As part of our BFI funding, we are required to submit Equality and Diversity monitoring forms for all team members of each festival. This week I spent some time developing a form to send to our LYFF volunteers. I was very aware of making the form as inclusive as possible, offering a range of answers for each question. The BFI had sent us a template form however I felt there were some aspects missing that I could I improve on.
I carried out research into a range of other organisation equality and diversity surveys and also called upon a friend of mine who works as an equality officer at a local music organisation. One of the major flaws I found with the BFI form was that it had been made using Excel and was not very accessible. As we learnt during an ECICE lecture, accessibility is one of the key aspects to take into account when organising events, and this should also be the case for evaluating them. To make it more accessible, I transferred the survey into an online form, which only required a web address to access. I made sure the form could be viewed as HTML or plain text, with images having alt text and the text being easily readable by a text to speech application.
Another aspect I changed was extending the range of answers for the questions. For example, adding 'Asexual' as an option under a sexuality question and adding further options under an ethnicity question. I also made sure that each question had the option to 'self-describe' or choose 'prefer not to say'. My manager agreed this survey better reflected our aims of accessibility and inclusivity, and using an online form also made collection of data much easier.
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