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Building the DAA Membership Database

By Rachel Wright posted 09-07-2021 11:31 AM

  
Our Member Profile has been updated with a few questions on member demographics. These will not be part of your public profile, but will be analyzed in aggregate.
If you haven’t yet, please update your profile by clicking the "Update Now" button and scrolling down to "Additional Information" for the new questions. For more information about how and why we decided to ask these questions, please read on!


Why We Ask
Digital Analytics Association is committed to eradicating racism by harnessing data and the passion of our community. As part of that effort, the DAA Anti-Racism Task Force is working to address inclusivity and diversity within the DAA. Our most recent data (from the 2020 Compensation & Benefits Survey) indicated that, within our US membership, DAA had very low representation from people of color. To increase the number of underrepresented groups who find a home within the DAA membership, the task force has been putting together a series of events and outreach, and we needed to develop a way to measure progress.

Our goals are to:
  1. Measure the impact of our events and outreach efforts to date
  2. Define our current membership state
  3. Contribute towards a definition of best practices for collecting and describing customer demographics

With these goals in mind, we moved forward with writing questions to collect the needed demographics data. The challenge here was constructing questions that offered adequate and inclusive categories. Identity is obviously extremely personal data; additionally, given the history of how certain groups have been marginalized, it is fraught with sensitivities.

We wanted to elicit this data in a way that would:
  • Enable us to measure and benchmark representation within DAA membership
  • Reflect terminology that could be used globally
  • Be respectful to our members
  • Be clear and avoid confusion for respondents

We studied various models, including national census questions from around the globe, questions from leading corporations and other organizations, and online sources. For those interested, we've shared a list of selected resources below.

Once we developed a draft, we shared it with various stakeholders and made significant revisions. In several cases where we had counter-indicating feedback, we used our best judgment, keeping our stated goals in mind. To be inclusive and respectful, we included options like “non-binary,” “prefer not to respond,” and “prefer to self-describe.”

Next Steps
We considered doing another dedicated survey on this topic, but decided instead to ask this information on the membership profile. The information collected will not be made part of the member's public profile, but would be available for aggregate analysis. We made this decision for two reasons:
  • So that we would have more than a "moment in time" understanding of representation within our membership. As new members join, they would fill out the profile and our database would grow.
  • We hoped that a message encouraging members to update their membership profile would motivate a higher response rate than a survey, as updating your membership profile can have additional benefits.

We hope that our work here can be a solid foundation for the future. We're open to your feedback; please contact us at memberprofilefeedback@gmail.com and let us know where we can continue to iterate.

Selected Sources / Additional Reading:
The US Census
Global Census Sources
Other Research
  • Pew Research on the use of "Latino" versus "Latinx" (August 2020)
Recent Studies on Intersectionality of Race and Gender

Special thanks to the other members of the Data & Research subgroup within the Anti-Racism Task Force for working so hard on this:

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#Diversity

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