Brain Trust Recap – DEI Conversation: The Executive Order and its Impact on Websites

On February 12, 2025, OHO convened a "Brain Trust" discussion with 65 of its clients, who are professionals from higher education and healthcare organizations. The participants discussed the impact of recent federal executive orders regarding DEI impacts on their organization’s websites. The participants represented a range of positions, from web content editors to non-marketing administrative staff.

Some states had already passed laws related to DEI prior to the federal executive order and related organizations had already started making changes.

What follows is a high-level summary of key discussion points from the session. While organizations are still figuring out how to address these concerns, the tone of the discussion made it clear that we’re all better equipped to move forward when we move forward together.

Making Changes to Your Website

• In some cases, individual units within an organization have their own statements about a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, posing a challenge for anyone who is charged with updating the site for compliance.
• Use a tool like Screaming Frog, SiteImprove, or DubBot to crawl your site and find references to terms that other high-level searches may not identify.
• These tools will identify where these words appear on your site. You can use this list to triage and prioritize where changes are needed. Senior leadership or subject matter experts in the organization should also be consulted in that decision-making. This can be a very "high-touch" process and will require time to review and implement. 
• Focus your efforts on language and text changes. Visuals should continue to reflect the reality of your community and the work happening at your organization.
• Some participants offered the view that they are not yet making any changes, given uncertainty around the legal mandate of the executive order
• Some organizations are changing the names of relevant departments, resulting in a need to change and update both templates and content within those templates. There is a concern that this may deter individuals seeking specific services if it is not clear that the renamed department would provide those services.

Consider the context of certain words and make edits thoughtfully.

• Multiple participants noted the complexity of diversity and inclusion at their organizations, with efforts going beyond race and gender equity to include opportunities for students from other underrepresented groups such as those with physical disabilities or impairments. 
• Avoid doing a wholesale search-and-replace on your site for particular words. Language that is used in DEI contexts can also be used in non-DEI contexts (such as the phrase "diverse majors," or "diverse programming"), and changing the term without consideration for the overall message could result in content that is confusing and isn’t aligned with its intention.
• After identifying the words or phrases and where they appear on your site, categorize the content based on whether the word is used in a DEI context and the priority level for changing the content.
• Keep track of the changes made across the site, noting what was changed and why, which can help inform future discussions.

Coordinating Changes Across the Organization

• The marketing and communications teams, while often responsible for implementing changes, should not be the entity that makes the final decision on language choices.
• If possible, work with your organization’s general counsel to determine what changes are necessary and what the language should be.
• Site changes must be consistent and coordinated across the organization, not isolated and reactionary. That can be through defined committees in various units or through direction from the top administration, for example. Also, citing specific articles from credible sources and/or looking at what peer organizations are doing can help inform options for how best to proceed.
• Changes should also be coordinated within individual units. Appoint a designated person to work with the final decision-maker on any edits or revisions.
• There was general consensus that previously published content, such as older news stories, should not be changed, as they serve more of a historical, archival purpose.
• Coordination at many organizations is still in the planning phase, with conversations taking place in designated meetings with various stakeholders across the institution. Minimal communication and guidance to the organization at large can add to confusion. Even communicating "we don’t have all the answers and we are working on it" can have great value.

Communicating Your Values

• While policies and preferred language may continue changing, the content on your site should still reflect your organization’s culture and values. By being intentional about your language, you can strike the balance between still communicating your values while adhering to certain restrictions around terminology.
• So much of the communication around diversity is reliant on visual branding and photography. The consensus among participants was to resist changing visual branding and imagery, primarily because the executive order and ensuing campus guidelines do not explicitly address them. As one participant said, "Keep them, because that’s the population we’re serving and they should be able to see themselves in the website."