DEIJB Audit and Strategy
An honest look at how you raise money, and a plan to do better.
Most organizations that call us have already done something. A staff training, a statement on the website, a committee that met hard for six months and then drifted. What they haven’t done is look closely at the machinery of advancement itself: who is in the database and how they’re coded, who gets invited to the head of school’s dinner, which gifts the board will and won’t accept, whose faces end up in the annual report. That’s where values either show up or don’t.
An audit sounds clinical, and some of it is. What it produces is a specific list of changes, ranked and assigned to owners, in place of a vague sense that “we should be doing better.” We do it without shaming anyone, because people who are afraid of getting it wrong stop telling you the truth, and then you can’t fix anything.
What We Do
Review the practice, not the posture
We go through your advancement operation piece by piece: CRM fields and salutation defaults, prospect research and rating criteria, gift acceptance and naming policies, event venues and ticket prices, appeal language and imagery, and who sits on which committee. We look for the places where bias or exclusion is built into the process, which is usually where nobody thought to look.
Listen to the people who know
We conduct confidential interviews and small focus groups with staff, trustees, donors, volunteers, and community partners, including people who have stepped away. They tell us how your organization feels from where they stand. We report what we heard in themes, never in names.
Write the plan with you
We sit down with your leadership and turn the findings into a prioritized plan: what to fix this quarter, what takes a year, what needs a board vote, and who owns each item. Some fixes cost nothing but a decision. We’ll tell you which ones.
Stay for the hard part
Plans fail in implementation. If you want us, we stay on to coach the people carrying the work, check progress against the plan, and help you adjust when something doesn’t land the way you expected.
What You Walk Away With
- A written assessment of your fundraising and communications practices, with specific findings and the evidence behind each one
- A summary of what stakeholders told us, organized by theme
- A prioritized action plan with owners, sequence, and the policies or documents each item touches
- Recommended revisions to the policies that most need it, such as gift acceptance, data standards, or recognition
- A simple way to check progress each year
Why We Still Say DEIJB
Many organizations have quietly dropped the words diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging from their websites and reports in the last few years. We understand the pressure, and we aren’t here to judge anyone’s choices about their own risk. We’ve made a different one.
We keep the words because each one names something specific. Diversity is about who is present. Equity is about whether the rules are fair. Inclusion is about whether people get to take part. Justice is about repairing what was unfair. Belonging is about whether people want to stay. Swap them for softer language and you tend to lose the precision, and the work gets fuzzier along with the vocabulary. We would rather say what we mean. If you are trying to hold steady on these commitments yourself, you won’t have to explain them to us.
What Clients Say
We knew we needed to make our fundraising practices more inclusive, but we were afraid of making mistakes. TRANSCEND Advancement provided an incredibly thorough and compassionate audit that gave us a clear, actionable path forward without any judgment.
The listening tours they conducted completely opened our eyes to how our messaging was landing with different segments of our audience. The resulting strategy has entirely shifted how we talk about our artistic community.
Even in the social justice space, internal operations can sometimes lag behind external messaging. Their DEIJB audit helped us align our internal development policies with our public-facing values, ensuring we walk the walk in everything we do.
Let’s talk.
If you’re ready to find out where your practices and your values part ways, we’re ready to help you look. The communities you serve notice the difference between what an organization says and what it does, long before the organization does.
Related services. Inclusive Fundraising and Donor Engagement · Development Office Audit