Checking In: One Year of Focusing on DEI
07.27.2021
By Grace Bisel, Creative Director
Checking In: One Year of Focusing on DEI
As our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Team reaches the first anniversary of its founding, we’re marking the occasion with a “check-in” of sorts—reflecting on the goals we’ve set for ourselves, and the work still to come.
But first, who is the IVC DEI team?
We’re a volunteer group of InVisionites helping to drive knowledge-sharing here at InVision Communications. We’re of different ages, have varying tenures at IVC, live in different cities, and have different gender identities, orientations, backgrounds, and life experiences. What unites us (beyond our love of creating amazing experiences and events) is our drive to increase diversity, develop greater equity, and foster inclusion within our agency and the industry. We meet twice a month to discuss ways we can make an impact in five key areas: building IVC’s future, and supporting our staff, clients, communities, and the industry. Here’s a brief progress report on our work from the past year.
For our Future
We took a comprehensive look at how we recruit candidates and have put into place several changes to help strengthen the diversity of InVision. We are evaluating all new job listings, and where possible are removing requirements that will unnecessarily deter those with different physical abilities and educational backgrounds. We have also broadened our job postings to include sites that target underrepresented populations at our agency. We are still working on an interviewing rubric to ensure unconscious biases don’t influence the interview process and plan to have those finished and train our agency on this new process in the coming months.
“We know we still have work to do in this area, in order to achieve our goal of growing our agency’s diversity from 17% to 30% by 2023.”
For our Staff
InVision is committed to making DEI a consistent conversation at our agency, rather than just a focus during heightened moments covered by the news. We’ve done this through company-wide discussions including unconscious bias training and listening circles, as well as a monthly “DEI Media Moment” series.
Our Media Moment content is varied from month to month—including books, podcasts, movies, and documentaries—creating multiple engagement levels to give all InVisionites an opportunity to engage regardless of project/work-time constraints. Since January, the topics have ranged from environmentalism to gender studies to black history to mental health, with many more topics lined up in the months to come. Group discussions on the chosen media are framed as a safe space to share and learn, and all are encouraged to consider the topic through an intersectional lens to draw connections between the lived experiences of those with different gender, race, class, disability, ages, sexual orientation, gender identity, housing or citizenship status.
For our Clients
We’re proud that our clients have called on us for help in improving the diversity in their events and broadcasts in the past year. Nothing has been more exciting than recommending and hiring some of our favorite diverse thought leaders, entrepreneurs, entertainers, and musicians, as well as discovering new-to-us talent—allowing attendees to feel seen and represented while watching an event. We’ve also worked to create inclusive experiences designed to address a variety of audience needs and perspectives, including optimizing the closed captioning experience for those experiencing an event as a non-native speaker or with different auditory abilities.
For our Community
We created and use a huge internal database of our agency’s favorite BIPOC-owned restaurants, shops and service providers—located not only near our three main offices but in cities our agency frequently travels to throughout the US. We also founded a very successful mentorship program with California College of the Arts and we are developing more mentorship programs with institutions with large BIPOC communities. Our mentors and mentees had such a wonderful time that we plan to release a separate article focused just on this program, so stay tuned!
For our Industry
This year InVision began developing a new Supplier Diversity Program, to increase awareness and support of minority-owned vendors for our programs. We are also forming a multi-agency collective to create accountability and drive changes across the events industry that support a more diverse and inclusive culture. (If you are a member of the events/communications industry and are interested in joining us, please reach out to Renee Miller for more information.)
To conclude, we’re proud of the work our agency has done so far, humbled and grateful to keep learning about critical issues, and energized by all that is to come. Now let’s get back to work, and help Make Change, Not Noise.
InVision is committed to building a diverse team of dedicated, creative people who aspire to deliver impactful solutions that change our communities and our clients’ businesses in meaningful ways. We welcome feedback on our progress so far and our future goals—please share your thoughts at info@iv.com.