Naming your Asian ERG, how important is it?
So, you’ve decided to start an Asian ERG. Well, the next step is how do you name your ERG? But is it important to have the right name? How important? Well, I believe it is important enough to understand that how you name your Asian ERG, defines the scope of what your ERG will tackle.
There are two main aspects to your Asian ERG name that will affect how you name it.
- Your target demographics
- The theme or niche of your employer
I won’t tell you how to name your ERG, since I don’t know what your intent of starting an ERG is, but I’ll give you my viewpoint on it. As someone who went through this process twice, the first time was just figuring out a name, and the second time was more about finding a name that had purpose and intent.
I was one of the founders of the Asian ERG at Salesforce. We started about 8 years ago in 2012 in San Francisco. At the time, we wanted to create a community for Asians and those who were interested in anything related to Asians. At the time, we focused on the following pillars.
- Philanthropy and Community Service
- Discussions with prominent speakers about the fiscal, economic, and political atmosphere of Asia.
- Cultural Celebrations
Our founding team was pretty diverse with representations from East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian Communities. We represented all Asians; we didn’t think too much about how we should name, but our main focus was on how the name flowed. At first, Asiaforce or Asianforce was pitched. However, we didn’t want it to be too focused on “race” but instead, we wanted to be a holistic picture of something larger. But we also didn’t want to bucket everyone together. And using “Asia”, we still wanted to have aspects of our local region (San Francisco). So, it was something that we couldn’t agree on. And then, someone pitched Pacificforce. Which sounded cool. All of us thought it was a good name since most of our homeland countries had the Pacific Ocean boarding it or nearby. And “force”, well, we did work at Salesforce. So, it was only proper to have a nod to our company to use it in some form. We decided to go with Pacificforce, because it didn’t necessarily put us in a corner or made us too specific. Our logo for Pacificforce was a wave. The wave represented the Pacific Ocean, but also the idea of an endless force that would surely make a change and impact.
Over the years, other office locations wanted to also start an Asian ERG. We had conversations with those locations to have them start a Pacificforce hub/chapter so that we can build a better brand but also awareness to all of our Asian employees. But one hub didn’t like to use Pacificforce. London’s leadership team was mainly South Asians. And to them, they didn’t have an emotional or any attachments at all to “Pacific”. Instead, they wanted to use Asianforce. As time went on, these same conversations continued to happen. And other Asian Groups started popping up with their own names such as Parsforce, SouthAsiaForce, etc.
At this point, we truly realized that our name was not lending itself to our bigger picture. At this point, we have evolved and our ERG took on a stronger stance of being a voice of our Asian Employees and community. But not just East Asians, but all Asians. And, our name was dividing our community instead of uniting it.
So, we learned that we needed to find a name that was reflective of what we wanted to do. And that was to be a strong voice for all Asians. After months of discussion, it was fairly difficult to find a name that was truly representative of all Asians and didn’t exclude communities. It felt that a lot of the language didn’t represent us. It wasn’t inclusive of our identities but wasn’t inclusive of our homeland. We wanted to both talk about things happening in Asia but also voice the concerns of Asian locally and globally within our company.
We decided to go with the terminology by the United Nations, Asia and the Pacific.
Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)
The UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific located in Bangkok, Thailand, is the regional development arm of the UN for the Asia-Pacific region. Made up of 53 Member States and 9 Associate Members, it has a geographical scope that stretches from Turkey in the west to the Pacific island nation of Kiribati in the east, and from the Russian Federation in the north to New Zealand in the south. The Asia and the Pacific region is home to 4.1 billion people, or two thirds of the world’s population. This makes ESCAP the most comprehensive of the five regional commissions of the United Nations, and the largest UN body serving the Asia-Pacific region, with over 600 staff.
Cited from: The United Nations
So a new name was born, Asiapacforce. With the goal of representing all of Asia and Pacific employees and their communities. We continued to keep our original logo of a wave but updated it with different colors to represent the hundreds of different cultures and ethnic groups within Asia and the Pacific regions.
I just talked about one specific story that I have experience with. But many Asian ERGs had similar struggles. It may not be as long or as dramatic as mine, but it was still important to figure out. Asian Leaders Alliance has created a survey with ERG Names. And currently, some of the Asian Leaders Alliance Members have added their Asian ERG names and the reasoning behind picking the name.
Take a look, and you will see different themes of how different ERGs picked their names. Some picked were straight forward and used “Asians @” or some variations of APA, API, etc. Others created ERGs for different Asian Regions. Some took it a step further and built-in their goals as part of their name.
Feel free to add your ERG to the list, so that we can all learn from each other.
There was an aspect here that I wanted to go in-depth on but decided to leave it out for another post. Which is, representation. I hinted at it earlier but will have a more in-depth post about it. In short, it will be about how do you structure your Asian ERG in regards to the different ethnic and cultural representation there and ensure that the voices of the different Asian communities are still heard.
