The Digital Stage

Andi Graham (00:01.809)
Hello, hello. Welcome to the digital stage. Today we are here with our friend Josh Uretsky who I first saw speak at the NTC conference in Portland, Oregon a couple of weeks ago, a few weeks ago, three, four weeks ago, something like that. And I was so impressed with the topic and it's something that all of our clients talk about. So I wanted to invite Josh to be with us here today to talk about all of that great work. So Josh is from the Audubon Society and Josh, would you introduce yourself?

Josh Uretsky (00:30.674)
Hi, yeah, I'm the senior director of analytics at the National Audubon Society. I'm the first person responsible for membership analytics at Audubon. We have a lot of people who study birds, but my job has been to better understand the people working with our political departments and our marketing departments to build out a data infrastructure.

Warren Wilansky (00:56.782)
Thanks for joining us, Josh.

Andi Graham (00:57.681)
What a gift that must be to have a full -time person who just works on membership analytics. That's so interesting.

Josh Uretsky (01:06.802)
Yeah, it's funny, in the talk you mentioned, somebody asked, is that a job at nonprofits to do data? And then it was funny because I looked out at the room and half the people at the room were shocked that that was a question because they either worked with or worked in data. I think particularly those of us who have a background in political data or political nonprofits, it's super important. But then the other half of the room was clearly like,

Andi Graham (01:13.745)
I'm sorry.

Josh Uretsky (01:35.09)
Yeah, I have no idea. I can't imagine how we could hire somebody full -time to do people data.

Andi Graham (01:39.185)
Yeah.

Andi Graham (01:43.025)
And I do think that that's a majority of the teams that both Warren and I probably work with at that, that luxury of a, of a role that just deals with member analytics probably seems like a, just a luxury for sure. So that's cool.

Josh Uretsky (01:56.434)
Yeah, I certainly get pulled into a lot of what I would call like operational analytics and trying to, you know, help make sure that the marketing files go out on time and that the systems talk to each other, you know, but.

Andi Graham (02:01.329)
Hehehehehe

Yep. It's important though. Yeah. No, I said that stuff's so important though. And it's one of the things that I think a lot of nonprofits really struggle with is that operationalization across their various systems. So that's good.

Warren Wilansky (02:10.606)
Yeah, it must be interesting just... Sorry, go ahead Andy.

Warren Wilansky (02:23.79)
I think it's what's interesting is, you know, Andy and I work with a lot of different kinds of clients, different levels of kind of data, knowledge and abilities. But it's interesting because I mean, a lot of nonprofits, they're probably a lot and probably your experience, especially especially in political campaigns, probably data drives a lot of decisions where there are still some people who still even though you know, where it's not like the digital age is it's not like it started a year or two ago, or decades into this. And there's still some people who were not as educated about it. So it seems like

second nature to you probably for a lot of people is still a big black box. So I didn't I didn't get a chance to see your presentation. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about it.

Josh Uretsky (03:02.002)
Yeah, absolutely. So the basic narrative is, so I got to Audubon about seven and a half years ago now. And one of the first major tasks I was asked to do was to count our members. Because we had multiple constituent relationship manager software CRMs. We use every action in Salesforce and they didn't talk to each other so well. And...

we could not actually uniquely count our donors and our email subscribers. And so, I mean, I'm sure you've heard that problem many times. And so that was one of my first tasks was like, can we get down to a reasonable number where we know where we have a confidence that we're not overly double counting? And we started to, once we started to do that, we're like, well, okay, we wanna put together a dashboard on this. We sent to the board that executive leadership can use.

And they actually, one of the things they were most interested in knowing was, going back to the political, the ideological leanings of our members. It leans into what our theories of change are, that we have more conservative members than other green groups. But because we needed that ideological data, we were reaching out to a company called Target Smart and matching our membership. And Target Smart's very common in the political space.

but not so much in the NGO space. And so we were able to match our members and it came back with a wealth of data. Most important to my boss's boss is the ideology. But we also got useful things like age and gender and race. And because we had that, we used it in the dashboard. And it confirmed some things we thought we knew. Our members are very, very old, very, very white and very, very female. And all of those things just hit differently.

Andi Graham (04:40.849)
It's amazing.

Josh Uretsky (04:56.21)
when you see them articulated as a number, as a percentage, where we really could have an estimate. And not only that though, but we could do work to change that if we wanted to and measure progress to goal. So I pushed to have a chart of our breakdown by race right there in the front of the membership dashboard, which showed that we were about 90, 91 % white.

And that was a generous method of doing the estimates because you have to correct for the bias in the data. But over time, we were able to get funding allocated. We already had a program in place to try to attract younger people who were interested in birds. And we added onto that a program around trying to use paid advertising to bring in people who were not white.

I'm gonna not try to do an entire hour long talk in the course of this podcast. But the short story is we stumbled a lot. We discovered that our initial strategies to target non -white people on Facebook did not bring back non -white people, they brought back the same people we always brought back. And we had to learn how to target. And in part, we started using the scores from Target Smart and pushed those to Facebook.

Andi Graham (06:00.561)
I'm sorry.

Josh Uretsky (06:22.162)
so that we were using this for the targeting the same thing we were measuring against, which is always super helpful. Since then, we've seen self -reported data that shows that even amongst the target smart scores, we're getting a lot of the places where the score is not perfect. I would say they're probably like 80, 85 % correct, and we're getting a lot of that 15 % white people that categorizes people of color, because that's just how white our brand is.

and our advertising strategies. But the long term is we have been able to mostly through investment in advertising, bring it down to an organization that's, now I'm missing the number off the top of my head, I wanna say like 79 % white and so about 21 % non -white, which is a significant improvement. Over that time, we've had some interesting peaks with the pandemic brought in a lot of birders.

But membership has been largely static since then, if not declining, but we've been able to double and redouble our number of non -white people, or at least modeled non -white people on the list, which brought us to the next stage, really, which is understanding whether or not they were engaging at the same rates as the white members, which if anybody who has worked on diversity, work can guess is they did not.

And so what we discovered very quickly was that our content was really systemically geared towards and trained on our existing audience. And that's what's gonna happen, right? You're always trying to improve your open rates, your click rates. And if you only measure that one number of your open rate or click rate across your whole audience, you're going to optimize for the majority of your audience, for the largest factor. And maybe if you have like a 60 -30 audience, sometimes you'll get a signal.

from that smaller audience, but most of the time, you're gonna get that majoritarian viewpoint back. And so what we've started to do is disaggregate that data out and understand, okay, is this open rate higher among people of color or is it only higher amongst our white audiences? And to what extent can we obviously write content that appeals to everybody?

Josh Uretsky (08:47.442)
But can we make sure that we include content that appeals to everybody across the content? And again, long story short, about a year ago, we launched, more than a year ago, we launched a longitudinal study to measure the impact of, to try to like revert to best practices and advice we've gotten through research to try to appeal to a more diverse audience. And,

Initially the results were mixed. We did see some significant results among Hispanics being more engaged during the test. But then actually even more interestingly, six months post -test, which actually was about a month ago when I presented at the NTC, we saw that African Americans on the list had significantly, well, we're still measuring the significance, so take the word significant out of there.

but had noticeably better engagement. With the same exact content, because we ended the test, the people who were in the test group were more engaged. And the initial studies, initial looks at that make it seem like it's a similar number of people, but the people who are engaged are more deeply engaged, which is exactly what we want to do. And honestly, that the revised content reverting to best practices,

led to the entire audience being better engaged as well and the disparity between the audience being reduced. So we're still like processing that and figuring out what that means as we plan for our next fiscal year, but that's kind of where we are.

Warren Wilansky (10:30.478)
I have a question for you Josh, which is when you're doing campaigns, are you sending out the same messages to everybody or are you subdividing and maybe doing different campaigns for different groups?

Josh Uretsky (10:40.05)
Yeah, so that depends on the scale of the campaign and the organization. Two jobs back, I worked for an organization called American Votes, and we worked with a range of nonprofits. And I actually worked for, split my time with State Voices for most of that time. And so we might work with someone like the Urban League of Philadelphia. I live in Philly, as you can tell from the Liberty Bell behind me. And so...

One partner who works with the Urban League might focus only on people who they believe to be African -Americans. They'd go out to African -American neighborhoods and focus on, with both a message and a strategy focused on that demographic. Larger campaigns like a presidential, I was at Bernie just before Audubon, they need to be able to walk and chew gum, right? They need to be able to build campaigns that have different strategies.

different messaging and different messengers to reach people across different demographics. And you see that all the time. You see that's why male candidates might have a female surrogate. Or you might bring, if you're going to a city like Philadelphia, you want to make sure you bring the mayor along who's an African American.

Andi Graham (12:00.337)
Talk to me a little bit about, I'm curious about the messaging that changed and can you give us some specific examples of what you had to change?

Josh Uretsky (12:09.362)
So I'm not the messaging person, I'm the data person. But I think the example that comes to mind most often to me is we were campaigning around a water issue in a predominantly African American city. And a lot of times our messaging is driven by the bird wonks on the ground or the bird scientists.

Andi Graham (12:11.121)
I know.

Josh Uretsky (12:35.73)
who are saying, oh, this issue around water is impacting birds and we need to do something about it. And because it was an ornithologist writing the initial copy, we really just didn't include the fact that this is a predominantly black city and like bad water is bad for everybody. Or I think it was a water issue, but the point is, and so really what a large part of what we did,

Andi Graham (12:53.649)
Yeah.

Warren Wilansky (12:54.702)
Hmm.

Josh Uretsky (13:03.442)
was just to take a step back and reread our content and look for what the team's been calling choice points. Where are there opportunities to talk about how these issues impact people in general and people of color in particular so that we can raise salient issues that people will identify with? One of the other things that we did was really revisit some of our Welcome series to think about like, are we?

We don't need to tell everybody to go out and buy an expensive binocular the first time we talk to them. And we don't need to insist on birding in your backyard. We know that actually the majority of people on our list, they bird very close to home. There are definitely birders who fly all the way across the world to see beautiful birds in other parts of the world. But the majority of us, like I'm doing right now, I see a couple of birds dancing around in the community garden behind my house.

And that's the majority of birding that people do. But everybody has different realities of where they see that. They might be doing it at the park. They might have a bird feeder in their backyard. They might have a bunch of trees in their backyard, and they're seeing it there. But they might live in an apartment, and it's not necessarily their backyard. At least not literally their backyard.

Warren Wilansky (14:20.878)
Yeah, I mean, it could be a tower in New York City and they're looking at a falcon at the roof of another building.

Andi Graham (14:21.073)
I'm curious.

Josh Uretsky (14:27.058)
Absolutely, absolutely. Or it could be going to their local park and looking at the bushes. Or Central Park, which is an amazing birding place. It reminds me though of the time I was visiting a friend in his office tower and we saw some sort of falcon who was at the time living in the city hall in Philly. Yeah, and he had a great view of both. But the point being is there are birds everywhere and learn how to open up your eyes and see them and appreciate them.

Andi Graham (14:43.281)
Oh wow. Oh that's so cool!

Josh Uretsky (14:55.41)
And it doesn't have to be, you don't have to make a major investment. You don't have to have, you don't have to be a wealthy landowner. That birding is something that should and could be accessible to everybody, but that's not how we talk about it.

Andi Graham (15:03.633)
Thank you.

Andi Graham (15:10.16)
It's not, were you a birder before this role or if you become a birder because of this role?

Josh Uretsky (15:13.074)
Absolutely not. No, I mean, I've definitely grown to appreciate birds. I was environmental, you know, I believe in environmental causes and that's what brought me to Audubon, but I definitely learned to appreciate it. Well, I've been here. Well, also like when you work at Audubon, there's some people who are really serious birders and they really know their stuff. And I'm like, you know, very, very much an amateur.

Andi Graham (15:25.041)
Absolutely not.

Andi Graham (15:30.513)
Yeah.

Yeah. I have.

I've told people a number of times that I think it's a prerequisite of turning 50 is that you start becoming strangely interested in the birds around you. Because my husband, all of a sudden we have 15 bird feeders and he literally screamed and ran upstairs when a bald eagle flew across our backyard last week. And it was just, it's nothing could be better. So it's like, oh, here's where we are now. I guess this is our part of the story.

Josh Uretsky (15:59.762)
Like I was saying, our membership really kicks up at about 50.

Warren Wilansky (16:03.566)
Hahaha.

Andi Graham (16:04.977)
And that leads me to one of the points you made in the talk, which I thought was interesting that there are some things about the mix of your membership that's just not going to change. Like they're not going to get younger. I think you and I actually chatted about that afterwards at the coffee shop where I said, you know, every client we work with, all of our nonprofits want to bring in a younger donor base. They want to bring in a younger membership. They want to just, and that's more of a legacy issue than it is anything else. And you said, why, why do they need to change the age range of their or the demographic?

of their membership population. I thought that was an interesting perspective.

Josh Uretsky (16:38.834)
Yeah, I mean, one of the things I think about, especially when you contrast like age and race as targets, right?

Andi Graham (16:43.153)
Mm -hmm.

Josh Uretsky (16:46.866)
When you think about diversifying your membership by race, you can think about making long -term investments. You can think about acquiring members, keeping them with you over time, learning better how to serve those members. When you think about acquiring, we had, not so much now, we invested a lot of money in bringing young people onto our list when I started at Audubon. And I really never understood the point of the program because frankly, they weren't engaging.

Andi Graham (16:51.889)
Yep.

Josh Uretsky (17:17.042)
And if they're really gonna be involved, what does it matter to Audubon if they join our membership list at 35 or at 50? How does that benefit the organization or the member? And so they age out of those categories. I think it's different, right? It depends on the mission. You need that mission alignment, right? Like other green groups, there are green groups that are really focused on younger members and they serve them well.

Andi Graham (17:30.417)
Yep.

Andi Graham (17:34.769)
Mm -hmm.

Josh Uretsky (17:46.514)
And I'm not saying that if, I mean, honestly, I think we're, an organization like Audubon is actually better served by connecting across generations and helping grandparents connect to their grandchildren and aunts connect to their nephews and nieces through birding as a strategy. Rather than, and we do have collegiate programs that do serve a purpose, right? We have, we've recently started creating campus chapters.

Andi Graham (18:03.537)
I love that.

Josh Uretsky (18:16.146)
And those serve a purpose, right? And they actually, like in some cases, help launch people's career in the sciences or in ornithology.

Warren Wilansky (18:23.662)
But I mean, what's interesting about that though is, you know, like, I think your point is well taken, but you know, what could be the way to look at it is if you're connecting with somebody who's 20 or 25 right now, they might not be an active Audubon member until they're 50, but you want them to know about Audubon society so that when it is time for them to get interested in birds and wanting to scream about a hawk, you scream about a, you know, a falcon going by, they're ready to do that. You know, they're, they're, they're, they're primed for it.

Andi Graham (18:47.121)
I'm sorry.

Josh Uretsky (18:50.45)
Yeah, I don't disagree. And honestly, you know, we've been we've been shifting towards more brand awareness ads, as opposed to acquisition ads. And I think that it's important that our brand awareness, you know, it is important for any organization, right, to have brand awareness across, you know, across and brand awareness is something that lasts along has a long tail. Whereas like an email subscription, right, unless you're really serving that person.

you should stop emailing them after a year if they're not engaging with your content. So if we acquire a 49 -year -old who has not had that epiphany yet at 49 and they don't engage with our email for a year, we have to reacquire them at 50 when they suddenly do.

Warren Wilansky (19:34.67)
love that perspective because so many clients when they get a name on an email list they just feel like oh I now own this relationship whereas then nobody wants to reduce their list but I'm a believer I don't know how you feel Andy but I'm a believer that like a really engaged smaller list is more powerful than a than a massive list of nobody ever engaging.

Josh Uretsky (19:55.186)
And yeah, I mean we've had challenges with email deliverability, which is a whole nother rabbit hole to go into. But you know, it actually reduces your ability to reach the people who are engaging if you're sending to people who aren't.

Andi Graham (20:08.817)
Yep. Email has been its own rabbit hole for about 12 months now, where it's just a constant problem. So yeah, and everybody's on different. It's one of the most complex things of working on the web, in my opinion, because there's so much more variability than there is in just building websites. We've got now down to like two real rendering engines that we need to work with versus the 70 ,000 different combinations that might be possible on email. So it gets harder and harder.

Josh Uretsky (20:33.681)
Yeah, I mean, I think the interesting thing about the different, and I think it's been a challenge with email throughout, is that the costs of sending to it, the costs of sending a piece of mail are easy to quantify. People can count the stamp and the paper and the printing and all that stuff. When you talk about the production cost of an email, people struggle a little bit to understand what the real costs are. And you're starting to think about, okay, there was production costs, right? There's the graphics and the writing.

Andi Graham (20:45.425)
Yeah.

Andi Graham (20:56.049)
Yep.

Josh Uretsky (21:00.818)
and the infrastructure you're using to send it, but there's also your list reputation and those kinds of things. And those things aren't as obvious and people tend to waste them because they're not as obvious.

Andi Graham (21:06.929)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Andi Graham (21:15.889)
That's so true. Yeah. It's hard to convince clients of that, that they should be keeping their list scrubbed for that reason. So that's a good, um, how do you engage with your marketers and your messaging teams? I mean, it sounds like you have some, not just so as a data person, you're not just reporting, you're also sharing opinion. And so it's a, I'm interested how open they are to taking those.

Josh Uretsky (21:40.018)
I mean, I think it depends. So when I was first hired at Audubon, I reported to the chief marketing officer. I've since moved to the technology team, but I've maintained close connections with close connectivity to that team. And in fact, the group that launched the longitudinal study and did some of the other preliminary work around those diversity issues was a cross -functional group that was like meeting.

By the time we were really running the study, we were meeting twice a week, or twice a day every Wednesday. And it was composed of people from our magazine content team, our marketing team, obviously the data and analytics team, and other teams as well, including our advocacy program and all across the organization.

Andi Graham (22:12.913)
Oh my gosh.

Josh Uretsky (22:33.17)
across the marketing and communications arms of the organization. So it was definitely a very tight collaboration.

Andi Graham (22:41.201)
So it really touched a lot more than just the membership side of things. It was all of your communications.

Josh Uretsky (22:47.154)
Well, so when we did the longitudinal study, what we did was across certain page channels that were targeting people of color, we randomized between a test condition and a control condition. And we randomly put people either you get everything that we've been sending, the stuff we've been sending normally versus you get the things that we're going to put a little extra effort into curating. We adjusted the welcome series. We sent less email overall.

We, like I said, we re -read every email we sent for choice points and just tried to be more intentional in that way. So it was only our digital communication. It was only the email program because you can't do everything. But it was the entire digital, the entire email journey of that member for, I think, nine months.

Andi Graham (23:33.489)
Yeah, this is you. Yeah.

Andi Graham (23:45.073)
It's much easier to test than did this postcard resonate with Jim when he opened it.

Josh Uretsky (23:48.178)
Well, so, yeah, so the interesting thing is, it's a little frustrating, right? It's a lot more exciting to be able to A -B test an individual piece of email. But what we realized when we started studying these things was that the emails that we were sending, when we would send a one -off message, so there's a Blackbirders week that some of our allies in the space have started doing, and we would send an email promoting it.

Warren Wilansky (23:48.75)
Mmm.

Josh Uretsky (24:18.706)
And naively, we thought or hoped that that email would get more engagement amongst African American members of our list. But that was just not the case. And what we saw was absolutely no measurable bump. And my theory is that what we've done is when you hear the term, you train your list and your list trains you. My theory was is that we had trained the list and so they weren't. So it was a brand problem fundamentally. It was a relationship problem.

And what we needed to do was invest more in building a stronger relationship so that when we did send content like that, the people were looking for it and interested in what we had to say about it.

Andi Graham (24:58.481)
Okay. All of this is, I think it's incredible. I think the integration of Target Smart sounds like, I think the integration of data sounds awesome. If you have somebody like you on the team who can do this, how can smaller organizations with smaller teams, what can, what do you think they can do? I mean, is this accessible to smaller organizations or do you really have to have a budget and a team that can support it?

Josh Uretsky (25:25.714)
I mean, I think some of it is. In terms of like disaggregating every email you send, that would be expensive to do. It is expensive to do without the infrastructure to support it, right? Because we're not doing that within the CRMs that exist. I don't know of any CRMs that can do like post -hoc demographic analysis on your email program. There ought to be, what's that?

Andi Graham (25:36.689)
Okay.

Andi Graham (25:44.881)
Yep. Yep.

Andi Graham (25:50.289)
Yeah. L true. I said L true. We're almost there.

Josh Uretsky (25:56.114)
Yeah, yeah. But what you can do very easily is do a one time match or once a year match and get and do that analysis for your across your membership. Right, like I would probably say if you're not going to like we have a I mean, we have a enterprise data warehouse, we're on snowflake, we're reporting things out on a BI tool called Sigma, all of which allow us to do a lot of

Andi Graham (26:11.537)
Okay.

Josh Uretsky (26:24.754)
to customize our environment in a way. But the cost of matching our membership, I think it's a couple of pennies per member, right? And so you can get that data back. And oftentimes, allied groups might do some sort of get together to reduce that costs sometimes, depending upon who you're doing it with. And...

Andi Graham (26:36.209)
Yeah.

Andi Graham (26:48.305)
Yeah, yeah. That's a neat idea. Yeah.

Josh Uretsky (26:54.354)
When you do that, you can do that analysis in the moment, right? And it's not that hard of a math problem if you just have a file that you're working on. Maintaining that going forward, right? So we match everybody as they come in new, right? And we check to see if they're new, we add more information, we see if your address changes, we try again if we haven't matched you before. That sort of thing, that's hard to do if you don't have a full setup.

Andi Graham (27:24.945)
That's the part that would be neat though.

Josh Uretsky (27:27.09)
Yeah, but knowing that first step of to have a group that could say every year, every six months, we're checking the demographics of our member. And we're getting a lot of other useful information too. And to be able to measure that on a regular basis. And then you can see improvements. And you have all that data on your members. So you could segment on it, for example, or run tests on it pretty easily.

Andi Graham (27:35.729)
Yep, that's true. Yep.

Andi Graham (27:42.929)
Yep.

Andi Graham (27:53.425)
So you mentioned Target Smart as a tool. You also were chatting with somebody at NTC that said he could help with that sort of thing. Do you remember who that was?

Josh Uretsky (28:02.802)
Oh yeah he works for Cibis

Andi Graham (28:05.233)
Civis, okay. That's right.

Josh Uretsky (28:07.282)
And they have a platform, they kind of have, that's actually kind of an entry level way to get into a data warehousing system, right? Cause they're basically, they're doing a lot of the data engineering for you and you can kind of access your data through a webpage. It does kind of assume, at least last time I looked at it, kind of assume that you have some SQL skills and can do a little bit of basic programming.

Andi Graham (28:17.265)
Mm -hmm.

Andi Graham (28:22.673)
Yep.

Josh Uretsky (28:36.658)
But it covers a lot of the work for you. And they work directly with Target Smart. So they can manage that matching for you and things like that, or help you manage it.

Andi Graham (28:47.409)
Okay.

Warren Wilansky (28:52.59)
I have a data question, which is one of around privacy. In other words, you know, I know the United States is a little bit less direct certain states more than others, but we take, let's say, I know probably not as much of a concern for you, Europe's GDPR. How do you manage what's your what's your what's your sense about data privacy and how you're managing data?

Josh Uretsky (29:06.13)
Uh -huh.

Josh Uretsky (29:12.37)
Yeah, well I'll start with as a non -profit, most of these laws don't apply to non -profits. Which frankly only really matters because it's expensive to do it right. So like if somebody, like look if somebody wants to be deleted from your database, you should remove their data. Now the question is what does that actually mean? Because you actually have to store a record of deleting their data, so in case it comes in again, you don't keep it. So that part's complicated. You know,

I've found, I've definitely had reactions when I've talked about projects like in political data, you talk about demographics all the time, right? Your best predictor of how somebody is gonna vote is race and religion. And, you know, we've been taught that that's not plight to talk about. But I think the flip side of it and what this project really is, dwells on in one of the takeaways is if you're not measuring it, you can't do anything about it. So I think a lot of times, so like, there's like individual level data privacy.

And like the truth is, is like people's data is a lot more available than they think it is. And you have to be respectful about how you use it. You know, there's great example of target, like, you know, targeting people for pregnancy ads, because they were buying products that indicated they were pregnant and people getting really mad about that. You just have to, you have to be thoughtful and consider it. I think, you know, in your marketing is probably more important than like what access to the data you have, but like,

Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree that you shouldn't be hoarding people's data against their stated wishes.

Warren Wilansky (30:49.902)
That's a really good perspective. I appreciate that perspective because there is the draw of gathering up as much as you can, but there comes a point where if you're hoovering up data for just the sake of it, you're not actually using it or doing anything with it, then what's the point?

Andi Graham (31:05.137)
becomes a liability at that point. Yeah.

Josh Uretsky (31:05.202)
Yeah there is that too

Andi Graham (31:09.617)
Well, Josh, thank you so much for chatting with us today. Is there anything you haven't shared with us that you want to share? Any interesting takeaways?

Josh Uretsky (31:17.362)
Yeah, I guess one of the themes of my talk that I want to restate is that I picked a spot that I had the power within my organization to work on. I work with membership, I work with membership data. So measuring diversity and trying to push the communications to be more inclusive is within the wheelhouse of my job. And I picked a spot and I did it. But that's not to say that like,

The National Audubon Society is in a particularly well situated strategic spot to be working on issues of DEI. We actually have some major strategic challenges that have come up. Actually, right at the beginning of this test, there were major news stories about that being a problem. Which is to say that whatever organization you work for, whatever strategic position you think you are, you individually have power somewhere.

in that organization to have an impact. And you just have to pick it and move it forward. There's no right place to do this. There's no right way to do it. And so I think that's, you know, that I think is actually the real summary of the narrative is that I picked a place and I leaned in. And I think that's, anybody can do that.

Andi Graham (32:35.249)
I love that even if it's not culturally being pushed down upon you to do those things, you have small choices you can make in everything you're producing every single day to think about that. So I love it. Yeah. Warren and I both, you know, coming from the digital space work on accessibility as a big issue for us. Um, and you know, it's funny when we talk about as practitioners, the accessibility side of our work as a non -negotiable, but our clients often.

Warren Wilansky (32:46.35)
That's great.

Warren Wilansky (32:51.95)
Hmm.

Andi Graham (33:02.001)
It's fully negotiable. They think it's a business case, you know, and it's, well, this is going to be pretty expensive. So maybe we only go this far. Um, and so it's a, it's a, those are strange conversations, but, um, in our industry, at least that you weren't an eye in the agency space that we're in all of it, most of our peers that we work with are, you know, it's becoming non -negotiable obviously, and the lawsuits are following us. So it's been good. It's good. So, well, Josh, thanks so much for spending some time with us today. It's been.

Warren Wilansky (33:24.398)
Mm -hmm.

Andi Graham (33:31.761)
Terribly insightful. I am like heartened to hear that these things are happening even on a small scale in very large organizations. I hope that I can take some of these techniques or ideas into our clients and find ways to make them work for their smaller bases and smaller groups that they're working with. So I love it. Yeah.

Josh Uretsky (33:51.506)
Thank you very much.

Warren Wilansky (33:52.91)
Yeah, thanks Josh. I learned a lot today. Appreciate it.

Andi Graham (33:55.153)
and two.