Part 4 - Communicating Inclusivity
YOUR REPUTATION & BRAND
How the public views your organization and how you demonstrate your commitment to diversity are important considerations. It’s about credibility and reputation – and ‘walking the walk.’
You need to let people both inside and outside your organization know about your efforts and your results in planning for and achieving diversity and inclusion. Part of your strategy should be a communications plan for sharing your values and goals, demonstrating diversity within your workforce, and what initiatives your organization is taking.
Having a strong diversity communications strategy will help you to:
- Raise internal awareness of diversity and inclusion with your staff, volunteers and board
- Highlight successes; inspire further action; improve staff engagement
- Emphasize your business case for diversity
- Build the external profile of the organization and support the attraction of diverse talent
General considerations for a communications strategy:
- Make sure you clearly define what diversity means to your organization.
- Choose the right messenger. Your leadership should definitely be among those who deliver your message because they speak for the whole organization’s attitude. Sometimes other employees may actually be better ambassadors. Make the messenger appropriate to the message.
- Communicate in stages. This allows for dialogue on a regular basis which leads to greater understanding and encourages everyone to get involved.
- Always include a call to action. It may be as simple as asking people to re-examine their own ideas in light of your company’s definition of diversity.
- Your communications plan should also make strategic use of pictures and videos. Remember the phrase: A picture is worth a thousand words.
Creating your communications plan:
- Start by determining what you want to express
- Brainstorm! Talk to all levels as well as audience, partners, clients
- Do a communications audit to review how diversity is reflected in all your communications tools (website, press releases, brochures and programs, newsletters, social media, job postings, annual reports, etc.)
- Establish a timetable, budget, and accountability and track your progress
Dig Deeper
Diversity Journal – This is an American site, but worth exploring for its articles and tips.
Consider the following
We have:
□ Internal communications free of jargon and cultural bias
□ External communications (e.g. website, printed materials, etc.) that show our commitment to inclusion and diversity through language and pictures
□ Clear and safe internal communication procedures to encourage people to express concerns
□ Strategies for cross-cultural communications in workplace interactions
□ Communication strategies and tools that are specific and relevant to the audiences or markets we want to reach
□ An employee manual for each employee that contains a statement of our values, mission and mandate, and our policies
□ A board manual for our board members which includes a code of conduct, our policies and values
□ Clear orientation procedures to accompany all written material