Starting Where We Are

Prior to running Minty Made, I spent a decade in corporate marketing, sales and a few years working in the non-profit sector. I’m no stranger to the generic diversity, equity and inclusion training that always seemed to be organized as a response to either a PR mishap or an incident where a situation with an employee was handled poorly.

Going through these mandatory training sessions and having the same stale discussions (with a majority of people who look exactly like me) always felt forced and inauthentic. What was even worse was the intentional disregard for others in the various industries that I was a part of –leaving fellow employees feeling disrespected, unheard and unappreciated. When I started my own business, I knew that I wanted to take a more proactive approach to incorporating these practices. I knew that I didn’t have all the answers and that we needed to start where we are. Fortunately, I have spent a few years bookmarking resources and building relationships with consultants and professionals in the DE&I space. It was time to make a move and take the first step…

Hiring an Experienced Professional to Help Us Build Our Foundations

Knowing where to start is most often the trickiest part of adopting any new habit, behavior or process. Early on in my business, I had connected with Simone McNish, a Certified Diversity practitioner, DEI consultant and inclusive marketing strategist in the Seattle area. I had invited her to be one of our guest speakers in The Green Marketing Academy to teach our students how to adopt more inclusive marketing practices. Listening to her presentation, light bulbs were going off right and left and I knew that this was just the start of what needed to happen within our own organization.

I very much appreciated Simone’s encouraging approach to helping small businesses get started with integrating more inclusive practices into their company culture. She led with compassion and the whole group left feeling empowered rather than overwhelmed or intimidated about some of the actions they could start to take right away. About one year later, we hired Simone to facilitate an in-person training and focus session with our own team. This allowed us to take a deeper dive into recognizing not only what we were already doing but also the areas in which we continue to improve and seek guidance around. Coming out of this session, we outlined a DE&I roadmap that we are currently working on implementing before the end of the year.

Another organization that we invited to speak in our community more recently was Veronique Porter of Ampersand Workspace. Veronique teaches folks to recognize race and gender-based oppression and use their power, privilege, and influence to disrupt it. She led our community through a workshop on Finding Sustainability through Intersectionality, focusing specifically on the role that race and gender play in environmental justice and climate change. She also offers facilitated group training and I highly recommend subscribing to her newsletter – it’s witty, informative and will certainly brighten your day!

Incorporating Inclusivity and Accessibility Into Our Onboarding Process

One of the most opportune places that we immediately recognized as an area of improvement for inclusivity and accessibility were our onboarding processes. When a client visits our website, starts a project with us or joins our green marketing community, all roads lead to the same call-to-action: asking them to fill out a form that asks them various questions about their business. In this day and age, optional questions that ask us to self-identify with certain demographics are included in most surveys or feedback forms, more for general reporting purposes. However, with Simone’s help and guidance, we were able to reframe the intention behind asking these specific questions to allow us to make our communications and the way we work with our clients more inclusive and accessible.

A few of the questions / additions we’ve included are:

Do you have any accessibility needs that we should be aware of to support your learning journey?
How accommodating was our team with project materials, communication and processes?
We are proud to work with clients from different backgrounds. If you would like to share any aspects of your identity and have us highlight and recognize them, please feel free to select any options that apply to your business below.

Just as we help our clients do the same with their branding strategy, it's important to recognize that every small business serves a unique set of clients or customers, so be sure to write these questions in a way that better serves your target audience and makes them feel included.

Prioritizing Our Annual Contributions to Diversity-Focused Organizations

Minty Made has been a 1% For The Planet Member since 2020, meaning that we contribute a minimum of 1% of our annual revenue to non-profit organizations who are focused on environmental and social justice. Since the early 1990s, many environmentally-focused organizations have been led by non-diverse leaders which has limited the voices of folks who are most affected by climate change and injustices. As of August 2023, there were 6,300 partners in 112 different countries. So needless to say, we have a huge net of non-profit partners to whom we can contribute either financially or through in-kind donations.

As I mentioned above, many environmental organizations are led by non-diverse leaders. Though there’s nothing wrong with this, we are making a conscious effort to support organizations who have a specific mission to help those in underrepresented communities such as but not limited to Black, Indigenous and LGBTQIA+. As much as I’m not a fan of the foundations of capitalism, money is a tool used for power, so it’s time that more of us help fund organizations who need to be louder voices on environmental injustices.

To view our most recent contributions, you can view our Donation record here.

Amplifying Voices of Business Owners with a Different Perspective

Building onto the previous point, one of the ways in which I feel extremely passionate about supporting other small businesses is ensuring that voices who have been historically silenced or prioritized are recognized and heard instead of overshadowed.

On the educational side of our business at The Green Marketing Academy, we do our best to promote a lineup of diverse speakers and educators to teach our community members about specific areas of sustainable marketing. This continues to be an area of focus for us as we have plans to grow and hire additional instructors.

On the studio side of our business, we are actively seeking to learn from and partner with more Black-owned, Indigenous and minority-owned businesses as well as clients as we fully acknowledge that this has been a shortcoming for us over the past two years.

Embracing the Vulnerability to Improve

I’m a huge fan of surveys and feedback forms. Whether I’m filling them out or am I the person receiving the feedback, I always appreciate people and businesses who make it a priority to ask what can be done to improve an experience. Following our team training with Simone, we immediately scheduled time on the calendar to come together and create two specific feedback forms: one that would be sent out to clients and the other to contractors and partners that we work with on a regular basis. After sending out the initial surveys, we will repeat this process on a bi-annual basis.

Gina, our Project & Operations Manager, provided us with a helpful reminder as well: In making frequent asks to your audience, be mindful of expecting people to give feedback too often without taking intentional action. As Culture Amp CEO Didier Elzinga says, “The most typical reason people don’t want to fill out your survey is that you haven’t done anything since the last one. They don’t have survey fatigue; they have lack-of-action fatigue.” The rule of thumb to combat this fatigue? Only survey as often as you can take valuable action on the results."

Though it’s a bit uncomfortable to ask for feedback on an area of business that I know is not our strongest, asking for honest feedback in this area is the only way to move us forward.

Our Path Forward

Diversity, equity and inclusion continues to be a focus for our team at Minty Made and The Green Marketing Academy. I am grateful that we have a team in place who continues to hold all of us accountable for our actions and the opportunities that we have to work with clients who share a similar vision. We would love to know what your company has done or is working on in creating a more inclusive and accessible culture or workplace. Leave a comment below and let’s discuss!