Dear Temple University DEI Leadership,
It is no question that Temple University prides itself on being “Philadelphia’s ‘diversity university.” Temple is making award-winning strides in DEI initiatives for students and faculty. We congratulate you on achieving the most diverse enrollment in school history and becoming a recipient of the 2022 INSIGHT Into Diversity HEED Award. You are setting a new standard for DEI programs and culture. With this determination for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion, managing and handling grievances and complaints to make your campus safer and more comfortable for these students and faculty can be a daunting task. If you’re not properly set up for success – digitally, your efforts may go to waste.
According to a survey in 2022 by Hanover Research, “50% of college students report a lack of awareness about DEI initiatives as the largest barrier to getting involved.” We aim to change this statistic by offering a new solution to grievances and reporting while aiming to Quantify DEI progress for universities.
OMBUDS is a secure and unbiased third-party grievance reporting application that empowers educational institutions to deepen their commitment to the complaint process and provides a safe environment for anyone to file a formal complaint.
Key Benefits of Using OMBUDS for DEI Reporting
OMBUDS provides a reliable and secure service allowing accuracy and convenience when managing formal complaints involving universities and other institutions.
For Temple University, integrating an innovative, digitally secure system will ease the pains of both the students and staff filing reports and the leadership team handling these reports.
By utilizing OMBUDS, reporting is simplified, tracked, and ensured to be solved. This directly results in a safer campus, detailed insight into DEI needs, a satisfied student body and staff, and an increase in enrollment due to DEI priority. As shown in the figure below, 54% of Temple University students surveyed reported they would be more likely to report incidents of harassment or racial discrimination if provided with an app that is autonomous of the university and provides the choice of anonymity.
OMBUDS creates an efficient and organized system that:
- Organizes data for the University by category, making it easy to search and filter by variables
- Simultaneously submits information to multiple stakeholders as per compliance and makes sure that all correspondence automatically follows legal standards
- Updates the user directly to ensure retention rate and reduce frustration
- Collects data from ongoing and closed tickets and creates analytical reports that are easy to review (and share anonymously)
- Collects user satisfaction survey information to add to data
How OMBUDS will work with Temple University
OMBUDS creates a system of governance surrounding complaints to make sure that any issues are effectively logged and communications surrounding complaints are tracked.
In the event of legal or other public-facing ramifications to complaints, OMBUDS allows an institution to point to clear and specific details on when, how, and by whom complaints are being addressed, including a timeline of detailed communications with the complainant.
Our concise software eliminates the manual labor of reporting via excel sheets and paper documents and helps by offering easy and user-friendly access to the ticketing system while safely storing collected data.
How OMBUDS will work for the user
For anyone filing a complaint: OMBUDS is a simple and safe way to lodge a complaint either anonymously or as an identified party. The application facilitates communication and clearly demonstrates the exact process:
- How the complaint is following
- Who is responsible for the next steps
- What those steps in the process are
OMBUDS will provide the following as part of our Implementation Strategy:
- Collaborative events to increase awareness of initiatives
- Engaging social content
- Requirement for Temple Students as part of the enrollment process
- Training for administrators
How we will measure success
In our survey, a trend we discovered was that students and faculty did not feel they have knowledge of where their grievances are in the process. One respondent even goes on to say,
“In my experience, no matter how serious or unserious of a situation, a college will process any reports of incidents in their own time, or if they want to do anything about the incident at all.”
OMBUDS helps to eliminate this pain point for both concerned reporters and the faculty handling the reports. OMBUDS offers a system that will measure success in the following ways:
- Decreasing the average # of days to the resolution of the grievance
- Provide detailed reports of where Temple University can improve DEI efforts specific to your needs
- Fueling initiatives led and implemented based on OMBUDS reports
- Maintains a satisfaction rating of “satisfied” to “extremely satisfied” post-resolution
- Pursuit of a 90% student/staff enrollment in and acknowledgment of the program
- Increased # of downloads of mobile app
- Increased enrollment
By allowing OMBUDS to assist in managing a stressful and taboo situation, we strive to make Temple University the standard for DEI practice by allowing students and faculty to feel safe and supported.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Best regards,
The OMBUDS team
References:
https://insights.hanoverresearch.com/hubfs/2022-Trends-in-Higher-Education.pdf
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