Unknown Speaker  0:01  
Welcome to Engaging Ideas, the bi weekly podcast from Parsons TKO, bringing you conversations with mission driven leaders and luminaries to shift your perspective and challenge your assumptions on the art of the possible.

Tony Kopetchny  0:16  
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of engaging ideas, the Parsons Tek yo podcast where we like to bring leaders and luminaries from across the mission driven sector to share ideas and experiences with you. So you can get some insights, have some kindred spirits out there you might be able to relate to, and I feel so alone and all that great work you're doing out there to make a difference in the world every day. Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Carrie Jones wearing who is currently serving as Vice President for Communications, the Health Foundation for Western and Central New York. Welcome, Carrie. Thanks so much for having me, Johnny. I'm so glad to be here. I'm delighted to dive into this episode with you. As everyone knows, we got a few questions we're gonna get started with, I'm going to be taking copious notes. So we can run down any of those rabbit holes that pop up during this conversation. And Carrie, can you tell us about what your team looks like, and you know what your primary objectives are in terms of outreach and Audience Engagement foundation? Sure. So the House Foundation for Western and Central New York, is a grant making organization that serves the Buffalo and Syracuse areas and the surrounding counties. So we serve 16 counties in New York. And we have a focus on improving the health of young children under five who have their lives impacted by poverty, we serve organ organizations are improving the lives of older adults. And we also work to build community health capacity. So building that strong network of community organizations in our area, that serve the people whose lives we want to improve. We do all of this through a lens of health equity, like a lot of organizations exercise, we're a small but mighty communications team, we have a total staff of 12. At the Health Foundation, we have two person communications. So it's myself and our communications content manager who really works with me developing a lot of the content that we use on our website, and our social media channels. And we're kind of just a two person team that really is working together to tackle some of these communications objectives. So we are in terms of outreach, we're in a really interesting place with our organization right now. Because

Kerry Jones Waring  2:36  
in early 2020, we, before the pandemic, we made a commitment to conducting our work through a lens of health equity specifically. So we've kind of always been in these areas, we have served the community for 20 years. And it was kind of we have, like we were doing this work, but we weren't specifically calling out how racial and socio economic health disparities have an impact on health outcomes. So we made the decision as an organization to develop a new strategic plan and a new vision statement that specifically centered our work and health equity. So from a communication standpoint, that really gave us an opportunity to take a closer look at how are we reaching people? You know, what is the public image that we're projecting him? And does it align with that vision? And does it align with our goals and equity, um, you know, only Anthropy can be a little bit of an ivory tower and has been traditionally where, you know, in the position to distribute money is a very specific power balance, right. So, and it was a power imbalance, I don't think was really recognized to explicitly buy this vector for a long time. But like a lot of foundations, now, we're starting to realize sort of the role that we play in the community and how the work that we do either reinforces inequity, or gives us the opportunity to kind of turn those things on its head and actually advanced racial health equity in the community. So we've been taking a really close look at our communications over the last couple of years and saying, you know, are we reaching the communities that we want to reach? Are we kind of using our position to undo some of those power dynamics and put ourselves in a position to be able to work with grassroots organizations that serve the community that haven't had the opportunity to access philanthropic funds before so it's a really interesting learning experience.

Tony Kopetchny  4:47  
We are chatting here for everyone at the close getting close to the close of 2022 in December.

Unknown Speaker  4:56  
You said you started this work at the beginning of 2020

Unknown Speaker  5:00  
No. And yes, amen. And I, your thoughts there about philanthropy. I know there's just been a massive amount of talks, more so this year than I've heard in other years about what role philanthropy really does have to play, and what changes they might need to make, you know, and getting to these, this equitable world we're all trying to achieve here. What's it been like, during the two years of your practice, then going through this? And because one thing I've been in conversations with, and I hear about is, how much of it was lip service? And who's backsliding? And how do we keep philanthropy and other organizations accountable for this work that they've committed to, to making sure that they're moving forward, rather than just slipping back into old ways? Is what's your what's your experience been like over the last two years? That's a great question. And that we started this work. And as you can imagine, at a really interesting time to start it was we actually voted on this vision, march 11 2020. So literally, before the pandemic really came to the US, and things started to change. And, of course, a few months before the racial justice, reckoning that happened in this earth that started to happen in this country, and may 2020. So we were really cognizant of the fact that this could easily look like lip service, it could easily become lip service. And what we did was we started as an organization by having some really candid conversations with some folks in the community that we trusted, who specialized in this kind of work, and, and said, you know, what's our, what's the door into that? Like, how do you even start this work, because it feels so overwhelming. And they said, look within, don't do anything until you look within this organization, and make sure that your day to day work is not reinforcing some of these social structures and some of this inequity. So we started a really detailed process of reviewing everything we do as an organization. We looked at our application, our grant application, we looked at our reporting processes. And when I say look at we are looking at this as ongoing work, it's really low, feel low, because it's so important that you feel this urgency, like feel very slow, but every incremental staff is really important. So we've been looking at the way we interact with our grantees. And the communications aspect is really interesting, because I think a lot of us in the field probably feel like, I'm doing a pretty good job with this, you know, I think

Unknown Speaker  7:36  
I'm using the right terminology. And I'm staying up to date on what you know, inclusive language looks like.

Unknown Speaker  7:45  
And when you start to really dig into it, we had a lot that we couldn't have been doing differently. We have been sort of reviewing all of our practices and communications. And you start by saying, well, we got to make sure we're using the right words. And as you know, we're using all our images. And that's all important stuff, too. But then you really start to think about how are we framing the issues that we're talking about? How are we bringing to the community, what it is that we're trying to do it in a way that is respectful and recognizes the dignity and identity of the people that we're serving. So it's really been requiring kind of a holistic audit of everything that we were doing and the way we talk about our work. One aspect that's been really important to us is the concept of asset framing, which is a concept developed by treyvion shorters is a really just amazing speaker. And I think he refers to himself as a social entrepreneur, which is such a cool way of putting it. And he developed this idea of asset, which is people are worth more than the challenges that's around them. So is the idea that another way that every word is people have worth and dignity, even before the nonprofit shows up, talking about your work in a way that recognizes the humanity and the dignity of the people that you're serving. And another concept that we've really been that has been sort of the center of the work that we've done in communications over the last couple of years, is a systemic lens to every single thing that we do. For example, we have this amazing doula program that we find in central New York and in Western New York. And what that does is provide doulas birthing doulas for people who are having babies at no cost. And normally a doula is extremely expensive. You know, someone like myself with some financial privilege when I had my kids, I couldn't afford a doula. It was wild how much they cost. So with good reason, because they provide a really incredible service, and doulas have been shown to reduce those

Unknown Speaker  10:00  
likelihood of complications during birth and after birth for both the mother and the child. So it's a really incredible service. But when we talk about our doula program, just using that as an example, we need to talk about the amazing work those doulas are doing and what the organization is doing. But we also need to talk about the fact why they exist. Why does that program have to exist, because we have a healthcare system that doesn't serve everybody equally, because we have a for profit health care system in this country, and some have access to super high quality services, and some people don't. So these tools are doing amazing work in this small space. But really, the bigger issue is the system's level change that has to happen. So that's sort of been our guiding light, over the last couple of years is reframing the way we talk about our work and pointing towards those systemic issues that the House Foundation might not be able to change on our own. But if we keep calling attention to them, it's gonna have a cumulative effect. Thank you for that. And just with some of the things you were saying there that feels slow part, it's like, it's got to take the time it's going to take, as long as action is being made, it's almost like I think we have to change something in the thinking in the nonprofit sector, and maybe just society, everyone just got so used to this super fast instant, everything's gonna be on Oh, look, I flipped the switch, this app works. And I've got 1000 followers type of mentality. And this is work that has to take time it's going to take but it has to keep happening. And I love that where you're at to is we have to start, how do we start. And we find that a lot of our work, whether it's helping people on technology, roadmapping, or the data work, it's like, there's just so many places you could dive in. And there's so much to it, where to start and helping people figure out that starting point always feels like the right approach, like, I want to get back in shape, I really want to run this race, but I haven't been off the couch and months, take a walk, take a walk and just get the habit of the walk feels like that. Just to reinforce that for everyone, this isn't going to happen overnight, this isn't going to happen. In fact, you have to start. That's right. One of the folks that we've been working with and in our dei kind of training, calls it urgent, lifelong work, you feel that urgency because you want to help people immediately. But it's lifelong work. And part of that is maybe just the systems that we work in are very results oriented, like it's a very, for profit kind of mindset, and a lot of nonprofits, what are the deliverables, that kind of thing, you can't have that mindset with this work, because there's never a finish line, there's just never a finish line you if you're going to be continuing to work on this stuff, as long as you're in this space. So once you realize that, you can come down a little bit and really start working on it.

Unknown Speaker  12:52  
But it makes itself so open, you really just think in terms of processes like coming out of software development years ago, but the agile methodologies where there isn't a finish line, but you you need marks points in time to see how well you did and then to be able to adjust. It's also not a three years throughput plan, you have a three year trajectory of where you want to go. And you know, the first six months because they're right in front of you don't know the last six months of that three, and you're gonna get there eventually. But you want to adapt along the way, not just stick to what was written on a Word doc, in the boardroom. I'm curious, when you started this work, and you were signing off on it. March 11 2020, right, where everything really started to change globally. Where did the idea for it stemmed from? Was it just a realization of the work you were doing locally? And that's something felt off? Or was there a specific board members, staff person who brought it up? Yeah, we had. So it was driven by our board. And so every five years, we go through our strategic planning process. And it's totally fine for that process to begin. And we had a really incredible dynamic board, members of Trustees, who started to talk about, you know, if we're doing this work, we've always been in this space. But until we call out the fact that race and socioeconomic status, have an impact on your health. And we need to undo that. What are we doing here? Like it almost became an imperative. And I'm going to be very frank, without getting into, you know, I can't share any, you know, proprietary information or anything, but there were some really complex conversations that had to happen. And I will also give the disclaimer that I was I joined the organization in August 2019. So just a few months before they made the decision. So they were already in the strategic planning process. But, you know, there were some really complicated conversations, hard conversations that have to happen, because, again, going back to philanthropy, as a white dominant

Unknown Speaker  15:00  
sort of ivory tower situation. For a lot of folks, this was a new way of thinking and new information. But everybody, through those complex conversations came to the realization that yeah, this is something that we have to do. So as part of that sort of five year strategic planning, they said, that's an evolution, not a revolution. So it's we didn't completely lift everything that we were doing in terms of our work, it was more of a, let's put a finer focus on it, to really use our platform to call out these disparities. That's wonderful. Thank you. I mean, I hope that for anyone who's working and trying to work through these things internally, and hasn't really set out to start making progress on it, like, here's some ideas on how to get started, or what was the emphasis or how to get yourself moving forward, thanks for bringing up treyvion shortage to those work is credible, definitely gonna lead to him. And I had the great pleasure of being in a committee once for a conference with his wife, he turned his shoulders who also runs an incredible business. So we'll link to both of them in our show notes, everyone can check out all the great work that they're both doing in this world. So there's two of you in the team. So first of all, just for everyone listening, just to reemphasize, to two folks, a lot of work that's happening. And in the midst of change and absorbing all of it.

Unknown Speaker  16:13  
I guess, because we did touch a little bit on measurement just a second or two ago, but how do you deploy analytics or data in your work? And how does that come to fruition? How do you use it? No. Great question. So on the communication side, we, we do all kind of analytics, in terms of looking at our website, visitors and our engagement on social. What we like to do going forward is is more drawing the connections between the communications work and sort of the holistic, overall organizational work, to say, the work that we're doing in communications is helping us reach new organizations who may have not found us before, there's something to be said, for your feedback loop that you sometimes get you in communications, where it's like, you're reaching your network really effectively, but who's not in that network. So that's one of the things that we've been really looking at for this equity work is, you know, how do we identify the people that are in those circles? And how do we reach them? And how do we create a sense of trust with folks who may not have been able to work with philanthropy before? So you know, that's a hard, long line to draw, it's hard sometimes to make the connection between, oh, we, you know, we ran a PSA on a different radio station than we usually do. And so we've been able to reach x number of people. So a lot of work in philanthropy is never nebulous, or with any communications that can really be that way to, for our organization as a whole. You know, there's a lot of imperative in philanthropy, sometimes to get that ROI, right, we want to see like going back to the idea of like, business kind of mindset, we want to see return on our investment. And so our organization has been taking part in something called the equitable evaluation initiative, which is national cohort of foundations, who are working in these types of spaces, to come together and have conversations about how our desire or return on investment or traditional approaches to evaluation may sometimes be reinforcing inequity. Because what is happening is, you have this idea that, you know, you need to report on everything, every grant you give, you should be analyzing, well, how many people did you reach? How many people did you serve? What that often does is create an onus on the grantee partner, who is probably a tiny organization, a nonprofit that has a stamp of three, sometimes, and even the wealth staff, wealth finance organizations, they don't have extra time, they don't have extra resources, they are living day to day trying to get doors open and serve. And here we come with the $25,000 grant and saying, I need quarterly reporting on all of these objectives, that we need to start recognizing what we're doing to these organizations. So that doesn't mean you shouldn't evaluate doesn't mean you shouldn't you can't get an ROI measurement. It means what are those terms mean to you? And how can you as the person on one side have a power imbalance that has more resources? How can you take that onus off of the grantee? So that's kind of how we've been starting to learn as an organization about how the kinds of data that we collect, you know how we can do that differently at a podcast and I tend to set up a release with Rachel Kimber, who's now at Smile Train and we were she was talking a bit of

Unknown Speaker  20:00  
About the reporting side to grant making and alternative reporting and oral reporting, as as some new methods being looked at, to really try to take some of the burden off the grantee,

Unknown Speaker  20:12  
and then get that information that the grant maker still wants. But like ways, you're with less time getting invested by the grantee so they can get out there doing the work, instead of sitting around just typing out reports and hoping it's the right thing and being really nervous and all the things that goes with that. Right. Exactly. You know, once you recognize that power dynamic, you start to see it happening everywhere, where you don't even think about, you know, the fact that a grantee is in a position where they're thinking, you need the funding to survive, I'll do whatever these folks need me to do. And you're taking time away from with the work that they're actually trying to do. So we've been we're in the very early stages of learning about this. But we recently, you know, added a field to our reporting process that allows for oral reports to be given, like, voice recording stories, one of the really important parts of the equitable evaluation initiative that we've been learning about is, you know, what do you consider data, and storytelling is data. So if you have the chance to hop on a zoom with a grantee, they tell you about some of the work they've been doing. You bring that back to your board, that data, you know, like that's showing the impact of your investment and their work. So, you know, we've really it's just about a mindset shift like all of this work, it's a mindset shift to say, you know, how do we measure whether we're sorry? Yeah, wholeheartedly, it was storytelling is data or data is storytelling. And it's, you know, the numbers alone, mean, nothing, there's no context around them. Exactly. And we've always emphasize quantitative matters, and you want to be able to collect that, but it's the qualitative side of those two, that that really makes the story shine, you know, oh, we had 100 retweets, or we had one retweet by Michelle Obama. I mean, there's exactly that quantitatively, that one would be very sad. But qualitatively, the impact of that is huge. And I think we still obscure miss the opportunities, because we're just trying to churn out reports that were, it's so hard for nonprofits, TEMA to really take the time to sit there. Once you get through churning that report and say, what did we really see? How do I back? Just how do I tell the story behind it? And, yeah, we'll just, if we can start to bring in a little bit of that. Take a breath. It's not just the numbers, throw the story on it. And that's and see the throughput of your story over time. Like, once you get to chapter 10, what a chapter one look like that it really align as you went along. Exactly. And social is such a, it's such a great example, because it can be so frustrating to look at your first of all, some of the like back channel analytics that they give you on something like Facebook, or just out of curiosity. And sometimes it's just so hard to parse even, you know what some of those numbers mean, and what is a great point where I think a lot of people have kind of an old school idea of like when successful on social, but you have to come to the understanding that maybe like you said, when you really influential shares your posts that might have more of an impact, like getting 1000 likes, you know, so it really, you have to be able to look at the numbers with them say, what does this really mean, in terms of our actually reaching people? Yeah, I've never run into the nonprofit yet, who said Our goal is lots of numbers. Exactly. Like Bigger, bigger numbers. You know, it's all for creating an effect in society or an impact or how to get there. And, yeah, we just got to make sure we don't disconnect those ones away. So you've been at this for a little bit now to work in a good two years into your solid two years? What issues of equity and inclusion have you run into with your outreach efforts? And also any of the data collection and reporting that we're just talking about? And how would you manage to address it, if you did run into any any sort of issues along those lines? To go back to the social issue? You know, one thing that we've run into is, it's difficult, it's really difficult to measure whether you are in the organizations and the communities that you want to reach if you're looking at something like social engagement, because oftentimes, it's just a little bit, you just don't have that data on a more minut level, and be able to make come to those conclusions. And I think that that's something that is a problem with the industry as a whole. So the foundation doesn't fund a ton. We don't do a lot of research ourselves, but we will often partner with an organization to fund some research. And one thing that we run into frequently is the idea of disaggregated data, or the lack thereof.

Unknown Speaker  25:00  
And backchannel back math. That's what it's called back mapping where you're actually so you have some numbers. But do those numbers actually mean anything, if you can kind of go back to the previous step that led to those outcomes. The idea of back mapping is looking at like, for example, if you look at maternal mortality numbers,

Unknown Speaker  25:23  
they're abysmal across the board across all races, but especially if you look at black women, and black people who are giving birth, and saying, those numbers are atrocious, so backtracking would then take you just to lead you to the neck back, which would be what led to that, more often than not people of color are less insured, have less access to health care than white people. So when you start to do that back mapping, you actually get to the heart of those issues that you're talking about. The problem is, with any of this kind of level of data, a lot of folks don't have the resources and the time to actually dig in that further. And the foundation of GTFO, pulling from, like, for example, data from the State Department of Health, it's not is never gated by race. So you'll often have like some points. But And largely, this is an issue that across the board, we're dealing with where data is not disaggregated by race income. And so we're kind of starting from a point when we're trying to draw conclusions from data that isn't even telling the full story, when you're able to look at data that is broken down by race or ethnicity, by socioeconomic status, then you can start to draw some of those back mapping conclusions. That's sort of the bigger picture and on a smaller scale, something that we're dealing with in communication as well, where it's like the data, and the analytics that we're working with, don't tell the whole story. So that's our challenge for the coming year is to start to say, you know, how do we draw those connections between the kind of outreach that we're doing, you know, the news stations that we're pitching for stories?

Unknown Speaker  27:10  
Is it all traditional media? Or is there some smaller community newspapers that we need to be reaching? Because those are where folks are getting their news?

Unknown Speaker  27:19  
social channels, are we, you know, in the right places for what we're trying to do. So there's a lot of challenges, and a lot of work that we still have to do in that area. Sounds to me a little bit like you're almost in a position where you have to start making your own unique datasets out of where you're able to compile from, is that true? That is true. And I don't know that we have the ability or the resources to that's a huge undertaking. I mean, that would be the ideal situation, right.

Unknown Speaker  27:52  
But again, it's again, and again, working with some of these organizations that are two person teams, overall, you know, that just don't have a big team don't have a lot of resources, but, you know, are mission driven, and are moving in the right direction. But, you know, how do we how do we tackle these huge data issues? Yeah, I mean, data normalization, being able to pull it in. And then if you were to create this dataset, and it was secured anonymous enough, there wasn't any PII or any things we've got to think about with any of the health requirements to on records. Yeah, do we just say, no HIPAA? Can you get it back out, then? No, is there which share these once they're created? does that become useful for other organizations to be able to build off of, yeah, I got very frustrated, and probably maybe like a lot of people during COVID, and just continuing to watch that the numbers couldn't get reported accurately out of any area, right, let alone the Fed doing nothing to step in, to try to start normalizing it and saying, let's create a common data set, exactly.

Unknown Speaker  28:59  
Common Data Set is, is across the board, something we need to be moving toward, we find it a lot with the smaller community organizations we work with. They're collecting some data that's probably really valuable to other organizations, but they have no way of sharing it. So we have organizations like 211, locally, who are doing amazing work in terms of that normalization of data loop, like a community information exchange. So it's like if you're part of this community information exchange, you can share your like, obviously just identified data about, you know what, you know, someone comes to you for your services, but they also need WIC, they also could really benefit from being in touch with social services, or the food pantry.

Unknown Speaker  29:51  
You can make a referral. There are a lot of people that have the right idea about it, but it's a really early stages moving that way. And those examples

Unknown Speaker  30:00  
Just really locally to where you're at in the Buffalo area in Western New York, you know, there is still a lot of fear from certain groups about what happens if their data is collected. And oftentimes, people won't give data for those reasons. And

Unknown Speaker  30:15  
and then if a smaller organization is collecting it, how are they treating it and handling it, making sure it's secure? Has there been any conversations where you're at just in the community about, hey, this is what we could be doing? Or this is how we're doing it anything you've heard, to kind of overcome those

Unknown Speaker  30:31  
private trust issues one, and then to just how people are handling data or securing it or whether Oh, yeah, security? I think people have really,

Unknown Speaker  30:42  
they have good reason for, for being distrustful of sharing information, understandably, absolutely. And I think that that's probably also part of, you know, our entire landscape on our entire world right now, where you're always wondering, like, who is taking my data, because there are a lot of bad actors. There's a lot of companies that are in the business of selling your data. So it's understandable that people would feel that way. So in terms of, you know, health outcomes, there definitely needs to be really clear communication around back, this is for a greater good. And that information is totally anonymized and just identified and, and moving that way. I don't know of any specific organizations that are working on that. Specifically, I think probably just because so much of this work is in that really critical early stage of just getting organizations to sign on. And there's also

Unknown Speaker  31:36  
like, some competitiveness among nonprofits, you know, to say, like, No, you shouldn't be going to them, you should want to ask for help. And so there's a reluctance, I think sometimes for our folks need to be part of the same network, because ultimately, they unfortunately, feel this sense of competition, which goes back to the idea of like, why are we even putting organizations in this position in the first place? We're providing these incredible services? So there's a there's interesting politics involved? Oh, yeah, I mean, the

Unknown Speaker  32:10  
raise energy coopetition, competitive, but cooperative in the nonprofit space. And everybody's trying to get a little bit advantage, because everyone to earlier points is just worried about that bit of money to make sure they can keep an existence and keep working. There's another podcast episode we did with Janice Sloten, who works on data values a lot in the international development space. And one thing she talked about was with data collection practices is also communicating back to the communities where the data has been collected, the feedbacks, and this is how it's been used. And look, this is what we did with it. And is there ever seen anything like that emerging around you? Definitely a lot of conversations around that. And that's been a topic frequently in the equitable evaluation cohort that we're part of, is building that trust, and recognizing as an organization that when someone does give you that feedback, data or information about their lives, that is a value that they are providing to you, as an organization, and you need to recognize that you definitely need to share back with community what they found, you need to recognize that ultimately, the community owns that information. This is not something this is not your IP, right, this is the community's information. And one thing that we've been moving toward, and a lot of other organizations are is compensating people for their time, or information. So it's obvious. I mean, the idea is not new to give someone 50 bucks participating in a focus group, where it gets a little trickier is, you know, having a grantee come and speak to your board or to the community that's, I'm out of their day. They provide a really valuable service in general, but also in that situation. And so you should assign a value to that as the person on the other side of that power imbalance, right. So we, we this is our 20th anniversary this year. So we have been working on a video talking to some of our grantees. And for the first time we compensated them for being interviewed for our video, because, yeah, we're partners and we have a great relationship with them. But at the end of the day, they took time out of their busy day serving the community to come and talk about us. So, you know, that's travel time and time out of their work schedule. And so we compensated them for that. And so I think that there definitely is a movement toward understanding that you're gonna build that process. They need the community needs to see what you're doing with the information that they're giving important reminder to about the compensation taking people's time.

Unknown Speaker  34:59  
Yeah, I think

Unknown Speaker  35:00  
pick up books, listen or hear in that one, too. And thank you for diving in on that with me. So when one thing you had mentioned to me that, like your little more about to is within your communications work. And as you're taking a review of the equity in your communications, equity style guide.

Unknown Speaker  35:16  
Can you tell us about that? Yeah, absolutely. So that was a recommendation that came out of some of our internal that internal review that we've been doing, I've been looking looking within, and you know, you hear the term style guide. And you might think, of the APA style guide. This is not that this isn't your standard style guide, what is this is really a normalization of our commitment to equity and our communications. So we're basically given an on paper, you know, these are principles when we talk about communications and our work. These are some foundational kinds of ideas that will influence how we talk about our work. And so this was something that my colleagues in our communications team and I sat down, put together, over the course of a couple of months, we talked to our team members, we talked to some of our grantees. And we put together this basic it's probably 10 pages. And what it does is formalizes our communications strategy with a lens of equity. So there are a lot of components to it. There's, you know, word choices, terminology that we choose to use, because there's a lot of complex conversations happening around town talk about racial issues, gender and trans issues, more specifically about health equity issues, you know, there's how do you define health equity, if you ask five people on the street, they might give you five different definitions. We wanted to get it on paper, so we could all agreement as an organization, not just the communications team, but the whole staff and the trustees to say, we agree on this. And understanding that there's, you know, communications is an ever evolving thing. And that things might change within the style guide. But the basic principles about how we frame our work, that idea of asset framing, that idea of drawing attention to systemic issues, we really wanted that on paper, so we could all come to agreement around it. And one aspect of it that I really, as we were developing, it didn't realize, and shame on me, maybe for not doing so how important it will be as the idea around accessibility in our communications. I mean, it's huge, and I don't think most people have been,

Unknown Speaker  37:42  
I think, like I said earlier, everyone thinks they're doing a great job with it. And then when you start to dig into it, you're like, oh, my gosh, there's so much more that we could be doing. You know, always using vaccines, your images, always using at least captions on your videos and your webinars. You know, we've had a couple of real life examples where someone could not access our content, they didn't have captions turns on. And it was mortified, and I felt terrible for that person. And I'll never do that again. And I've been learning a lot about the different like the value of captions versus an ASL interpreter, and how an ASL interpreter is way more valuable for a deaf person, in terms of getting contacted about what people are talking about. In terms of accuracy. It's way more valuable. So you know, that's something that we kind of normalize that, we're always gonna at least provide captions, if not an ASL interpreter. You know, it's really it's been a really eye opening experience. And a lot of our staff said the same. They said, I didn't even know we were supposed to be doing this. So that's kind of what the style guide is. It's really just almost a policy document that says, This is our approach. This is really our strategy and communication is so my follow up question. So it's stored as a PDF or document. And right now, it's a Google Doc. We did that on purpose. Because we wanted it to be sort of a living document, to understand that things might shift. And things evolve, we might change our mind about things. It's totally possible for the whole town. And it's living document. So that was some of my next questions was how often, I don't know how old or how long the duck has been around, but how often would it be revisited and checked, you know, audit and like, where are we at? Is it still resonating? How often is that happened? Or is that in the works? So pretty new, we released it for the staff a couple of months ago, and we do want to also share it publicly. We're not quite there yet. Make a couple of revisions, just in case any other organization, you know, get any use out of it, but be so we were kind of still in the stage of putting a fine point on it. So there's actually some

Unknown Speaker  40:00  
The revisions that are happening right now, but I think it's something that we should be revisiting once a year at least. But really kind of always keeping in mind, you know, the idea that we should be listening to the community, and revise it as needed, depending on how things evolve, there's been, we've had some really great conversations around, you know, the cultural context, or a lot of word choices and a lot of terminology. And that, you know, our standard has always been to refer to older adults, as older adults versus something like seniors, but there's a lot of communities, the black community and indigenous people who really value referring to other people as their elders, and that is a really meaningful part. And so, we one of the components of the style guide, is the idea that any of this could change based on, you know, cultural context of what you need, the most important thing that you can do is, listen to the people that you're serving, be mindful of their cultural context, and how you might be more respectful of those ideas. So it's, it's, that's kind of the core principle in it is, listen to the people that you're serving. Send more questions about this, the first time I've heard of it, I'm really excited. And I hope everyone listening is getting excited, too. I was gonna ask if you could share it. So it sounds like that. That's coming soon. And whenever you're ready, we'd love to post it up and get it out there for others to look at. So you had said it's open to all staff. Anyone can go in and edit because I can hear some of the audience right now like?

Unknown Speaker  41:39  
Well, definitely brave boy. And I know that every organization is different, we are really privileged to have a small team and be a team where there's a ton of mutual respect for our different roles. So I have no qualms about leaving it open for editing, because I trust every person on this team to do the right thing. And to ultimately, come to me with questions. Now, I feel like I'm really tooting my own horn here. And I don't mean for it to sound like that. But I do feel like the organization has created an environment where we can trust each other on that level, I totally get that a larger organization may not be able to do that, then I think that at least it should be something that's open purchase session, even if not everybody has access to added it. I mean, change moves at the speed of trust. And regardless of size of the organization, I mean, you have to find a way to democratize all of that, whether it's democratizing data for decision making across different units, or it's democratizing, certainly the values of the organization out to the staff, so everybody can internalize it, and then be proponents of those values for the organization back to the communities we serve. seems incredibly important. And yeah, to to a toot your horn. This is this is your time, I think this is great. I mean, it's, it is fantastic. And this is one of the reasons I really like doing podcast is there's so many great ideas and so many examples all over and the more we could share that into the community of tracks you can start to get gained and what you've built there could be applied in other places just unique to their own situation, or you know how they would set it up or what they would do. I really love that idea, though that open document because even in a super large organization, anyone could then log in and see it and see what the effort is and and see that there's action being made, not just talk

Unknown Speaker  43:33  
back to how we started the episode, right? How do we differ layers away in an organization from that central leadership group see that something's happening? And I feel like having that open document is one way to at least internally understand. People are making intentions and movements and and trying their best. Exactly. It's very operationalize. It's, you know, it's not just talk of, how does this affect the way we actually do our day to day work? So I've already had folks who, you know, it's just been a couple of months where people will email me and say, Can I see the document and I was gonna use this word, but I think I should do this. So it's really, it's been really helpful already. This is wonderful. I mean, this is a major highlight. I'm really glad we got into talk about this. You know, we are like I said, In the beginning, we are here cresting to the end of 2022. And this will be coming out in early 2023. So with that in mind, in case anything drastically changes in the next three to six weeks. Everyone who's listening take our our thoughts here with a grain of salt about our future outlook. But as we look out, getting things started here and 2023 What are three things you are focusing on or interested in learning about in the coming year getting excited about definitely, like a continuation of our equity and communications work? So the style guide was kind of the first real concrete step for us.

Unknown Speaker  45:00  
And the next step is doing a very specific audit of all of our assets, looking at our website content, our social channels, our email, copy, our media list, you know who we're reaching out to? And looking through it and looking through it with a lens of is this accomplishing what we want to in terms of equity? And is there anything that we could be doing differently? Should we be on a different social channel, you know, some folks are using WhatsApp, some folks are using to, to get their messages out. And I don't know if that's right for us, but we need to be examining whether it is. So that's the next step is doing kind of an audit, and maybe an update of our visual assets, brand assets, to make sure that we are projecting an image that reflects our commitment to equity. O Matic isn't about this. But something that I think is really important. In the coming years, shaking up social channels is kind of examining our plays on social media, and the role that social media is playing in some of these issues that we're trying to correct. And I know that a lot of folks had a reckoning on Twitter over the last couple of weeks and months, we had similar feelings about baseball, during the election, when there was a lot of misinformation that was being promoted via Facebook. And so, you know, I want to have some really hard conversations in terms of what's our role in that, you know, are we holding something that we shouldn't be by having a presence on these channels? Can we accomplish our objectives with our kind of playing a part in these systems that are kind of problematic? So that's something that I want to be part of that equity review and say, version?

Unknown Speaker  47:01  
Or can we use those platforms for good, and to undo some of that impact that's essential, you know, different social media channels are having to end on a brighter note than that, you know, we had an information gathering last week, and it was really our first event,

Unknown Speaker  47:18  
pandemic started. And, of course, you know, we have to continue to be safe, why it was so energizing to be with people in the community again. And I'm really looking forward to, like, really looking at how we can take what we've learned from the past few years in terms of events or convenience, and kind of meld them. So you still have that energizing in person event, but still using virtual aspects that might be more accessible for people who maybe have applications that don't feel safe, or are coming from different parts of the geography serve in counties. And we might have a convenient in the city of Buffalo, or the city of Syracuse, we serve organizations that exist two to three hours away from that by car. And those folks are excluded, essentially, from the before times style of uninvited, an impersonal event. So you know, how can we continue to rethink the way that we feel community meanings and make sure they're accessible to everybody that we serve? I'm going to follow up on a couple of those too. So on the audit, sounds like a little bit of a content on it, maybe a little bit of data in the audience, like CRM type audit. Are you looking to do that internally? Are you looking for someone to come in externally for that type of

Unknown Speaker  48:47  
objective review coming in? Yeah, we're looking to work with someone externally, we're going to be doing a lot of the internal work sort of stewarding it, you know, you have to know your limitations too. And I really have been looking at different comps firms that specialize in equity. So I don't want to just work with a great public relations for branding firm, that just great dazzling campaign. That's great. There are a lot of firms right here in Buffalo that are doing fantastic work. But I need someone who gets it, I need someone who really understands the ideas of equity, and how that can be influenced in communications. And so that's where I'd be lucky to work with something like that. Thank you. Yeah. I was just curious to just for the listening audience know, how whether you take something like that on internally or externally, you know, you could audit because you could grab all your things internally, but then when you're sitting so far inside of it, it's hard to see what you can't see anymore. Exactly when you've been and then role of social s. I've had so many conversations about this. It's such a such

Unknown Speaker  50:00  
icky slippery slope.

Unknown Speaker  50:02  
Here these JIRA amateur all the points you made, there are a lot of brand tarnishing Are you promoting something you don't believe in are you continuing to add to the systemic problems by being there within it's also become the mass media channel, because it's who watches, Channel Five news at a certain time now, because you've got, everything's broken up by whatever app you're using through your TV. And radio is not as popular. So it is a separate subject, we see something coming, I don't have really figured it out. One thing I've seen what you had said about community in person, and then where I think some of the social channels are going is like the revival of online community as a separate aspect of social media, where it's not just the blasts out like you're in this because you care about it, you care about this information, you might be silent, but you're really there for a reason. Maybe there's some type of gatekeeping to get into the community that's being curated, and they could still be very big, you know, and I've seen studies that talk about on Facebook, in particular, it's those community groups that have really still been very successful for it.

Unknown Speaker  51:11  
I've written slightly about it, I should have, I should keep writing more. I really think the moment of community is coming back. And we have a chance to start shaping that now then how do you do it in a non exclusive way? I guess that you're getting all the right folks within the community. But then you guys, there's fundraisers, listening, I can imagine they're like, Oh, my God, but I just need those eyeballs. There's more people out there. And if it's in the community, it's locked in, they already know about me. So it's

Unknown Speaker  51:37  
not us over a barrel? There's a lot going on there. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, how do you sell your board? Oh, we're leaving in social media, you know, like, it's a hard, it's a hard sell, because they, that is where we'll get their information, where you can do that community building in a very effective way. But you're always gonna have this, this feeling of conflict, we've completely stopped doing paid ads across social but especially on Facebook after, after everything that's happened the last couple of years. The first one, they made it very difficult for nonprofits, to boost their ads, because of the kinds of filters that they had to put on because of what was happening with the election, they had a lot of, they would pick up your content as being political, and then they wouldn't be able to boost it. Even if it was talking about, you know, food access, or something like that it would get flagged on the flip side to it is created this algorithm, where you have to pay to get it in front of anyone, anybody. So if you say we're only going to do organic, you might not reach anybody. So they really, they do have us in a really tough position. But I cannot like I really don't feel that it would be an ethical move for us to use foundation funds to pay Facebook or something. It's, it's a really sticky situation. Yeah, I understand. I feel like for you on that one, it's a, I think we need more conversations about that. And 2023 in the nonprofit sector, I also really firmly believe a lot of the work with data equity needs to start coming from the nonprofit sector to is the place where we need to lead because to your earlier point, the businesses are going to use all this data anyway, they want to make an extra buck and market better to you. We have very different needs. And we do care about vulnerable populations. And we do want to do it right. And so I feel like we have to step up as a sector to find ways to do this, because it's not going to come from I don't think it's gonna come from the government that we didn't do much during pandemic, I don't know where they're kind of evolved anywhere else from there. Yeah. So these are things that I'm definitely looking at in 2023. Thank you so much for everything today. This has been an awesome episode. Oh, I'm so glad to hear that. I've had a great time. I really appreciate the opportunity. Now, for everyone who has been a regular listener of the show, you know, we do always end with same question. And so today, I'd like to know, Carrie, what is your go to song when you need a boost? And why? So that's a great question. And I gave it a lot of thought, because my kids monopolize my phone for bonds. And so I opened, you know, my Google music and the top lead album was the minion soundtracks I had, you know, I had to give it some real thought that wasn't going to work. But I, I always go back to Florence and the Machine is on, shake it out. It's just like, I know, it's been around for a couple of years and a little cheesy, but I absolutely love it. And

Unknown Speaker  54:47  
just that, you know, the idea that better times are coming. And that's been a really helpful message over the last couple of years. So that's my, that's my go to thank you for sharing that. We're gonna get that

Unknown Speaker  55:00  
into the Spotify list. I do love to learn to the machine to thank you so much Tony, you too. Thank you for sharing with us today. It was absolute pleasure. And I'll talk to you again soon. Sounds great. Thank you. Bye now.

Unknown Speaker  55:14  
Thank you for listening. Join us again for more engaging ideas with your host Parsons TKO CEO Tony Kopetchny. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a comment and share with your friends. Send us your feedback at create change at Parsons tko.com.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai