Green 2.0's Guide to Best Practices in Demographic Data Collection
Green 2.0’s Guide to Best Practices in Demographic Data Collection outlines best practices for demographic data collection of an organization’s existing staff, grantees, and/or communities served. Demographic data collection provides information that can yield important insights into organizations and the environmental sector at large. For example, insights from staff demographics can include understanding how to best tailor your organization’s policies and programs to support your employees, like implementing veteran assistance programs for a veteran majority workforce. Insights can also include identifying potential bias in hiring, promotion, and/or grantmaking practices and using that information to make them more fair. There are a plethora of benefits to applying best practices to collect demographic data, as further outlined in this guide.
It is important to note that collecting demographic data on staff, grantees, and/or communities served is legal. How your organization chooses to use this data should be made transparent with their survey respondents, and this data can be used to create more fair policies and programs to benefit all staff, grantees, and an organization’s effectiveness in fulfilling their mission. Using the data collected to hire or promote people on the basis of protected categories like race, ethnicity, gender, etc. is illegal.