Your marketing and communications team aren't diversity experts

If you’ve been following along with our blog posts, you’re probably aware that, at QuakeLab, we’re advocates for integrating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) strategically at all levels of your organization.

And when quick-win tactics are used instead of strategic and systematized approaches, the results are often harmful. 

DEI needs to be embedded into every facet of your organisation. So today – we’re talking communications. 

Communications, branding, marketing, and PR are the face of your organization. These functions represent and promote what your organisation aspires to be. 

The ways in which your organization approaches and executes communications says a lot about how inclusive, equitable, and even how diverse you are. 

Here are few quick ways you can assess if your organizational communication is inclusive, equitable and reflects who you are, rather than just who you aspire to be.

We’ll be dividing this assessment into three categories:

1. Crisis communications

2. External communications

3. Internal communications

When the murder of George Floyd prompted conversations about Black Lives Matter, injustice, racism, discrimination, what was your organizaton’s response? 

Most likely, your marketing/communications team was tasked to be the “woke spokesperson.” 

It became their responsibility to draft #BLM statements for social media, rapidly develop a diversity and inclusion statement, create an internal Slack channel for ‘educating’ the team, and probably, ensuring that your Instagram, website, and marketing materials had enough Black and Brown faces before those #BLM statements went public. 

It’s been two months since those public #BLM statements.

Let’s investigate:

Crisis communications

1. Did your comms team need to become race theorists for the purpose of your crisis communications?

2. Were your employees of colour tokenized in service of your crisis communications?

3. Did your strategy around #BLM center around external communications rather than internal changes and your strategic approaches to DEI?

4. Did your communications team have to create content that reflected a diverse staff and client base that doesn’t exist?

External communications

1. In an effort to speak to younger audiences and remain relevant on digital platforms, does your communications team regularly co-opt the language, style and content of communities that are not reflected in your stakeholders? (Learn more about digital blackface)

2. When creating a communication strategy and plan, are you discussing the nuances of your core audience’s demographics and their relationship with your organization and your industry?

3. When sharing news, content and expertise, do you center the voices of the most privileged? 

4. Are you using passive language to communicate injustice? Active voice takes ownership (someone did something) while passive voice makes ownership more nebulous (something was done by someone). Are you more likely to say “George Floyyd died” or “George Floyyd was murdered”? Are you more likely to say “he assaulted her” or “she was assaulted”?

Internal communication

1. Who is heard in your organization? Does your organization value ideas that come from the loudest voices? Do you have a culture of equating loud or quick input with leadership and intelligence?

2. Do you openly communicate about and seek informed consent about the privacy and security of organizational technology and communications platforms?

3. Do staff have the opportunity to introduce their preferred names and pronouns? Do they have autonomy to set up their own accounts indicating their preferred names and pronouns? If you feel they do have this autonomy, have you made that explicit or implicit?

4. Are your internal policies, procedures, and benefits easily accessible?

5. Do you have a strategy or plan for how to respect the needs of your staff during a crisis? For example: meaningfully creating space for discussion about protests, murders, racialized violence, or other significant events that may leave your team feeling traumatized.

6. Were Black employees requested or required to speak at internal sessions about BLM with no consideration about their mental wellbeing, trauma and the stress they were navigating?

These questions are a starting point. 

Diversity, equity and inclusion are not stand-alone items. They should be embedded into every part of how you work, including your communications. 

It is critical that, when approaching this work, you assess every aspect of your organization, understand your challenges, and consider with empathy the folks who are most harmed and disenfranchised by those challenges before you jump to a solution.

You need to develop a measurable strategy for diversity, belonging, and inclusion that is built into your processes, culture, and systems for real, measurable change.

And if developing a strategy sounds overwhelming, consider QuakeLab’s DIY Inclusion Strategy: an online self-guided course that will support you to go all the way from audit to evaluation as you develop your own inclusion strategy based on design thinking and results-based management.