How to Use Clear Impact Software to Advance Your Organization’s Racial Equity Mission

You and your team have likely considered a racial equity strategy at some point within the past year. To aid individual efforts, President Joe Biden signed an executive order in January to support equity initiatives around the country. While efforts for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) can be well-intentioned, they are much less likely to succeed without proper planning and execution via proven methods. Further, even successful DEI initiatives can miss out on grant money if organizations are not careful about providing qualitative evidence regarding the impact of their efforts on their community. To this end, Clear Impact offers a consistent strategy that is proven to achieve results in the area of racial equity and software that allows organizations to plan, monitor, and evaluate the success of their actions.

Our Results-Based Accountability (RBA) strategy focuses on pragmatic problem-solving and community participation to help nonprofit organizations focus on what they can do to get results. If you are unfamiliar with the program, we offer resources, including a free eBook as well as blogs discussing RBA in action. Understanding this framework will help your organization begin to shift towards a more efficient way of tackling problems. However, this is just the first step. Understanding how to use software to assist your efforts and provide the data necessary to understand impact can be the key to accelerating progress on racial equity within and outside of your organization. 

Clear Impact Scorecard has a powerful and vital feature that allows you to focus your efforts on racial equity: data breakdown by race. By collecting data concerning the racial makeup of whatever variable you are currently measuring, you can assign race as a specific parameter for Scorecard to display. Without a deliberate focus on race as an essential data point in your efforts, you’ll likely miss out on the whole story behind the data. For example, if you host community events and see that your participation rises, you may be happy initially. However, if you collected data on race and noticed that participation among whites is steadily going up while other minority populations are seeing decreased participation, you would see that there is more to the story than just raw numbers of attendance. 

Organizations should also bear in mind that equity does not just apply to outside populations and services. All organizations should also focus on equity internally to ensure that their team represents the population or populations served. This is because a diversity of perspectives, skills, knowledge, and ideas lies within the heart of innovation. When you represent your community, you may also increase trust for your proposed solutions and thus greater participation. In this respect, Clear Impact also has software that can help. Large organizations may need to keep track of a large number of employees over time, and the strategy mentioned earlier of implementing race as a data point in workforce development research will be vital to ensure that their employment practices are equitable. Smaller organizations with more consistent employment may not need to regularly update and analyze employment data in the same manner as their larger counterparts. However, data collection can still be a valuable tool in other ways. 

Clear Impact Complye offers custom survey software that can help keep track of employees’ thoughts toward your policy and actions. Surveys can be a great way of ensuring that everyone involved is on board and happy with the state of your development. Compyle also works in conjunction with Scorecard, allowing users to seamlessly convert survey data into visual scorecards alongside any other relevant data. For further research, try asking yourself how you can combine in-house and external surveys to give yourself a complete picture of your organization’s progress on racial equity. 

Using one or more of these strategies in conjunction with our RBA framework for achieving collective impact on racial equity is the best course of action to ensure that you and your team are doing everything you can to achieve equity in your organization and community. For more information regarding our software and its relation to equity, check this free eBook.