Creating a data-driven process
As an institution of higher education, we feel a particular responsibility to ground our anchor-mission work not in assumptions about what works, but in evidence. Our strategy as a local economic anchor is data-driven: our Hire Local, Buy Local, and Build Local efforts started with understanding available data about our internal hiring practices and trends, how we spend for necessary goods and services, and how we handle contracting for construction.
Data that illuminates our local and regional economy is an important part of strategy development as well. Information about, for example, local average educational attainment, West Philadelphia’s business and retail landscape, and the distribution of minority and women construction contractors, suppliers, and trades workers has helped focus our implementation.
Data frames the start of a process, and it also keeps a process moving. We track and share our year-to-year local-hire data, measuring the numbers and percentage of local employees and the total salaries paid into West Philadelphia to quantify impact and reinforce our successes. We also track the salary savings that occur as a result of specific local-hire projects like customized job training and local-temp hires. For an anchor mission to take hold in an institution, it has to have internal benefits, and demonstrating impacts like budget savings and reduced turnover helps to keep participating offices and departments invested.
Our first step in transforming our procurement practices was an exhaustive analysis of our spend data: the spend categories, local/minority/women owned representation among vendors, and where vendors were located (and doing local hiring as a result of our purchase activity). We looked at the city’s goals for diversity spend benchmarking, and adopted those as our own. Annual fiscal-year analyses of our spend percentages show us the extent to which interventions around targeted new vendor onboarding have worked, and it lets us show our local partners the progress we are making in our commitments.
In some cases, tracking data isn’t optional: here in Philadelphia, developers of construction projects over a certain dollar value, or which require a city ordinance to happen, must develop and commit to Economic Opportunity Plans (EOPs) – good faith efforts to provide opportunities to women-owned, minority-owned, and disabled-owned business enterprises. EOPs offer a useful structure for collecting, tracking, and analyzing the data on construction inclusion goals, and measuring that progress. Drexel is obligated to file EOPs with the city for qualifying construction projects, but as part of our commitment as an engaged anchor we established an EOP requirement for all of our campus construction as an accountability mechanism. Part of what committing to an inclusion agenda means for Drexel is going above and beyond the minimum tracking required by the city, and building this accountability into our institutional culture.