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A Meta Reflection on Equitable Communications: Behind-the-Scenes of Creating the Equitable Communications Guide
After researching ways to share our findings and reports with equity in mind, we realized there wasn’t a go-to resource for equitable communications in the evaluation field. Together, we were inspired to develop the Equitable Communications Guide. This guide is a resource designed for evaluators in the social sector, which has relevant lessons for anyone looking to improve their communications! The guide explores how to communicate equitably, center the experiences of others, and convey the meaning behind key messages.
Equitable communications refers to using evaluation reports and messages to counter dominant narratives, embrace inclusivity, and center marginalized peoples.
We are not experts in equitable communications. But some of us know what it feels like for others to speak on our behalf and misrepresent our identities and experiences. Others of us have perpetrated the same violence against others and want to do better. We decided to draw on the work and guidance of thought leaders in other sectors, along with our own experience, to write the content found in this guide.
Creating this guide was a collaborative design process among our current and former team members. We didn’t just want a guide that showed people how to communicate equitably, we wanted a guide that could model what equitable communications can look like.
This blog post is an inside look at the inspiration behind developing the guide and everything that went into the process.
Early Stages
This project began the way many projects do: with a big vision, but uncertainty with how to create it. Our efforts began when our amazing intern Aranzazu Jorquiera Johnson conducted research on equitable communications and brought in lessons from her own knowledge around diversity, equity, and inclusion. But we did not have time to come together to create a shared vision for what we wanted the final guide to look like and how it could be useful for an evaluation audience.
When Shelli Golson-Mickens added her leadership to the project she began by centering the audience of the guide from the start, using human-centered design processes. She led us through a journey mapping exercise that considered the many people who could read and benefit from the guide. Using this persona profile template, we created personas, identified their needs, and created ideas for how to design a guide that met them.
On reflection, we would have liked to bring these personas into our process throughout the writing stage. While we struggled with time constraints, we found that the process of creating personas allowed us to envision and create a more inclusive guide and led us to a simplified and visual structure.
Process Stage
Using Aranzazu’s research and conducting some of our own, we started coding for themes we saw within resources related to equitable communications. These codes became the guideposts and strategies that are the heart of the guide.
Before we started writing, our teammate and evaluator/illustrator Kayla Boisvert helped us to envision an effective layout and design for the guide. Remembering our personas, we wanted something that would be digestible, where someone could open to the section relevant to them in the moment and get the information they need. We also knew this guide would be an aggregator of resources: not being experts ourselves, we were translating information for an evaluator audience and bringing lessons together in one place. There were wonderful deep dives into specific topics like equitable data visualization and language justice that we wanted people to find through our guide. Kayla mocked up some design options that captured the lessons we wanted to share and identified key resources for people to learn more, the design you see in our guide today.
Once deciding on the layout, Shelli and co-author Alissa Marchant divided the writing by theme so that we could bring lessons together from across resources in several fields, including marketing, research, and advocacy. It felt like an iterative process because we found the strategies overlapped one another. We had many conversations to discuss ways to share pithy themes without repeating information. It was also hard to stay narrow: ultimately, this guide is about communicating data findings and not about how to maintain open and transparent communications throughout an evaluation (which is also important!). There was too much to say, but at the same time, we felt limited by the bounds we placed on ourselves. Ultimately, having a deadline — the Evaluation 23 conference where we were presenting our findings — obliged us to narrow our scope and workshop the language with feedback from our team, fellow evaluators who are a primary audience for the guide.
Publication
Living our values from the guide, we knew that putting our pens (and digital markers!) down was just the beginning.
Our first step was making the guide accessible to people with disabilities. As sighted people, we quickly realized how our visual approach to the guide (perfect for a sighted audience) was challenging for audiences who have limited eyesight. Kayla spent hours writing detailed alternative texts for each visual, and unfortunately we later learned that Canva (the design platform we used to design the guide) was poorly equipped to make the document ADA compliant. (Canva is improving. Shout out to Chris Lysy, who details its pitfalls and keeps us up with Canva’s capabilities in this helpful blog post.) We ultimately hired a freelancer who specializes in ADA compliance to help make a final PDF of the guide more accessible.
Since the guide was published, we have been sharing information from within the guide in various ways. We are not just relying on the written word! We also shared the guide at Evaluation 23 and a recent webinar (watch the recording here), with more workshops in the works. (If you’re reading this before March 15, please join us for Talking Data Equity!) We are grateful for the partnership of Elizabeth Grim, an independent consultant who writes about non-violent language, and Jonathan Schwabish, an author of the Do No Harm Guides, who co-presented with us. Sharing together has allowed us to continue to learn about equitable communications through our collaborations.
Takeaways
Writing this guide helped us to internalize some of the lessons within the guide in a new way. We felt a shift in our own perspective from what we should say to being curious about how other people perceive our communications and working to understand their cultural perspectives. Rather than a right or wrong answer, communications has become an opportunity to learn and better understand the people we are working with.
We understand that knowing how to communicate equitably is different from doing it well. We are just starting to practice the strategies we captured in the guide, and still learning how to communicate about the importance of equitable communications and advocate for more resources to communicate equitably in our client projects.
Although we sought to be as thorough as possible when writing this guide, we recognize that our use of language changes as society continues to evolve. And we know that what we created may miss something! We considered — and may still — develop a living document version of the guide where others can add their own insights as the world evolves and guidance changes. Until that time, please send us your thoughts and feedback on the guide in the comments here, or directly at [email protected].
Thank you for learning alongside us! We look forward to your insights and continuing to learn together.
A Meta Reflection on Equitable Communications: Behind-the-Scenes of Creating the Equitable… was originally published in InnovationNetwork on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.