A New DEIB Benchmarking Tool for Fundraisers
Improving diversity, equity, and inclusion has become an increasing priority in many fields — and fundraising is no exception. Experts say the key is long-term commitment and evaluating what’s working and what’s not at your organization. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education has created a tool that aims to help fundraising departments assess how they are doing in their efforts to improve DEI and the next steps they should take in their journey, my colleague Rasheeda Childress reports.
“There are some really systemic barriers that are in the field of advancement,” says Benjamin Fiore-Walker, senior director of the Opportunity and Inclusion Center at CASE. “We came up with this idea of how do we measure where institutions are in their maturity in their diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) journey.”
Fiore-Walker helped develop CASE’s new Advancement Inclusion Index. The tool, which includes a lengthy questionnaire, is designed to help university advancement departments see how they are performing in terms of DEIB and provide benchmarks against similar-size peers. While the tool is designed with university fundraisers in mind, Fiore-Walker says, any organization with a fundraising team can use it.
Diversity has long been a problem in fundraising, says Isabelle Leighton, executive director of the Donors of Color Network. Many longstanding legacy institutions, she says, have passed on a fundraising culture that is not welcoming to people of color. “The operations are really big, there’s a lot of pressure, and there’s historically much more structural racism,” she says.
Leighton adds that many organizations hire people of color and then don’t work to make them feel like they belong. Too often, she says, nonprofits dismiss people’s attempts to bring their culture to the organization with them — especially when it comes to reaching out to donors of color. “They’re not taken seriously and not seen as people who have the same kind of resources.”
Leighton says any tools that help a fundraising department “shift their organizational culture to address” diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging will serve an organization well.
CASE’s inclusion index asks for numerous data points about the advancement department — about staff, donor, and volunteer policies and practices — to help assess the university. The tool also asks the institution to rate where it stands using a six-tier scale that ranges from a policy being “not present” to being carried out at an “advanced” level.
The assessment has more than 80 questions and asks for demographic data. In the pilot for the project, most universities completed the online questionnaire within two months. They then received an assessment that showed where they took in a variety of categories and how they compared with their peers.
The assessment can help advancement departments get a handle on where they are and where they need to go, Fiore-Walker says.
“You can really start mapping out what these initial, intermediate, and long-term steps need to be,” he says. “You can say, here are some things that you should be doing to really have a robust DEIB strategy.”
For more insights — including items from the index on which departments are asked to rate their performance — read Rasheeda’s full story.
