Inclusive language

Background

In response to conversations around institutional racism, overhaul the language used throughout the company.

Key collaborative partner: Technical Content Writer

Supporting team members: Director of User Experience, Technical Content team, Content creating leaders throughout the organization

Supporting resources: Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, https://consciousstyleguide.com/

Approach and solution

Goal: Initiate and oversee an effort to create more inclusive terminology to better reflect the corporate values and best represent the people who use the software.

I started by creating a Google Sheet allowing anyone in the organization to propose outdated or offensive terminology that I prepopulated with some key terms.

As terms were added to the spreadsheet, our core team of two worked to identify replacement terms. Despite our team owning this work, we were lucky to have the support of a team doing similar work at our parent company and the support of an entire content industry doing the same work at their own companies.

Changes to offensive terminology were made across our product content, user documentation, community, and training materials and rolled out with an announcement in the November 2020 release.

And, to help users with the changes, we set up synonyms to map the old terms to the new in case someone searched on an old term!

Live Community article: https://community.boomi.com/s/article/Removing-exclusionary-terminology-from-Boomi 

Lessons learned and takeaways

While most of the teams embraced these changes, some teams pushed back, especially those teams that didn’t produce customer-facing information. For example, engineering happily made changes to content that was visible in the UI itself, but pushed back on codebase-only changes. They didn’t think we needed to implement changes that weren’t customer-facing. It took a lot of education and executive buy-in to begin seeing the internal-only changes. 

Additionally, some teams didn’t have a good way of identifying all of the content that they had created so that they could do an audit of the terminology used in that content. For this reason, it’s important to keep a content inventory readily available. And, if the inventory isn’t available in a content repository, it’s important to keep one in another format.

These changes were embraced internally and received positive feedback from customers.

Example customer feedback: