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Making Your Events More Inclusive and Diverse
“Diversity is being asked to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.”
– Verna Myers, Netflix VP of Inclusion Strategy & American activist
Today more than ever, cultivating a culture of inclusion for your event — one where all kinds of people are welcome — can have a huge impact on both your brand and your overall event success.
“If you’re planning an event and creating a space where only certain people can join,” says Maasha Kah, former global head of diversity and inclusion at Eventbrite, “your business model can’t adapt to the changing needs of the market.”
Whether your event aims to attract all types of people or serve a particular or marginalized crowd, they share a common objective: to build community. And the best communities consist of all different kinds of people, across gender lines, age demographics, racial designations, and levels of physical ability.
In this guide, read the stories of event creators whose profound understanding of diversity and inclusion paved the way for their groundbreaking events. And hear from experts at Eventbrite who can help you transfer the knowledge and ideas to your own event to make a deep impact on the world of your attendees — and the world in general.
A new take on yoga
“Too often, yoga studios are happy to confirm that bias that you don’t belong here, that you aren’t good enough, and that, yes, this is a place for the elite and you so happen not to be elite.”
— Trap Yoga Bae
Britteny Floyd-Mayo, the creator of Trap Yoga (known to her online fans as Trap Yoga Bae), delivers a literal f*ck you to the yoga norm. With her irreverent teaching style, she infuses her classes with realness, including the authentic cursing she’s known for — sans Sanskrit. From her home base in Oakland, California to large-scale events across the U.S. with a frequently downloaded roster of yoga classes, she has found her niche with a largely female, African American audience.
“It’s really hard to get people of color to want to do yoga,” she says, “because they’ve got this preconceived notion that it is not for them.” When Trap Yoga Bae realized yoga was for her, she wanted to share this revelation with others who might benefit.
Beyond playing hip hop and adding a few new yoga positions, Trap Yoga Bae is using nontraditional methods to build a community and bring in sponsors that grow her business.
Fans love Trap Yoga Bae’s modern urban take on a traditional wellness methodology. Her main message rings true for a lot of people today who are sick of feeling marginalized and left out: “You can save your motherf*cking self. Stop waiting for someone else.”
This guide is for…
Event creators who understand that diversity and inclusion are not just buzzwords but deep values that events can embody. They seek to create events that invite in bigger, more interesting audiences in order to reflect the beautiful, diverse world around us.
What you’ll learn:
- How to curate a diverse lineup of speakers, entertainers, vendors, and partners while designing an event with both broad and specific appeal
- Tactics for creating diversity and inclusion, so all your attendees feel welcome at the event
- Why your team should reflect your audience, and how to build that team
- How to evolve as a brand and move beyond your first steps toward diversity and inclusion
Meet the experts
01. The foundation of an inclusive event brand
“It’s all about intent. Saying you’re an inclusive event is a winning strategy. Let’s put it this way — you’re not going to lose any people by saying it.”
– Jorge Portillo, Co-founder, Hard French
“I once worked with a concert venue in Washington state that complained that their audiences all looked the same,” says Maasha. “And when I looked at their lineup, it was easy to see why. The narrow range of music artists they were booking naturally attracted an audience whose demographic reflected the talent on stage.”
Simply put: if your goal is to attract more diversity — and more people — you need to offer a diverse, inclusive experience to event-goers.
“Look around your table. What does it look like right now? How do you want it to look?”
– Maasha Kah, Former Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion, Eventbrite
Curate a diverse pool of talent
As Maasha learned from experience, if your events feature similar types of artists or experts, you’re likely to attract a similar crowd. An easy way to change this is to spotlight people from demographics that have been traditionally underrepresented at events like yours.
For instance, most business panels and lineups have heavily featured white men in the past. The status quo has been recently challenged, and while the creators leading the charge have made significant progress towards more representation of women and people of color, more can be done.
Want to join them? Here’s how:
- First, get great at networking. Reach out to outliers. If a person you want isn’t available, ask them if they can recommend someone who is.
- Support and coach your speakers. Regardless of their background, give your speakers, panelists, or talents coaching and tips to set them up for success — provided they’re open to it. Instead of assuming they don’t know what they’re doing, be open to offering them tactical advice.
With a little out-of-the-box thinking, this approach can work for any event. Consider Maasha’s approach when she helped the Washington State venue achieve its goal to become more diverse and inclusive.
“I recommended they turn to the local tourism bureau. They’re an organization that knows a lot about the local demographics,” says Maasha. Together they found that one of the largest demographics in the region were Asian tourists. The discovery led to her next recommendation: Take advantage of the loads of tour buses passing through by offering more Asian-focused concerts during the off season. “After the decision was made, the venue began to see a huge uptick in sales,” she recalls. “It’s that type of creative thinking that any kind of event or venue should lean into.”
Be strategic and thoughtful about your partners
The artists, experts, and speakers you enlist are only part of the experience you orchestrate. Vendors, sponsors, and partner brands have an influence over whether your event is perceived as diverse and inclusive.
Make an effort to invite organizations with a focus on equality and anti-bias. Go the extra mile to source non-normative vendors. Educate and entertain with pop-ups, booths, and spotlight moments that speak to a diverse audience about non-mainstream ideas.
“I encourage all creators to set out an intention for your event before you start looking for sponsorships.”
– Maasha Kah, Former Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion, Eventbrite
And with any sponsor, vendor, or other partner you work with, always scrutinize your relationship closely to make sure you have similar values. Sometimes, you’re far along in the onboarding process with a vendor before you realize there’s a catch. For example, they might insist you open up ticket availability or VIP spots to thier customers first. instance, perhaps they’re insistent that you open up ticket availability or VIP spots to their customers first. Or they donate money they make at your event to an organization that’s radically misaligned with what your event stands for.
Maasha has this advice to avoid these rude awakenings: “Whether it’s about fun and you intentionally want to be nonpartisan, or you have a specific agenda, always go into sponsorship meetings with parameters in mind. Ask them about their own practices around inclusivity and diversity.” In other words, choose partners who share your vision.
How Wanderlust opens up wellness to everyone
Yoga, meditation, and wellness practices are good for everyone. But you wouldn’t know it by surveying the typical wellness festival, where the demographics tend to skew towards the affluent, white, and able-bodied.
Wanderlust, one of the biggest wellness-focused festivals in the world, has taken a proactive stance on challenging the norm. Here are just a few of the steps the yoga and music festival takes to invite in a much broader spectrum of people and make sure they feel included.
- Mindful marketing: Typically, a lot of the presenters at Wanderlust are also effective on-the-ground influencers. They share socially with their own niche markets, and when those people come to events, it makes for a more diverse crowd.
- Equitable access to space: Wanderlust is thoughtful about providing access to the event space for less mobile participants. They lay out the welcome mat for these event goers by providing clear maps and friendly signs to direct them to accessible activity spaces.
- Explicit invites: A weekend pass to Wanderlust is not cheap, but the festival brand doesn’t want that to prevent wellness enthusiasts from attending. The brand actively seeks out partnerships with organizations willing to sponsor scholarships and promotes a plus-one mentality for attendees who can afford it.
Wanderlust is very public about its intentions to bring more diversity into American yoga culture. Learn more about it from Radical Diversity: Setting a Yoga Standard for Equality on the Wanderlust website.
Infusing your existing event with more inclusion
It’s all well and good to build an inclusive event from the ground up. But what if you already have an event brand that’s doing pretty great? Your goal might just be to build more diversity and inclusion into your existing event, without shaking things up so completely that you lose the soul of what’s working.
Start with creating some benchmarks. Did you have ten male speakers last year? This year, how about subbing at least two of those out for women? To create diversity, you need to move your speakers, performers, and eventually your event audience towards equal representation.
Then lean on those mandates to drive your event planning — and redesign your public-facing brand. Don’t just bring in more female speakers, for instance. Let people know you’re doing it and why.
02. How to make all your guests feel welcome
Inviting diversity into your event is a fantastic first step. But remember, it’s also about inclusion — not just inviting people, but making sure they feel comfortable once they walk in the door. That takes communication, education, and a certain level of risk tolerance.
“Beyond bringing everyone to the table, there’s some work we have to do to ensure that people feel like they belong at that table.”
– Maasha Kah, Former Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion, Eventbrite
People look for subtle cues about whether they’re truly welcome, and these cues come both before your event, during your event, and after your event is all over. Let’s break this down.
Before the event: Take the bias out of your marketing
Your marketing tells a powerful story about your events. Think about where you advertise, what sort of language you use, and what imagery you adopt to support the narrative. Do your photos show a homogenous crowd or a diverse range of people all enjoying an experience together?
It’s not that you have to be all things to all people. But consider what your marketing imagery and messaging says about the people you’re trying to attract. Do your homework here.
- Take a look around at how some other brands are doing it — within and beyond events. Check out these recent social campaigns by Third Love and P&G.
- Let your real audience members inspire you. Who’s coming to your events already? Are you capturing a well-rounded representation of your audience in your video and still shots?
- Tease out more diversity in your marketing. And remember that, to some extent, it’s okay to fake it until you make it. You certainly don’t want to be inauthentic.
Your marketing efforts provide a strong indicator of the experience that lies ahead. And it’s a virtuous cycle: Prioritize diversity in your marketing. Create more diversity at your events. And then you’ll have more diversity to show in your marketing.
of millennials in particular are more apt to buy into brands that demonstrate inclusion and diversity in their promotional offers
Accenture
During the event: Communicate clearly and fairly
When it comes to inclusion at events, it’s essential that you practice what you preach. Diversity in your marketing without inclusion at your event is false advertising. In particular, you need to make marginalized groups feel welcome.
Jorge Portillo, co-founder of the outdoor daytime soul music dance party Hard French, is used to being a gay man and a minority at mainstream events. “If I see a sign that it’s a QTPOC space,” he says — and that stands for Queer and Trans People of Color, by the way — ”I feel more at ease.”
Simple gestures in the form of signs can go a long way, particularly at the entrance to your event. Another gesture Portillo also recommends welcoming your trans participants by nit requiring ID at the door. He says, “When you ask participants to show ID, you might be unintentionally offending a trans person whose ID does not reflect their current gender identity. They shirk away from the mandatory ID check — you don’t even notice them turn away from your door.”
Any little step you can take to communicate your intentions around inclusion makes a bold statement to folks who are used to feeling out of place in a certain crowd.
10 inclusive gestures you may not have considered
- Set a date for your event that won’t conflict with any “minor” religious or cultural holidays.
- Ask questions during registration to make sure you’re meeting all of your attendees’ needs.
- Create an accessible website, following Google’s recommendations.
- With all your marketing videos, use captions for the hard of hearing and audio captions for the vision impaired.
- Do your research into ADA rules and recommendations so your event is truly accessible to people with disabilities.
- Make every effort to offer bilingual options, particularly with your signage.
- Offer a sign language interpreter alongside your speakers and performers.
- Post bathroom signs that aren’t gender binary, and if it’s a family-friendly event, ensure there are changing tables in every single bathroom.
- Offer a range of dietary choices for vegetarians, vegans, those who are gluten-free or lactose intolerant, and for die-hard carnivores. And respect those with peanut allergies.
- After your event is over, send a survey to follow up on what you did right and where you may have missed the mark.
After the event
If you’re sharing recap videos on your social media and other marketing channels, make sure they feature a well-rounded representation of the types of people, performers, and staff you had at your event. Your post-event recaps are powerful marketing for your next event, and the message you want to send is one of inclusivity.
Setting your event’s code of conduct
“A code of conduct gives people reassurance and a sense of safety, as well as investment in the event itself. It reinforces the notion of safe space.”
— Jorge Portillo, Co-founder, Hard French
Keeping participants safe is obviously a huge priority for any event creator. No one wants their guests to be assaulted or feel unsafe. A code of conduct establishes community rules and guidelines for your event so attendees know what they are and are not expected to do.
Jorge Portillo, who considers Hard French to be a “sex-positive event,” leans into the event’s code of conduct to set parameters around what’s okay in terms of touch, language, and intimate interaction. “Our code of conduct is written with a party mentality in mind,” he explains. “Some of the rules are reactionary, and others are just common sense. But there’s space for people to express themselves within those rules.”
Hard French uses the code of conduct aggressively in its marketing, communication with attendees, and event signage. “It’s everywhere,” Portillo says, “Anywhere we post about an event, we include it. And it makes an impact.”
But Maasha, who interfaces with tons of events in her role as global head of diversity and inclusion at Eventbrite, warns, “A code of conduct is a great concept, but if people don’t read it or buy into it then it doesn’t count.”
You can’t just talk the talk. You have to walk it with your actions. For instance, if you’re throwing events late at night, offering lots of alcohol and featuring plenty of unmonitored dark corners, a code of conduct might not be enough to ward off inappropriate behavior.
Best practice for a code of conduct:
- Make it snappy, short, and sweet so people can read it quickly.
- Be creative about how you present it. It shouldn’t just be fine print at the bottom of your marketing material. Make it part of your event itself — think comedy skits and “commercial breaks” to educate your attendees.
- As much as your code of conduct supports your event, your event must also support your code of conduct. Make it easy for people to follow the rules by establishing an experience and culture that’s in alignment with your code.
- And most importantly, when people break the code, hold them accountable.
03. Steps to building a diverse event team
“People always stereotype brown people like me as being into rap and hip hop,” says Jorge Portillo. “But I’ve been going to punk shows my whole life. And I always felt like an outsider. I would have liked to see myself represented up on that stage, or at least in the support staff, or volunteers, or security people.”
“Seeing yourself reflected in the people around you makes for a much more welcoming experience.”
– Jorge Portillo, Co-founder, Hard French
If you’re used to going to events where you look like the majority of people there, you may never have had this experience. But plenty of people in minority and other marginalized groups have.
When your attendees look around at your event staff, what do they see? Hiring a variety of types of people brings richness and varying points of view to your event brand, and it also sends a message to attendees that you’re truly invested in diversity.
Creating real diversity on your team goes beyond simply complying with labor laws. It takes an intentional approach, and the payoff is worth it.
of younger millennials consider diversity in the workforce an important factor in deciding where to spend their money.
Accenture
When you’re hiring and recruiting volunteers, consider this: diversity is not just about gender and race, but also economic background, educational level, physical ability, and sexual orientation. Research the demographics of your region. Can you match them in your hiring — or do even better?
04. Be prepared to evolve with societal changes
“When we started, we literally were building the airplane while we were flying it.”
– Stephanie Slysz, Executive Administrator of RepresentUs and Co-creator of Unrig Summit
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution stressed the importance of diversity in order for a species to evolve. And for events, diversity is just as critical to evolution.
Becoming a more inclusive, diverse event brand is not something you can achieve overnight. It’s a work in progress. In order to evolve your event, you have to be willing to take risks, make mistakes, and learn from (and acknowledge) failure.
How Hard French evolved to stay true to its original mission
For Hard French, an outdoor daytime soul music dance party in San Francisco, evolution has been critical to staying in business for the last decade. According to co-founder Jorge Portillo, Hard French started as an underground dance party for “alternative queers and brown folks being pushed out of traditional gay spaces in the city.”
This group felt out of place in the Castro, San Francisco’s traditional mainstream gay epicenter. Hard French’s crowd wanted to celebrate with punk, Latin music, and soul — not the prevalent house and pop music in the Castro. “We wanted an atmosphere where we could enjoy the music we liked,” says Portillo.
The event was wildly successful from the start. The regular dance parties at the El Rio became, according to Portillo, “a diaspora of types, and those folks pulled more people like them to come to events — not necessarily representative of the gay mainstream.”
But after several years, the team started to feel like their fringe dance party was ironically turning into just another mainstream event. Portillo explains, “It was starting to lose the core flavor and become, for lack of a better word, gentrified.”
So the team decided to pivot. Now, they host only a few big-scale events a year — most notably, to celebrate Pride Week and the Folsom Street Parade, another hugely popular LGTBQ event in San Francisco.
Portillo says, “Non-mainstream events that are focused on a particular area of diversity or awareness, and which try to tap into a particular community or culture, have to be ready to change and shift. They can’t just scale up infinitely from their original form. If they want to stay true to their core premise, they have to adapt as they go.”
Be humble about your mistakes
You are going to make mistakes.
Jorge Portillo describes a time when his team at Hard French decided to throw a party to celebrate May 5th. They didn’t want to call it “Cinco de Mayo” — a term and theme they deemed victim to massive cultural appropriation in the U.S.
Instead, they cheekily organized a Pico de Gallo party, paying homage to a popular style of salsa. They thought this was cute, but some Latinx in the community were miffed that Hard French was “bringing Latin culture down” with a lack of respect for a time-honored tradition. There was some bad press, and it took the event brand a while to recover from the gaffe.
But recover they did, and learned a valuable lesson: “Diversity and inclusion — there’s no one right answer,” Portillo says. “The effort is always the most important thing, but if that’s the point of your events, you’re going to face challenges at a lot of different levels.”
Find tools and technology that will scale with you
Ideally, your diversity and inclusion goals will help you grow beyond your wildest expectations. It’s important, when you do, that you have the right foundation in place to scale up. So make sure you choose event management and ticketing tools that are flexible and will grow with you.
The best event management tools provide a wide range of functionality and a lot of marketing support. Look for platforms like Eventbrite that feature integrations with other event management tools, too. When integration is a priority for a platform, you know that your options will only grow as your event grows.
How the Unrig Summit bridges the political divide in America
Unrig Summit is a three-day summit that brings people together across the political divide. Republicans and Democrats join forces to “unrig” the government. The first event was held in February 2018 in New Orleans, and 1,500 people came.
During that first event, participants made some groundbreaking progress towards their mission, including writing laws to end gerrymandering and helping restore the vote to all of Florida’s citizens. Going into the 2019 event, the organizers wanted to build on that initial success — not simply repeat it.
Stephanie Slysz, Co-creator of Unrig Summit, decided to invest in an online ticketing platform that could streamline ticketing as the event scaled up. She also looked for technology that would enable a higher degree of marketing, and that’s how the team landed on Eventbrite. They needed a platform that would scale with Unrig Summit’s growth and come from a trusted brand. With an event people might feel nervous about, she wanted them to feel absolutely confident about the ticket-buying process.
In 2019, 1,830 people attended Unrig, which featured over over 200 speakers, and 71% of the participants adopted the event app.
Ready to be the change?
Creating more diversity and inclusion at your events is a noble pursuit. But it has to be backed up with a practical business plan and a grounded strategy. Yes, you’ll probably fail at some things. But in the end, when you help create a more diverse and inclusive world through your events, everybody wins.
Eventbrite powered 4.7 million events in 2019
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