DEI Toolkit

Constituent and stakeholder surveys allow us to gather information about our wider community of stakeholders and make decisions that best serve our current and intended audiences. Hearing directly from stakeholders provides our organizations with important data on which to base decisions about outreach, programming, policymaking, and relationship building.

• Determine which languages you need to provide your survey in.
• Consider the reading level and fluency of your intended audience.
• Decide which sections go first, second, third, etc.
• Create a communication plan for the survey deployment.
• Determine the timeline for deployment, analysis, and sharing back what you have learned.
• Create a survey that meets accessibility standards for people who are blind or who have low-vision, and those who are deaf or hard of hearing.

• Use this section of your survey to determine what your constituents or stakeholders need from your organization.
• Qualitative data, though more time intensive during analysis, provides constituents and stakeholders the opportunity to provide meaningful feedback.

• What are your constituent’s expectations of the organization and how well do they feel you meet (or do not meet) their expectations? Do hard to reach communities have any expectations of your organization and do those need to be co-developed in relationship with those communities?
• Evaluate constituent responses against your organization’s internal expectations for itself, its vision, mission, and values.

• Demographic information provides insight into who responds to your survey. It can be compared to census and other demographic data about your constituents to help you identify overlaps and gaps in outreach.
• Consider including demographic questions about gender identity, racial and ethnic background, age, household income, access to transportation, ability and disability, and other categories that will help your organization make more informed decisions about their budget, programs, collections, and communications.
• Gender Identity: The gender spectrum is expanding to include vocabulary and identifiers for people who have always existed but are just now being named. This is a good opportunity to include a text box response or an opportunity for stakeholders to self-identify in a multiple-choice format.
• Racial and Ethnic Background: Consider a text box response or a multiple-choice response that allows people to self-identify.
• Hispanic, or No? Asking constituents about their ethnic background, particularly whether or not they identify as Hispanic, is complex. It can be an important piece of information, or it can confuse data analysis. If your organization chooses to include this question, we recommend removing it from the Race/Ethnic background questions and adding an additional yes/no/I do not know question, “Do you identify as Hispanic?” If this question is necessary to determine which languages your organization should use for materials, collections, and programming, we recommend a multiple choice or open-ended question regarding written and spoken language of preference and/or language spoken at home.
• Age, Income, Transportation: Asking these questions in your survey can give your organization enough information to evaluate your community’s needs and analyze their responses based on other available research in those categories.
• Ability and Disability: This question can be a valuable way to learn about stakeholders’ accommodation needs. We do not recommend asking stakeholders to disclose specific disabilities but instead using ability and disability questions to address which accommodations they may need or appreciate including a talking library, spoken object labels, ramps, single stall or companion bathrooms, large print library, braille materials, etc.