Equality, representation and pay equity have been part of the diversity and inclusion conversation for some time. The good news? Companies across the United States regularly focus on it, create and execute plans, and measure their progress.

But it’s not just altruism or a heightened sense of social responsibility.

A diverse workforce makes good business sense that positively impacts the bottom line. Research shows diversity can drive innovation, increase creativity, make recruiting easier, reduce turnover, help brands capture a larger market and make more money. What’s more, customers are attracted to brands that operate with a purpose. Today’s brands are constantly searching for ways to engage with audiences around the topic of diversity, ranging from releasing workplace diversity numbers to public statements from executives on inclusion. Some brands have gone as far as to make phrases associated with diversity part of their core values. However, the halo effect created from diversity initiatives only works if audiences are made aware of the positive changes occurring behind the scenes.

Media data can provide a real-time measure of your brand’s reputation for diversity. This dataset can answer questions like:

  • Are my customers generally aware of what we do to support diversity?
  • What words and phrases are most commonly used to describe our brand?
  • Why are we seeing changes in the way key audiences view our brand?

Measure the impact of diversity messaging

A quick Google search for diversity returns hundreds of millions of results, which makes finding information relevant to your brand the proverbial needle in a haystack. What if there was a more efficient way? Leveraging machine learning to filter through all this information and highlight what is important is the easiest and most effective method available today.

Message Pull-through

Artificial intelligence can detect when certain words appear in the same sentence — for instance it could detect when the brand HBO and “gender equality” are mentioned together in the same post or tweet. Measuring mentions for these co-occurrences over time — and monitoring which words are used most frequently — can help accurately benchmark your brand on diversity-related topics and show where improvements can be made.

Prominence

Another way to measure if diversity messaging resonates is to gauge the prominence of mentions for your brand and diversity. This examines the location of mentions for your brand within an article, with the most impactful occurring in the title and the least appearing near the bottom of an article. A high number of articles with your brand’s name in the title or lede is a strong indicator that your brand is a market leader.

Emotion

When your brand does enter the discussion around diversity, is the association a positive one?

Mining messages to find the most commonly used words, hashtags and emojis around your brand and diversity provides extra sentiment insight on the health of your diversity efforts. Examining how these change over time can indicate if messaging is effective.

Overlay media mentions for diversity with employment diversity data

One way to see if an increase in awareness for your brand’s diversity efforts has had any impact on other aspects of the business is to overlay media metrics with diversity datasets from around the enterprise. This way you can see if there is any correlation between marketing and communications programs and an increase in other diversity metrics like minority hiring or wage equity.

 

A diverse workforce provides material benefit to the enterprise, but the gains only occur if and when the right audiences know about the strides your company is making.

To learn more about how diversity can positively impact your brand’s reputation, register for our webinar: Measure the Brand Impact of Your Corporate Responsibility & Sustainability Initiatives.