“Before I share anything with the outside world, I always ask myself “How does this showcase Dogpatch as a diverse & inclusive place?” and “Which groups am I elevating in these images?”. I’ve found it’s raised the awareness of me and those around me as to who we’re elevating and why – often it’s just habit!”
Aisling Conlon
Head of Communication
Dogpatch labs
Some examples of the conscientious image choices we use
Communications
Communicating about D&I strategies often comes with perceived risks because it puts your organisation forward for scrutiny.
But there are also benefits to communicating the wins and the shortcomings of your D&I strategy, even if you’re only starting out.
Transparency and accountability helps to build trust within your hub. As Micheal Kimmel said “privilege is invisible to those who have it” so obtaining honest feedback from those outside your team will be crucial for informing the scope of your D&I projects.
Internally
Keeping your hub up to date with your D&I efforts will help bring people on board and lessen anxiety or resistance against D&I.
Externally
Publishing information externally about your D&I efforts will help keep your hub accountable to goals and targets.
Every hub operates differently, but regardless it’s important that your team have D&I front of mind to keep your target audience informed and up to date about your hubs D&I journey.
Understand
the premise of unconscious bias and what good examples of inclusive language and images look like
Diverse and Inclusive Comms 101
Baseline
your hubs comms current inclusivity standards using our quick surveys
Benchmark Your Hub
Identify and address
the gaps you identify your current content. Use this opportunity to upskill your team in inclusive comms.
Writing Inclusive Comms Content
D&I Communications 101
To communicate inclusively you’ll need to start by understanding the nuances in bias and diversity. Invest in yourself by taking subconscious bias training and understand where misconceptions about D&I come from.
From there you can move to monitor whether you’re using inclusive language and images in your current comms.
Inclusive Language Principles
Below you’ll find tips for increasing inclusive language and images across your hub.
Remember that people are people first and you should only reference an individual’s attributes (i.e. disability, race, gender) if it’s relevant to the context.
1. Inclusive Language Principles – Medium Article (Part 1)
This article covers inclusive principles to remember and phrases to avoid (~4 min read)
2. The Guide to Inclusive Language – Marketing Partners Inc.
Search “Guidelines and Examples by Topic” on this page for general principles to help you reduce bias. Theses principles are categorised by grouping (i.e. age, gender).
This article also contains a “Glossary of Definitions and Shared Language” section, which is a fantastic centralised resource explaining D&I terminology (~10-20 min read).
3. Alex – Plug-in for identifying Unequal Phrasing
Install this plain-text plug-in to catch unequal phrasing such as gender favouring, polarising, race-related, religion inconsiderate, or profane language.
Representation in Images
A picture paints a thousand words so using images which represent various groups across will drive home your commitments to an empowered, diverse workforce.
Representation Matters – Even In Stock Photos
Click through to this blog post for a deeper dive into why visual representation is so crucial. This page also has a list of diverse and inclusive stock photography resources.
Our favourite free resources from this list are;
“How (not) to talk about diversity in tech”
Take a look at this short article which highlights some of the common pitfalls in D&I communications content
Benchmark Your Hub
Use this checklist to help strengthen and sustain D&I in your hub by ensuring D&I is visible to your team and community.
Once you’ve identified your gaps, head back over to ‘Make It Happen’ for some tips on how you can start planning to address them.
Writing Inclusive Comms Content
All functions should be accountable for creating inclusive content with a united core D&I message.
The aim should be to seamlessly integrate inclusion into your communications channels to ensure they’re as welcoming, responsive, respectful as possible.
Honing Your D&I Message
Create one singular core document to work collaboratively with your hubs comms team to establish key messages, details and finalised text.
Here’s an example of a document we used to help map out communications content.
Mapping Your Audience
For more specific initiatives, such as a You’ll have to be intentional about who you’re trying to reach with your initiatives because approach will differ depending on the audience. It’s also crucial to understand any factors that might cause people not to engage.
How: Consider these barriers for your audience ahead of an initiative.
You can use the audience mapping framework in the core PR doc (see below) or go deeper again and develop user persona templates to help you drill down on the needs of individual groups and be more targeted in your approach.
