Why was this important to us and our customers?
We know that underrepresented groups engage at a much lower rate in networking and mentorship (critical to academic and career success) than students and alumni with an abundance of social capital.
We collaborated with researchers focused on informal mentoring within underrepresented groups to better understand barriers and then held multiple focus groups with diverse students to hear directly from them why / why not. If you are interested in the “why not”, we actually wrote a research summary that reviews the key barriers.
Here’s what we learned:
(1) Students (and alumni) are okay sharing sensitive demographic data (gender, ethnicity, age, etc.) as long as it is clear what it is being used for: “We don’t mind, we get asked for it all the time.”
(2) It’s less about “same” and “shared experiences”, students are foremost looking for allyship. We heard “I don’t care if the alum is transgender or not. I want to know that she/he/they care about and support me.”
That fired us up because (a) collecting demographic data is messy and (b) most universities already support allyship in some capacity through affinity groups. Not as refined as we believe is necessary, but often a good stop-gap when you want to understand what someone cares about.
So we mocked something up and did more focus groups and user testing, especially around those initial affinities that we heard over and over again are more important than others. Not just because we’re “in the moment” but also because they are much harder to capture.
One highlight was a call with an associate general counsel at a large institution who loved what we were going for, shared constraints / legal framework, and offered the positive view that long-standing concerns and restrictions on demographic data are thawing because (a) there’s a growing awareness of the opportunity for more connectedness and (b) the definition of privacy is changing all around us.
As with everything, this is a journey. We’re collecting actionable data and user / customer feedback, and excited where affinities will lead us.