Blog
August 11, 2023
Embracing Inclusion for Enhanced Impact
From building or implementing software to creating or altering business processes and defining company policy, almost every organization-wide decision-making process will eventually run into “edge cases.”
Edge cases are the uncommon, rare, and unimportant scenarios that, due to their only occasional occurrence, are not part of an organization’s standard business processes, but also cannot be entirely dismissed. They are the, “What do we do when the situation doesn’t fit the norm?” scenarios. Examples of edge cases include how an employee processes a gift type that your nonprofit organization rarely receives or how a certain interface element will be described by a screen reader.
The theory is, the edge case can be dealt with by using a different process, on a case-by-case basis, or by adding additional software features in the future. The ability to exclude edge cases from the scope of a digital transformation project is critical to keeping that scope achievable—but excluding them can have consequences.
Being able to differentiate critical use cases and scenarios from edge cases is, of course, critical to making decisions at your organization. If a group gets bogged down by trying to account for every possible situation, they will never make any decisions. This is especially true when making software configuration decisions, developing business processes, or planning software features.
But every use case that gets removed from the planning process eventually affects someone and the way they do their work. It’s important to know whose work is being impacted and how dealing with those edge cases—possibly in an unnecessarily inefficient way—will affect their work and therefore their ability to impact an organization’s mission work.
Processes should be representative of your team
Consider the gift processor who will have to tediously process contributions manually or the box office staffer who will have to copy and paste information from one system into another. Will the changes to your organization’s processes or tools add to these team members’ workloads or create bottlenecks for other work? Consider the staffer who uses adaptive technology to help them navigate your CRM. Will that adaptive technology still work for them after the upgrade?
Taking the time to consider the people behind the use cases and involving a representative group in the decision-making process can help with adoption and general team buy-in for any project.
All of this is part of an effective change management strategy, which should always be part of the planning and implementation of digital transformation projects. But, in this case, it can also be a critical step in verifying that the case your core group thinks is “edge” doesn’t turn out to be right at the center of the work for someone who isn’t in the room.
Practice inclusion in project planning
Once your organization begins considering the people behind the edge cases as part of your change management strategy, you may realize there are certain roles more likely to find bits of their work excluded from decision-making—gift processors, front-line customer service workers, people who answer calls from the public, coordinators, and so on.
These types of roles are rarely included in the core team of big projects. Tasks that employees in these roles do once a week may seem, from a distance, safe to exclude from the software configuration planning or design of an interface or new workflow. Surely, those few employees can handle one manual task instead of an automated process, right? Surely, they can handle a few extra steps to get approval, right? Surely, the three staff members who use adaptive technology can sort themselves out, right?
Here is where edge cases meet issues of equity and belonging.
What do the roles mentioned above have in common? They are positions that are relatively low on the corporate ladder, and therefore, given the workforce distribution in general, are often staffed by early-career people, people from historically excluded communities, people without college degrees, and people who grew up in poverty.
According to zippia.com, 68.5% of nonprofit managers in 2021 were white and 70% had a bachelor’s or master’s degree. Since family wealth is linked to both college enrollment and completion (according to Inside Higher Ed’s review of federal data) and white families hold significantly more wealth than non-white families, we can infer that a high proportion of nonprofit managers come from economically secure backgrounds. Only 59.5% of full-time nonprofit staff are white—that implies a concentration of people from historically privileged positions at the top of the nonprofit corporate ladder.
While management and leadership may seem like pivotal roles at a nonprofit organization, it is often the “rank and file” who have the most contact with an organization’s constituents. In many cases, those front-line workers are functionally the face of the organization. While the turnover rate among nonprofit executives is low, the overall nonprofit organization turnover rate is 21% with a majority of those leaving nonprofits citing a lack of upward mobility as their main concern. Turnover of front-line employees has a high dollar cost (up to half the employee’s annual salary) and an even higher mission cost. Turnovers erode trust with constituents who see the faces change, but it means losing institutional knowledge and efficiency, which decreases an organization’s ability to achieve its mission.
For example, people using adaptive technology are doing so because technology solutions, in general, are not built for the way their body functions. If you have trouble with fine motor control, a mouse is not terribly useful. If you have impaired vision, a screen on its own won’t tell you much. These are the people who are, or at least are most likely to feel, precarious at work to begin with.
They may feel insecure in their jobs for a host of reasons from simply being further down in the organizational chart and therefore more “expendable” to feeling like they don’t quite fit in because their background is different from most of the rest of the staff. They may also simply be economically insecure, due to low wages (according to the Center on Disability, the median income for households that include people with disabilities is $43,330 as compared to $68,700 for households that don’t include people with disabilities) or other factors, which can create both an intense pressure to keep their job and a generalized sense of insecurity.
Edge cases create inequities when not addressed
Telling people who use adaptive technology time and time again that the scenario that matters to their work is just an edge case decreases the sense of belonging at an organization. Worse still, having excluded their needs from the decision-making process, you’ve now created a policy or piece of software that doesn’t consider their needs.
How is the gift processor going to feel when her colleagues save so much time with new automation that they go home early on Friday, while she must stay late to deal with the in-kind gifts that the new CRM can’t automatically process? How is the box office staffer going to feel when he must have a difficult conversation with his boss about his responsibilities because the new ticketing system won’t increase the font size large enough for him to read? How is the call center rep going to feel when they can’t keep up with ticket statuses because it is represented only by colors they can’t distinguish between? They are unlikely to feel valued or that they have a future at the organization.
There are no easy answers here. Diversity and equity programs in workplaces exist, at least in part, because the business case for enhancing the sense of belonging among employees is strong. But the challenge of being genuinely committed to inclusion and enabling all people to thrive in a workplace is that the threats to thriving are pervasive.
Even the best diversity program is only effective if it makes a difference to the daily operations of an organization and if its principles of equity and fairness influence the way decisions are made. Thinking about the people whose work is being excluded from an organization’s digital transformation and involving them in the project is an opportunity to put your commitment to inclusion into practice. It can go a long way towards mitigating frustrations and increasing the sense of belonging at your organization.
For a nonprofit that cares about improving the world, that is a worthy goal in itself, but enhancing the sense of value and belonging significantly contributes toward decreasing turnover and increasing employee performance.
Include equity in your Salesforce solutions
At Attain Partners, we actively acknowledge and appreciate the importance of creating an environment in which all team members feel valued, included, and empowered to do great work and share ideas. We work closely with our clients to create a breakthrough vision of the future and execute with purpose and diligence to transform organizational processes, encourage progressive change management, enhance the sense of belonging, and help our clients move their mission-centric work forward.
When working with our clients, including nonprofits, we always design for and consider the constituent experience. For example, we design systems so that users (internal and external) can easily use the tools and fully engage with the organization even if English is not their primary language.
In addition, one of the reasons we’re proud to partner with Salesforce is its commitment to increasing accessibility for low-vision and/or hearing-impaired users. We help our nonprofit clients take advantage of Salesforce’s continual investment in innovation and accessibility.
In addition, one of the reasons we’re proud to partner with Salesforce is its commitment to increasing accessibility for low-vision and/or hearing-impaired users. We help our nonprofit clients take advantage of Salesforce’s continual investment in innovation and accessibility.
Kristi Phillips
Managing Director and Nonprofit Market Lead, Attain Partners
Attain Partners – Salesforce Experts
No matter if your organization is beginning its Salesforce journey or 10+ years into development, we are here to help you achieve your digital transformation goals.
To learn more, check out our Salesforce Innovation services and read case studies about our work. Contact Attain Partners today to learn how we can help you achieve your goals by harnessing the power of Salesforce. Explore blog posts from Attain Partners’ Salesforce team.
About the Author
Jaemi Loeb is a Senior Consultant at Attain Partners and a veteran nonprofit leader. Her expertise sits at the intersection between technology and people, tools, and daily operations. She is passionate about helping organizations to streamline their workflows and use data to meet their missions.
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