Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) Strategies

Shawn Schaeffer

Hello, our foundation, like many, are working to improve the quality and quantity of DEI data. Currently we pull any data the university registrar has at the time of graduation, so we have decent data for recent graduates, but for the rest of our constituents, the data is sparse at best. Some thoughts are to add optional fields on our giving/event registration pages as well as look at a census/survey for our alumni, but does anyone do anything different to supplement this data? The quality of data returned from vendors in this area has not been the best and there are questions around whether this data should only be self-disclosed, but I would be interested in hearing any thoughts on this.


Related to DEI, we also want to update our outdated ethnicity code table to match the university and clean up our historical data to meet our new definitions. Has anyone completed a similar project and could provide some lesson's learned or guidance? We greatly appreciate your help.