: it benefits the company to give these benefits and then have them sit unused. It's salary-without-paying in some instances. But, if you actually use those benefits: they are pretty neat.

For the experience rewards programs... no, thank you. I'd much rather see the money spent on those programs go into my paycheck. If employee experiences are taxable benefits, please put the money into my actual paycheck and let me spend (or save) it however I'd like.

The idea behind the "experiences" program, put bluntly and cynically, is to essentially manipulate employees into associating their employer a good and unique experience, with the added benefit (for both the company contracting the rewards company and the rewards company themselves) of employees hopefully posting on social media about their vacation experiences with totally authentic mentions of the company's names alongside the post -- free marketing for everyone.

The whole premise of "give your employees experiences, so they talk about that experience, so they talk positively about your company" -- really cannot say I'm a fan. It toes slightly too close to the line in my head between "creative marketing" and "manipulation."

Dark and dreary, yes -- but I think these companies do enough of their own bright and sunny marketing for themselves. I don't need to bolster that image any. They have it down pat.