How we hold ourselves accountable for our racial equity work

Last summer, Tableau Foundation launched the Racial Justice Data Initiative—our long-term strategy to develop and strengthen partnerships with organizations using data to advocate for racial equity and justice. And according to Fast Company, we were not alone—last year saw the largest ever across-the-board commitments from the tech sector to advance racial equity and justice, both within companies and in the country as a whole. For our part, Tableau Foundation has already disbursed $10.1m in grants to 27 organizations as part of the Salesforce pledge to invest $200 million and 1 million volunteer hours in racial equity and justice work over the next five years. 

A year in, the spotlight of accountability is turning back to these pledges: Just Capital developed a corporate racial equity tracker; Fast Company reached out to 42 companies to assess their progress; CNBC and Marketplace have also published progress reports on various commitments. 

For Tableau Foundation, accountability and transparency have always been core to how we operate. When we launched the Racial Justice Data Initiative in July 2020, we pledged to publish every grant made toward our commitment.

This was not a major change--since our founding, we’ve published our grantmaking data via our Living Annual Report (LAR), an interactive Tableau dashboard that refreshes weekly and makes current data the centerpiece of our conversations with stakeholders. Recently, we redesigned the LAR to foreground our refocused grantmaking priorities, including our Racial Justice Data Initiative commitments.

Through conversations and collaborations with our partners, I’ve seen that transparency and accountability are just one piece of the work when it comes to making progress against big systemic issues. As funders and private companies, we still need to be setting bold goals around investments and partnerships. And we also have to challenge ourselves to think beyond traditional measurement frameworks to understand what it means to be in this effort for the long haul. For me, there have been four big takeaways over the past year:

Accountability is not the same as outcomes.

When we launched the RJDI, we made a public commitment to granting $10 million over three years to organizations fighting anti-Black racism; that total quickly changed to $12 million soon after we announced the initiative's launch. If you look at our Living Annual Report, you can see our progress to date—and I’m excited to announce that our commitment is rising again, to $18 million, out of recognition of the importance of long-term partnership in this space.

Our data will tell you about funding, but it doesn’t say what the software, services, and funding have done to impact organizations and communities. These outcomes are essential, but admittedly, much harder to track and quantify than a grant’s dollar value. 

This leads me to my next point. 

Get comfortable with qualitative results—yes, even as a data-driven organization!

As I’ve mentioned in the past, being part of Tableau, we are inevitably drawn toward partnerships with quantifiable goals attached to them.

With our partners under the Racial Justice Data Initiative, the goals we’ve set are harder to pin down with data. For example, PolicyLink’s Racial Equity Data Lab is designed to empower grassroots organizations with data and visualizations into their advocacy campaigns. The work is disparate and driven by the community's goals, which makes a standardized measurement framework nearly impossible. In the process, we have to be comfortable measuring the process and not the outputs, and even then leaving enough grace for the local advocates and their stakeholders to follow the path that is the best fit for their situation. Which, of course, leads to...

A need for long-term work

Honestly, we did not go into this work knowing what exactly our role would be. Sure, many groups are using data to advance racial justice, and after a year, I still can’t pretend we have all the answers. But what we do have is a commitment with our partners to figure it out together. 

So, we are thinking of our first year’s work as an exploration of ambitious ideas that hopefully help lead to innovative data tools and approaches that can scale. For example, several of our partners are collaborating with us on ideas for what could make an effective strategy for data skills training. We could easily provide Tableau product training, but we’re asking our partners what communities need. And instead of developing and exporting training curriculum from Tableau headquarters in Seattle to communities, we’re working on opportunities to support communities that want to develop their own data training - using their data and their context, not something exported from a tech company outside of their community.

Doing this work well and being a good partner will take continual iteration, and that’s the point—we don’t want to push something forward if it’s not going to take root and move the needle at the community level. We designed the RJDI to take this view, and my team has had to cultivate a culture among ourselves and with partners that is comfortable with uncertainty. 

Scale is a collaborative effort.

We also hope that making longer-term grants—3 years at a minimum—will help our partners’ initiatives take root and scale beyond what we could do alone. For instance, Measures for Justice and APA are providing support to 15 district attorney’s offices to help set up more transparent data collection and sharing programs. One day, though, we hope the innovative work the 15 cities are doing with data will inspire others to support Measures for Justice and APA to expand to many more cities, so collectively we can hit a tipping point where most cities share meaningful data in the spirit of transparency and accountability.

That will take time, so for now, I am excited by the investments we’ve made and really grateful to the hundreds of people that have helped us learn and build such meaningful partnerships in our first year of the Racial Justice Data Initiative. I can’t wait to see what the second year brings.