Tips & Tricks | Estimated Read time – 5:12
We are still feeling so inspired by the 2022 Running USA Industry conference (revisit our initial takeaways). Diversity & Inclusion was a key focus and we’ve been thinking about how we, as event management technology providers, can help our industry evolve into a space where everyone feels welcome.
During these talks at the conference, many event organizers asked what they can do to diversify their events and create a more inclusive experience. In this article, we’re covering 8 great tools you could be leveraging right now to take steps toward a more diverse and inclusive industry.
8 ways to utilize Race Roster tools to make your event more diverse & inclusive
1. Confirm your color scheme is accessible with Race Roster’s contrast checker
Our team at Race Roster is passionate about digital accessibility. To help you ensure you have good contrast on your event colors, we have a built-in contrast checker on the event branding page! You will be alerted when there is not enough contrast in the colors you have chosen.
Why is this important?
People who are able to see may perceive colors in different ways and experience difficulties distinguishing shades and colors (color vision deficiency, or CVD).
Consider these statistics
2. Collect important information with ‘custom registration questions’
This tool can be used to determine how you can make adjustments in order to achieve a more inclusive and accessible event. For example, you could ask participants to indicate if they will require an interpreter. Knowing this information, you can ensure that sign language interpreters are available on-site.
Send personalized emails based on registration questions
You can send email campaigns that highlight relevant information based on your participant’s needs.
- For example, if your event expo is on a second level floor, you could outline where the ramps and elevators are in an email to registrants who will be participating in a wheelchair.
Create personalized awards based on registration questions
If you ask the right questions during registration, you’ll have the data you need to distribute meaningful awards!
- For example, you could award the top 3 or more finishers who are blind or living with vision loss! For more ideas, check out our article “great ways to create meaningful awards beyond winning the race”.
Note: A great alternative to asking each registrant a question is to create a sub-event to allow participants to sign up for a specific category!
3. Allow participants to select a gender identity
Allowing participants to select a gender identity allows each individual the opportunity to participate as themselves! However, if collecting gender or sex is not at all relevant for your event, best practice is to skip it all together.
4. Offer multiple language options
When the multilingual feature has been enabled for your event, your participants will be able to view your event details page, legal pages, their participant dashboard, promoter dashboard, results, and ‘agreements’ page during registration in any of the 10 languages available on Race Roster.
When setting up your email campaign triggers, you can select a specific language from the dropdown and it will ensure your campaign only sends to participants who use Race Roster in that particular language. You can also set the language of the default footer that appears on every campaign you send. This will allow you to send out emails that are in a single language from top to bottom!
Ready to go multilingual?
Please reach out to us at director@raceroster.com if you are interested in enabling these language options for your participants.
5. Include various clothing size options
Our products tool allows you to sell event merchandise and other items during registration or afterwards from your online event store. T-shirts, jackets, and other clothing items are the most common items to offer, and you can use the products tool to provide your participants with a variety of size options.
6. Set up a harrassment & discrimination policy
Using Race Roster’s waiver tool, you could add a custom waiver stating that harassment and discrimination will not be tolerated at your event and outline how any acts will be handled. If you are a timed race, consider adding a policy regarding transgender and non-binary participants whose inclusion is based on self-determination.
We recommend working with a legal consultant on these!
7. Offer discounts & early access
Using promo/discount codes or access codes, you can offer discounted registration or early-bird access to underprivileged groups.
8. Consider the accessibility of your content
It’s important to consider how the content placed on your event details page will be consumed by those with cognitive, hearing, or other disabilities. Here are a few tips:
- Ensure your writing is clear and concise
- Provide multiple ways to consume information (e.g., text, images, videos, etc.)
- Enable captions on videos – We recommend manually typing or inserting captions instead of using the automated CC options. This will help ensure your captions are completely accurate!
Coming Soon: Gender updates in results
We’re excited to announce that our awards tool will be adding flexibility in our results platform, allowing timers to easily import and score results in a wide variety of gender and sex categories.
For example, this will make it seamless to display results for participants identifying as non-binary.
Race Roster Internal Initiatives
What are we currently doing at Race Roster?
- We have formed a diversity and inclusion committee. As a committee our goal is to remove barriers, identify gaps and address, implement and develop solutions to these gaps. The D&I Committee has been and will continue to work together to identify concerns, and growth opportunities to diversify our workforce and create a more equitable and inclusive workplace.
- We have partnered with the Canadian Center for Diversity and Inclusion (CCDI).
- Each month, we are celebrating topics related to diversity and inclusion. These topics focus on race and gender equality, the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, people with disabilities, and more. Celebrations include virtual runs/walks, speaker series, and engaging educational material/resources.
- We’ve worked with a subcommittee of employees and leaders to make our recruitment practices more equitable.
- Implemented an onboarding survey to assess feelings of inclusivity and belonging among new hires within their first 90 days with the company.
- Implemented a bi-annual diversity and inclusion survey to better understand our team’s wants and needs and identify growth opportunities.
What’s new at Race Roster?
See all of our releases or visit our what’s new page for the most noteworthy Race Roster updates!
