Improving Doteveryone’s diversity: open call for a diversity champion

Doteveryone is a think tank based in London that champions responsible technology for the good of everyone in society. We believe diversity is vital to a healthy organisation, and we work hard to help the technology industry be more diverse.

And it’s crucial that we live our values — so we’re hiring a diversity champion and releasing a diversity reporting tool to help other organisations understand the diversity of their workforce.

Diversity champion

Diversity in small organisations is something you have to work at.

Our team hovers between 15 and 20 people, including our trustees. We work with a wide range of contractors and advisors, but the number of long-term roles we can offer is small. We’ve been forming and finding our purpose over the last 18 months, and during that time have had a wide variety of people work with us, from different backgrounds and with different needs. But we need to work harder on the ethnic diversity of our staff.

For a technology organisation, we’re unusual in that we attract a lot of women applicants (perhaps because our leadership team is all women; perhaps also because we’re a charity), and there is also a lot of less visible diversity. That’s not enough though, so we’re inviting proposals from diversity champions and consultants who can help us to improve.

Specifically we’re looking for someone or an organisation that can:

1. Analyse recent job advertisements and role profiles (not more than 6), as well as our wider comms and positioning, suggest improvements, and help us to implement them, where appropriate

2. Advise on more diverse recruitment practices for upcoming roles, including co-authoring job descriptions, training hiring staff, and helping to design recruitment process

3. Propose wider strategic improvements

4. Provide ongoing consultancy and advice

We have an initial budget of £5,000 for items 1–3, and estimate this as 8–12 days’ effort.

If you’d like to put in an expression of interest, please apply via Workable.

Diversity reporting tool

We’ve been working over the last year on a tool small organisations can use to do diversity reporting. From the outside, it might seem like small organisations don’t need to publish diversity figures — you should be able to look around the room, or your Slack channel, and see who’s who, but not all diversity is visible, and some aspects aren’t knowable unless you ask.

And in small organisations that don’t have HR departments, and aren’t legally required to publish diversity figures, there are all kinds of reasons it can be easy to let a single culture dominate.

If there are less than 100 people, every percentage point might put someone in the spotlight who doesn’t want to be there. We trialled the tool with ad agency BETC last year (read Russell Davies’ post about that here), and have tested the question set to make sure it captures how people view their diversity.

In the next few weeks we’re going to make the tool available to any organisation that wants to use it. We’ll also publish our own diversity stats as part of our next annual report.

If you want to be notified when our diversity tracking tool goes live, send us a note at hello@doteveryone.org.uk. You’re free to use it however you like — but if you find it useful, we’d love to know more.