Diversity Isn’t Enough
Angelique Grant and Ron Schiller both spent decades working in advancement before beginning their work as consultants at the search firm Aspen Leadership Group. Since its founding seven years ago, the firm has been committed to improving diversity, equity, and inclusion in nonprofit and higher-education fundraising. The field still has a lot of work to do, they say, particularly when it comes to creating more inclusive workplaces.
“Our numbers of diverse professionals in fundraising and advancement are quite low. And everyone’s still having this conversation: How do we make it more attractive to not only new professionals entering the field but those who are currently there?” Grant says. “A lot of it has to do with inclusive cultures.”
Inclusion is not a natural consequence of diversity, she says. “We hear a lot of people say they want to diversify their teams,” she says. “But if no one feels included, whether they’re diverse or not, you’re never going to change the environment they walk into.”
Maybe your team is in the privileged position of being able to hire in the new year. Or perhaps you’re working to identify steps to take to become more inclusive — both internally and with your donors and other constituents.
Grant and Schiller’s new book, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Advancement, seeks to help readers move beyond awareness to meaningful action. The book draws on the latest research and the experiences of advancement professionals and offers tools and strategies for making real progress.
I recently spoke with them about creating a DEI statement, starting an “inclusion council,” and taking advantage of campaigns to accelerate internal and external DEI efforts. Here’s part of our conversation:
You write about the importance of considering “nontraditional candidates” when recruiting and hiring fundraisers. Have you found that institutions have a hard time changing their way of thinking about this, especially as the field has professionalized?
Schiller: We often laugh with each other and our team members because really none of us came to fundraising right out of school thinking that that’s what we were going to do. In a way, nontraditional has been traditional for decades in this profession.
As we’ve matured as a profession, there are people who very quickly forget that they themselves and most of their team members came from other fields where they had developed the skills and abilities that they needed, and they only want to hire somebody who already has five or 10 years of fundraising experience. That certainly gets in the way of increasing diversity in the field if we’re only hiring from within a field that’s not particularly diverse. We’re encouraging our clients to think about their own experiences coming into the profession.
Grant: A lot of organizations are open to having this discussion, but sometimes they’re a little hesitant with hiring at the end of the day. We do need to be a little bit more open when it comes to candidates with those core competencies — whether it’s strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, relationship building, etc. — and help to support candidates who are coming in with transferable skills. Some of that you can train; it’s just taking the time to do that.
You write that adding a new team member means that the whole team is new in some ways and suggest that the entire team be involved integrating a new hire into the organization. What does that look like when done well?
Grant: We found that onboarding is one of those keys to retention. There’s a statistic that 90 percent of employees decide whether they’re going to stay within the first six months. Onboarding actually starts right after the candidate signs the offer letter and before they actually even arrive.
Orientation is different than onboarding. Orientation is a great time to sit down and learn about your benefits and spend eight hours in one room, whereas onboarding could be 90 days, six months, up to a year, because it’s that full transition of connecting this new employee, especially if they’re a diverse employee, with members of the team who can help support them along the way — mentors both within the organization and outside.
Now that they’re there, diversity is representation, and inclusion is the participation piece. So it makes sense to have everyone become part of the onboarding part, the inclusive part where you’re creating these opportunities for them to connect and identify and see themselves within the organization.
Schiller: Employees are much more likely to stay, not because of a loyalty to the institution per se but to people. Maybe it’s to the leaders of the institution because they really like them and respect them. Maybe it’s the people who are being served by the organization because they feel a connection or a passion for that work. Maybe it’s because of their supervisor. Maybe it’s because of their team members. Everybody on the team can contribute to a new employee’s sense of stickiness.
We’ve been polling people when we do presentations about the book, and whereas most of them have at least some kind of orientation program, only about a third, and always less than half, report that they have a robust onboarding program. Maybe a third don’t have any at all. It’s one of those things that’s not that difficult to do and can have a very powerful impact on inclusion and on retention.
Read the rest of the interview featuring more practical advice from Grant and Schiller.
