Anti-racism efforts

Terry McKiel

Like many organizations we are scrutinizing our policies & procedures to identify areas of potential racism and social inequities. To that end I am wondering what changes or additions any of you have made to your donor database software to address these issues?

 

Crystal Bruce

This is a great topic for discussion, we will feature this in our slider. Thanks for posting!

Colleen Rives

Crystal Bruce‍,


What is a slider?


Thanks!

Crystal Bruce

Hey Colleen,


It's our featured content on our home page and on your mycommunity page. I call it a slider because the featured content slides - like a slideshow. Thanks!

Julie Lytle

Great topic!  In response to Terry, we have not made any changes.  Is there something specific that you have implemented that you have found helpful?

Terry McKiel

We are currently reviewing all our acknowledgement letters and website to include anti-racist language, but so far no changes to how we use Raiser's Edge. 

T

Jessica Thrift

I am really interested in this topic as well. I think I may have posted about it before. I have more questions than answers, personally but here some things to think about:


do your naming formats, salutations, and addressee formats respect special characters?

do your naming formats respect how different cultures may use different names (e.g. middle names, multiple last names, specific titles, etc) 

do you track race or ethnicity? if you do, why? how do you collect that information? what do you do with it?

do you keep track of different cultural and religious holidays and consider them when planning communications and events? 

do you ask the vendors you work with about how they are working to dismantle white supremacy culture within their organizations? 

does your organization approach strategic planning through an anti-racism lens? how does your work look different if you are intentionally anti-racist, and what needs to change in your database to better support that shift? 

consider how database and administrative practices alienate marginalized communities? 

do you create forms? how do those forms accommodate cultural difference? 

presuming best intentions on the part of your organization (while I know that may not always be true) - are your board, leadership, and hiring practices set up to provide leadership and staffing that reflect the audience you aspire to serve and the mission you aspire to achieve? 


 

Terry McKiel

Jessica, those are all the kinds of questions we are asking ourselves and like you, we have more questions than answers at this time! The one thing we have changed on our donate page is we added a drop-down box for donors to choose which language they want the page to display in. I look forward to others chiming in to answer some of the specific questions you posed.

Faith Murray

Thankfully, our organization has been comfortable with different races and ethnicities for some time. As we typically sport a high Hispanic and Vietnamese student body, and as our donor audience is religion-specific, we probably are less affected by this cultural "ah-ha" moment than most.


Here, however, I would like to delineate between race and language/culture, which usually go hand-in-hand, but are not synonymous. Both should be respected and celebrated. However, a Christian organization appealing to its Hispanic and black racial demographics, who share a mutual belief system, holidays, etc., will have completely different needs in this conversation than an animal service org that is trying to appeal to the different holiday systems of multiple donor cultures. Both conversations have to happen, but they involve different legal protections and data recording needs.

Terry McKiel

Great distinction Faith, thanks for your input!

Judy Spigarelli

Terry McKiel:

Jessica, those are all the kinds of questions we are asking ourselves and like you, we have more questions than answers at this time! The one thing we have changed on our donate page is we added a drop-down box for donors to choose which language they want the page to display in. I look forward to others chiming in to answer some of the specific questions you posed.

Terry McKiel‍, how do you have your donate page display in different languages?  That's very awesome!

Terry McKiel

YMCA has a legacy license to use Google Translate, the tool/widget in the top right corner that allows us to translate the website into other languages.

Google retired Google Translate, https://translate.google.com/intl/en/about/website/. However, for non-profits dealing “directly with COVID-19,” Google has reopened permission to use the tool, https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/google-translates-website-translator.html.


Hope that helps!